Final Fantasy III/Headscratchers

• III never got a Wonderswan remake, the remakes that became the basis for all I and II reissues. During the 'Finest Fantasy for Advance' campaign, this was still the 'missing FF' in the west and long gone in Japan. FFVI had no problems and isn't /that/ popular in Japan. V needed a new translation, apparently. IV is immensely popular. III is popular in Japan. So why was III not remade in the way I and II were? Why does it still not have one in its original form?
  • Rumor has it that Square somehow lost the source code so they had to start from scratch.
• Why is it that the Light Warriors have access to an explicitly Darkness-based class (The Dark Knight)?
  • Because they are the heroes of the balance. The only reason they are called Light Warriors is because it is darkness that got out of hand. And as they say "fight fire with fire". I assume when the Dark Warriors battled the Flood of Light in the last imbalance they had access to the Paladin.
    • I guess fight fire with fire makes a kind of sense. It just seems weird that the Light world's Crystals would have a darkness power.
    • In the original Famicom they had access to the Magic Knight/Paladin not the Dark Knight.
      • Huh. Wonder why they changed it.
      • Maybe because Dark Knights are more iconic of the newer games in the series?
      • Because they didn't change it. The Japanese name for the "Magic Knight/Paladin" translates to "Demon Knight" (Weeeell, you could make a case for "Magic Knight". "Paladin" is wrong though.), now that does sound more fitting doesn't it? The real question is why they can use White Magic in said original version.
  • Because they fight on behalf of the Light, but aren't restricted to using its powers exclusively. Also, "Darkness" (or "Dark") as a Final Fantasy elemental isn't opposite to "Light," it's opposite to Holy, so to them, it's just an elemental-based Job Class.
• "Light and darkness, one cannot exist without the other, just like the sun and the world". Wait, what? If the Earth disappeared somehow, wouldn't the sun just continue on burning anyways?
  • They're probably still stuck on a geocentric model of the universe; in which the Sun is a gem in the dome of the heavens or whatever, that would probably fall apart if the world vanished.
  • I took it to mean something entirely different, considering the fantasy context of the series. I figured that since Xande stopped time in the world by blocking out the sunlight, it meant that in the world of FFIII, time is solar-powered. So... yeah.
• Light is not good, dark is not evil, alright, we've got that. So why Cloud of Darkness? Why not Nothingness or the Void or something more fitting to her role?
  • Because it's the darkness that got out of hand this time. Last time it was the Cloud of Light. The whole point is that there has to be a balance. Darkness may not be evil, per se, but too much darkness, just like too much light, is a bad thing that causes the end of the world.
    • No. It was stated that it was also the Cloud of Darkness last time as well. The Cloud of Darkness is a being that arises when an imbalance occurs, light or dark. So we're back to square one. Why is it the Cloud of "Darkness"?
    • In addition to that, the Cloud is always made up of both Light and Darkness. Either Darkness revolving around a core of Light, or Light surrounding a core of Darkness.
• Why did the DS version move the Master (second fist-based class) to the Earth crystal instead of keeping it with the Water crystal? It kind of wrecks the class's ability to be useful, because at that point, there's no way, outside of excessive grinding in Eureka, that you're going to get your Job Level high enough for the fists to be actually worth something.
  • Job experience is completely unrelated to the strength of the monsters you fight. You can grind your job levels in the Alter Cave and it would take even less time than doing it in Eureka if you know what you're doing.
  • Still doesn't change the fact that you have to grind it up for it to be useful, whereas at its old spot it was about the same strength as the other classes, so you could make it useful just by playing the game, without having to go out of the way to grind.
• Zande's master plan was to freeze time so he'd live forever. Why? Wouldn't being permanently frozen in time be pretty much exactly the same as being dead anyway? Is extending life really that much of a problem in a fantasy world? You fight a lich a quarter of the way through the game. Wouldn't that be a much easier and less frozen-on-the-spot way for an evil sorcerer to avoid the perils of old age?
  • Maybe the "gift of mortality" prevents him from becoming immortal in any way. It would explain why he had to use such a round-about method of living forever.
  • Maybe he wouldn't mind being permanently frozen in time, as long as he doesn't die? It could be that he fears not The Nothing After Death, but dying itself, or the afterlife. As long as he still is, it's fine if he's effectively comatose forever.
  • Your generic descent into villainous insanity? He started out just trying to find a way to become immortal through time manipulation, but as his mortal life ticked on, he became more and more insane, willing to do anything to not 'die,' no matter how much worse the result could be.
• Here's some serious Fridge Logic - the game measures damage in "hits", like 10 Hits, okay. This creates a slight problem when you're using Bows. I attack with a Ranger, it says "16 Hits!", but I only used one arrow. Of course, they had to do this, otherwise you'd run out of arrows every four battles. Still, how do you fire one arrow, and hit sixteen times?
  • Ricochets. More seriously... They shatter, and each piece does a certain amount of damage on average?
  • Or maybe that one arrow turned into a Rain of Arrows, Double Strafe style?
• So, on the DS version, there's no damage cap, yet it only lists numbers up to 9999. Is this supposed to be part of the difficulty (so I can't do my usual math-based "look up the boss' hit points, find out how much damage I can reliably do to him/her/it, and figure out whether it's worth it to have a healing strategy or a do as much damage as possible to hit that magic number before I die strategy")?
  • Aside from the Bonus Boss with its obscene amounts of HP and defence (took this troper half an hour of constant battling with all four of his characters that are normally capable of dealing over 9999 damage each attack now only doing 5.4k or so), it doesn't really matter as if you're hitting over 9999, there isn't much point in strategy.
• If the other two sages are immortal, how did you kill them?
  • They probably have Tolkien-style elfy immortality. Or to put it in a less weird way; they have what our article on Immortality calls Type II. They probably are immune to disease and have no fear of death by old age, but they can be mortally wounded, etc.
• If the sages want the light warriors to kill them, why didn't Unne give them a moment to heal up between fights?
  • It was an endurance test. If the Chosen Four couldn't take down a mini-dungeon and two bosses in one shot, how are they supposed to deal with two full dungeons and six bosses in a single run?
• Why'd Noah give mortality to Xande? Doga and Unei died anyway, and besides it just made Xande go crazy. Speaking of which, what happened to Noah?
  • Xande's gift is part and parcel to Humans Are Special.
  • It was kind of a gift and a test. I believe Doga said that it's not how long you live, but what you do with the time you have. Now consider that Xande froze time for himself to keep himself from dying. He was willing to stay stopped for eternity in order to be immortal. I think it's safe to say he failed that test.
• Why did Xande say that his plan was complete even if he died? Wasn't the whole point of his plan to live forever?
  • I think he'd been utterly brainwashed by the Cloud of Darkness at that point, so his original designs didn't factor.
  • It's the Kuja plan. No point in the world going on if you won't live to see it, right?
  • He initially wanted to live forever no matter what state he had to be in in order to achieve that. After he caused the Flood of Darkness the Cloud showed up and started manipulating him. Once he was under her control, he went from trying to preserve himself no matter what to trying to reduce the world to a void.
• There's something unsettling about the whole sequence where the team are forced to turn themselves into toads - specifically the fact that Refia is never shown consenting to it. (It's not so bad the second time, what with the resigned expression on her face). This isn't even helped if you play her as the White or Red Mage, considering the awkward questions it raises about how the boys talked her into it.
  • Erm... she realized it was for the greater good and got the hell over it? And if she was the one casting it, and the boys tried to force her, she could have just turned them into toads and gone home? I think you're overthinking this.
    • Probably, yeah. It just feels like an abrupt cut between "Dispute over plan that could have split the whole team up" and "OK, we'll just ignore what she said and get on with it". And they could have resolved it with maybe two or three lines of dialogue.
• Its revealed early on in the game that all 4 kids and Cid are from the surface world and came to the floating continent when Cid's airship crashed. But wait...later on it's stated that all time outside of the floating continent was stopped by Xande for a thousand years. So how could Cid and the kids have come from the surface world? Wouldn't they have been frozen too?
  • I think the time on the surface wasn't actually stopped for exactly a thousand years. But rather, it seemed like time stopped for a thousand years, but in fact it isn't a thousand years.