Final Fantasy 3: Completed two boring, water themed dungeons that are stupid and really the MAIN EVENT in fighting a Power Rangers villain is next. Yeah, short play session, but here we go!
-Kraken's dungeon is awful in the NES version. Halfway in, I stopped caring and just started Record Keeper tactics...inspite of a Back Row Black Mage (front row, he almost does damage with Knives!), and the damage anemic White Mage. Need for healing? NONE. Knight is OP here, and Archer is good against half enemies here due to elemental weaknesses, kind of OK vs. the rest. Still, this part is pathetic. How bad is this? In a back attack, Black Mage got hit for 36 damage; he has just under 500 HP. White Mage later got hit for 60! There was a fight where 4 enemies attacked my Knight (Front Row) and all whiffed. DS Version is a little better, because enemies do damage, so back attacks can be meaningful, and petrify exists, though it's still not a good dungeon. It's simply "Did you have enough healing? If yes, you're fine." You should be able to have a healthy stock of Potions and be using one of Red Mage or White Mage here; I went in with 29 Potions and a Red Mage, that was more than enough; as a reminder, Potions are Dirt Cheap, even by FF3's money crunching standards (end of the playthrough, I bought 99 of them and my wallet barely felt it.)
-Kraken himself is very different in both games. NES version, how hard he is varies on a few things. First off, did you equip Flamemail or Knight armor on Knight? Flamemail is important because it nulls out the Ice Helmet's Ice weakness (which is KNight's best headgear at the time), as well as making you resist 2 out of his 3 attacks. Additionally, are you using a job that relies on Ice gear (like, say, Archer)? Weakness to Ice = you die if he hits you with Ice 2. Flipside, Fire spells are pretty lulworthy. If he were to hurl Lightning magic everyturn? He'd still be decent as he'd have 2HKO damage to just about everyone. I barely pulled through due to bad planning by having a hail-mary Black Mage throwing Bomb Arm, and that killing him. Oh yeah, like every other boss, Kraken lulz at Magic; Bomb Arm worked because Fire 3 is just so much better than the other level 3's (which makes sense; it's a level 6 spell)
How much stronger is Fire 3 you ask? Ice 3 is 95 power, Bolt 3 is 110 power, Fire 3 is 150 power. Considering FF3 uses a subtraction based defense system, this is why Ice 3 gets mocked by Kraken but a Bomb Arm can do 500 damage (way better than any physical damage.)
As far Kraken goes in the DS version? It's still RNG dependent. He either attacks twice with physical damage which is decent, so if he focuses he can kill someone, or he uses Blind which sucks. This is one fight where Knight might actually stand out since his defense is way higher than Warrior, and you can go in with 3 near dead PCs, and Cover cheese your way to victory. Also worth noting I made life harder on myself by going back to Thief who still can't do crap, thinking "oh, Lightning enemies, that'll make Spark Daggers good!" Nope, Thief still sucks here. It's worth noting, though, that Knight's Cover isn't that useful if you don't plan around it since Kraken's damage is in that annoying area where "high enough to 2HKO' but "not high enough to knock you into yellow". On the otherhand, Warrior's damage during this arc is suitably absurd. Royal Sword + Blood Sword + Advance = Watch me do 4 digit damage! That + Blood Sword's healing made him pretty much immortal unless enemies double critted him.
-Speaking of Crits, Critical HIt Rate by enemies in the DS version is annoyingly high.
-Sewers of Amur are not really noteworthy in the NES dungeon; they're straight up PATHETIC like Kraken's cave, since the enemies do 3 digit damage (average PCHP of about 550) so severla of them ganging up on one PC can be scary, but like DS Kraken's cave, it's really a case of "Did you prepare enough healing." DS version...is interesting. First off, like an idiot I didn't buy more potions, so this was harder than it needed to be. More to the point? This dungeon's difficulty is completely related to which jobs you use, though not in the usual way. Amur's equipment is ridiculously good compared to Floating Continent stuff. How good?
Thief has 56 Defense with it's Amur gear (which is all free I might add!) Warrior, your tank through most of the FC, has 41. For what this translates to in damage, Thief takes about 60 from enemies on a good day (before factoring in Back Row thanks to Boomerangs), Warrior takes about 150, assuming he hasn't used Advance yet. Any class that relies on FC stuff takes a beating here if in Front Row, save for KNight since Knight's Armor + his Vitality probably makes up for it. those with Amur equips just laugh it off. As such, for physical jobs, the "Good vs. Bad" for durability looks like this here:
Good: Viking, Archer, Monk, Thief, MAYBE Knight
Bad: Warrior, Dark Knight, Dragoon
...go figure, I went and made Luneth a Dragoon thinking "hey those Thunder spears should be nice against enemies down here!" Turns out that made my life harder, and probably should have stuck with Warrior a little longer, if only because he'd do way higher damage and each attack heals him. To be fair, because I used Dragoon, Arc was able to be a physical damage dealing Red Mage again thanks to Royal Sword clearing up, and with Main Gauche/Poison Dagger (stronger than FC Swords, and an agility boost, so helps getting Hit Benchmarks easier. Poison Dagger is even free); still, convinced this was a poor life decision especially since I went in there unprepared. Overall I made a dungeon that SHOULD be inconsequential harder on myself.
-Aria's Death scene (OMG SPOILERZ!!!) is better in the NES version, strange as this sounds. You may have heard my rants about FF4DS making scenes impossible to take seriously because cute art style trying to be dramatic and serious doesn't work, since it looks campy and silly? Yeah, this is very much in that vain. The NES version, you see the sprite push you aside, the arrow hits her, and she falls down. It's not especially good, but then it's an 8 Bit presentation, this is about the best you'll get in this engine, so you just go with it. DS version, Aria pushes Luneth, cut away, she's standing there and we see the arrow fly towards her in ARROW VISION which while neat the first time they did it in Two Towers, it looks ridiculous when FF3DS does it since it's lacks the speed and impact. Heck, the speed of the arrow really makes it feel like one of THESE moments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd2nWh6wui0#t=3m48sThen, to make things even more ridiculous, she falls down, to the side, IN SLOW MOTION, as though "OMG DRAMATIC!" In truth, she looks like a rag-doll, and her expression looks borderline smile. This is why I can't emphasize enough how much better Bravely Default was for going a minimal approach with cut-scenes. Seeing the characters talking on a black background, with simplified actions, animations, etc? It gets the point across that "this is just a representation of what is going on" so we can recognize the "cutesy" art-style BD has is, again, just a representation of what is actually going on When you try to full act a scene out, though, it makes the whole representation thing harder to swallow.
-...though the art style works
fine for more comedic, light-hearted moments. Case in point, when the 4 Old Men appear in Amur for the first time, they jump into a silly pose, and it's all the more awesome for it. The art style being the way it is actually works with the scenes silliness, not against it. To FF3's credit, there are very few big, dramatic moments that rely on action that get hurt by it (Aria's scene is one of the exceptions; most of the "dramatic" moments are dialog driven like Desch's FF4ing himself), which is why this aspect didn't stand out to me until FF4DS, so just wanted to be clear I am not against the art-style as a whole. Furthermore, another aspect the DS version benefits from? Cutscene speed. The 4 old men don't have to walk off/on screen one at a time due to limitations, for example. Granted, there are moments where the DS takes longer because they try to expand the cutscene, but when the two are equivalent, DS version tends to come out ahead.
-Oh yeah, one last thing in Kraken's cave! In the NES version, there's a side path that leads to a pool with absolutely nothing there, which is a total dick move. DS version, they put Blizzaga there (which is no longer storebought), which is far more acceptable. Also, encounter rate in Kraken's Cave seems way lower than in the NES version.
And yes, I know that dungeon is not called Kraken's Cave but **** if it has any meaning to me other than "Kraken is here" and "you get Water Jobs." But more importantly, a Power Rangers villain is next and really, what else matters?
