Final Fantasy Legend III (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
306A playthrough of Square Soft's 1993 role-playing game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Final Fantasy Legend III.
This video shows the entire game played through.
Final Fantasy Legend III is the third and final game of Square's Final Fantasy Legend series, and though it's a markedly different experience than the first two were, it ends the series on a satisfying note. It's still a Saga game masquerading as Final Fantasy for English-speaking audiences, but it feels much more like a Final Fantasy game than the first two. It's more story driven, the battles are better streamlined and more forgiving, and the character growth systems are way less daunting.
Just like in FFL1 and 2, you can consume parts of fallen enemies to shift your character class, but unlike in those games, success in this game doesn't hinge on your doing so. After focusing on those aspects in my videos of the first two games, I welcomed the opportunity to not endlessly obsess over what sort of Frankensteined monster I should create, and I think this change makes FFL3 far, far more approachable to the uninitiated than the earlier games were.
The story this time deals with time travel, and you explore past, present, and future versions of the world in your quest to stop the evil being that seeks to drown everything. To do this, Arthur, Curtis, Gloria, and Sharon have to find the pieces of the Talon, an automated time travel machine, mini-mall, and heavy weapons platform all-in-one, complete with its own sweet theme song.
The game flows as you'd expect. You explore towns, grind for experience points and gold, and tackle dungeons that are usually capped with a big boss fight, and this general structure drives the entire journey. It moves at a good pace, it has a fun amount of melodrama, and its relative simplicity makes it fun to play so long as you aren't expecting an insanely deep experience.
I have to make a special note of that last boss fight. Not to spoil anything, but the unexpected arrival of a "special guest combatant" has to be one of my favorite, "no way, that's so awesome!" moments in any JRPG. The animation for nuking the battlefield is also ridiculously cool.
The graphics and sound have been upgraded nicely from FFL1 and 2's. The environments are super well detailed and the monsters - especially the bosses! - look awesome.
If you're a long time fan of all things Final Fantasy, you also might have noticed several strong similarities between elements of FFL3 and of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Unsurprisingly, several key members of the FFL3 team worked on FFMQ, and the influence is immediately obvious. Many of the character sprites and background tiles are virtually identical between the games, there's a jump button, and oh man, the music! The soundtrack was all done by Ryuji Sasai and Chihiro Fujioka, and if you've heard FFMQ's music, you know just what a potent combination they can be. There aren't many Game Boy soundtracks that can rock quite as hard as Final Fantasy Legend III does in its best moments.
I'm not sure that I would call Final Fantasy Legend III the best game of the trilogy, but it is the one that I enjoyed the most.
Phew. I've finally finished recording playthroughs of all of the Final Fantasy Game Boy games, just in time for the "Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend" compilation coming to the Nintendo Switch next month. How many of you guys are looking forward to it like I am?
*Recorded with Retroarch's DMG shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.*
Links to playthroughs of other Game Boy Final Fantasy games:
The Final Fantasy Legend:
https://youtu.be/rM7omzH0LbQ
Final Fantasy Legend II:
https://youtu.be/O8TUj3J9pQQ
Final Fantasy Adventure:
https://youtu.be/dTUYbI1pkf4
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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