racketboy.com

This game. Where do I even begin?

Let's go back to the late 1990s and follow preteen Key as she and her mother take a Saturday drive to FuncoLand. Key has only recently become a SNES owner, and one of her internet friends has been tirelessly urging her to buy a copy of Chrono Trigger (a game Key has ever heard of), or at least a Final Fantasy, ever since. Key is still totally new to the console's library and has decided she'll try Final Fantasy III, a decision based entirely on a review in a gaming magazine that mentioned a boss fight with a possessed train. Preteen Key thinks that is very cool, and has even called ahead to make sure her local FuncoLand has a cartridge in stock.

When she gets to the store, however, she is shocked to discover that the copy of FFIII is going for twice the price of A Link to the Past, which is a game she'd purchased herself from this same location not a few months before. What was this all about? Were Past and Fantasy not both RPGs? They both had slanted bird's eye views, didn't they? How could they really be that different?

She asks the employee helping her about this. "It's a really big game," he explains, which seems to make perfect sense to him. Preteen Key is not sure it makes enough sense to confidently gamble away two games' worth of her money -- and this is even after considering the haunted locomotive angle.

"Do you have any other Final Fantasy games?" she fishes, not quite sure if this pricing situation is standard for the entire series.

So, guess what happened.

That's right: I opted to buy their copy of Final Fantasy Legend III for the Game Boy that day, which came with a manual and a comparatively attractive price tag, instead. I thought it was going to be the little-kid version of the SNES cartridge of similar title. And what an infamous mix-up this turned out to be!

Suffice it to say, I had no idea what I was doing in RPGs back then. But I found the game strangely compelling; the music was fantastic, the story dramatic. I gave up on it less than an eighth of the way through, but it gnawed on the back of my mind as unfinished business for years. I picked it up again in high school, not long after I'd finally played Final Fantasy VI. I got about halfway through before I inexplicably lost interest. But now I've finally gone and done it. I'm almost thirty... and I have closure.

It's hard for me to know what to say about this game. It's huge for a Game Boy title, which is really fantastic. The story hinges on a time-travel element, which I always love, even when it doesn't quite make consistent sense. The music is fabulous, the graphics run the gamut from cute to impressive to rather creepy (there's a very simple artwork change in the final bossfight that really startled me), and there are a ton of locales and characters to deal with. There's also an entire race/class system that I haven't bothered with, but which is apparently deep and complicated if you dig into it.

But, it's tedious. Especially toward the end. You often can't walk two squares without hitting a random encounter, and this is supremely frustrating when you're trying to explore the different routes in a tower where pretty much every floor looks exactly the same. You also can't put this game down for too long lest you forget what you were doing. I was apparently two bosses from the endgame last fall when I decided to take a break (I was facing down another tower and felt like I just couldn't handle it), and when I fired up the cart tonight, I wound up having to look at a walkthrough because I couldn't remember where my flying ship was parked or where I was headed.

And unfortunately, the translation is odd. Many of the emotional scenes are hurt by the stilted dialog, and there were some sentences I had to scratch my head over for a minute before untangling what the writers were trying to convey.

Do I recommend it? I'm not sure. I love it unconditionally because it's had such a presence in my life, and you can really tell that the game was trying to say and do so much more than its limitations would allow. There's a kind of pressurized greatness to it, I suppose. And if someone is looking for a quirky Game Boy experience to stretch out over many months in short little bursts, I'd say go for it. But be prepared for a random encounter rate that will make you crazy so you don't burn out on it.