Requirements
You’re Promoted: Master 3 jobs – job level 99 and obtain ultimate equipment – on each character.
The Way of the Onion: Master the Onion Knight job and obtain its ultimate equipment.
Eureka!: Complete the Forbidden Land Eureka sidequest.
A Box of Scraps: Beat the Iron Giant.
Character screenshots
You’re Promoted: Master 3 jobs – job level 99 and obtain ultimate equipment – on each character.
The Way of the Onion: Master the Onion Knight job and obtain its ultimate equipment.
Eureka!: Complete the Forbidden Land Eureka sidequest.
A Box of Scraps: Beat the Iron Giant.
Character screenshots
Random comments
According to the secret old guy in Gysahl, at the time I beat the game, I had killed 122 Yellow Dragons, 105 Green Dragons, 255 Red Dragons, and 2874 enemies overall. My maximum damage inflicted in one attack was 71024.
Okay, so let’s start with my requirements. I played this game after beating FFV, so I thought that mastering multiple jobs would actually be useful.
It’s not. It does precisely jack.
By the time I realized that wasn’t true, I’d already mastered several jobs amongst my characters so I just finished it…but that was a pointless waste of time, honestly. Getting the ultimate equipment wasn’t hard after I finished that. Here are the jobs I mastered:
Luneth: Red Mage, Conjurer, Summoner
Arc: Scholar, White Mage, Devout
Refia: Monk, Black Belt, Onion Knight
Ingus: Warrior, Dragoon, Knight
Getting through Eureka wasn’t hard, either, and on the original NES version it was the game’s only sidequest. In the DS version there’s also the Iron Giant. Now the Iron Giant is either impossibly hard or laughably easy, depending on whether you have fully-equipped Onion Knights at level 95+. If you do, then its regular attacks do anywhere from 0-1000 damage per character (yes, the range begins with 0). Swipe does a bit more, up to maybe 2000 per character, but still nowhere near enough to be dangerous unless you refuse to heal or something.
But what this means is you need to grind on dragons in the ??? cave for days to get to those levels and equipment. This leads to FFIII being the longest Final Fantasy I have ever played. Once I got to level 98, I beat the Iron Giant without much difficulty. The only thing I was ever worried about was Luneth dying, since he needed to stay in the Summoner job to use his summons; everyone else was an Onion Knight with full or near-full Onion equipment in the back row.
The rest of the game survived a maximum of 2 rounds against my party, and that includes the last boss.
And on a final note: yes, there’s a strategy involving the Viking class that allows you to beat the Iron Giant at lower levels, but I never leveled a Viking.
Character award: Refia
Yes, I'm giving my character award to the only female member of the party, like I did with FFII. I'd say Arc is a close second because I identify with him a lot, but it's nice to see a female protagonist, especially one who isn't cliché/oversexualized. Also, in my game, she was the Onion Knight and utterly annihilated anything that dared stand in her way.
Villain rating: bad
If you say the Cloud of Darkness is the main villain, she's kind of random and has a generic nihilist goal (return all existence to non-existence). She's kind of this random force of nature that shows up but is inexplicably given a personality and motivation. If we're looking at Xande, he's better in that he has a more believable role in the plot and motivation.
Gameplay rating
This is the last game without the ATB, so that part is pretty clean; unfortunately, the battle mechanics are kind of random. It's pretty inconsistent what character goes before whom and the randomness in damage is pretty high. All in all, though, I'd say the gameplay flaws aren't game-breaking.
Difficulty rating
This game is pretty hard at the beginning. If you don't bother going the route of the Onion Knight, the difficulty kind of stays with you until the end (made worse by the fact that there are no save points). If you spend the exorbitant amount of time building up an Onion Knight, everything after that becomes laughably easy, except for maybe the superboss (see above).
Storyline rating: okay
It's nothing special, but still entertaining.
Quote award
“Odin feared the use of his own power…and so he sealed himself…” – some random bard
This quote always made me laugh (especially when you remember that the Odin summon rarely does anything in this game).
Overpowered award
The Holy Wand, ultimate equipment for the Devout, allows him to cast Curaja on a single target in battle for free. So for all except a handful of encounters, we got free instant-to-max healing.
The Cloud of Darkness, the mother or many future villains desiring to return existence to Void
According to the secret old guy in Gysahl, at the time I beat the game, I had killed 122 Yellow Dragons, 105 Green Dragons, 255 Red Dragons, and 2874 enemies overall. My maximum damage inflicted in one attack was 71024.
Okay, so let’s start with my requirements. I played this game after beating FFV, so I thought that mastering multiple jobs would actually be useful.
It’s not. It does precisely jack.
By the time I realized that wasn’t true, I’d already mastered several jobs amongst my characters so I just finished it…but that was a pointless waste of time, honestly. Getting the ultimate equipment wasn’t hard after I finished that. Here are the jobs I mastered:
Luneth: Red Mage, Conjurer, Summoner
Arc: Scholar, White Mage, Devout
Refia: Monk, Black Belt, Onion Knight
Ingus: Warrior, Dragoon, Knight
Getting through Eureka wasn’t hard, either, and on the original NES version it was the game’s only sidequest. In the DS version there’s also the Iron Giant. Now the Iron Giant is either impossibly hard or laughably easy, depending on whether you have fully-equipped Onion Knights at level 95+. If you do, then its regular attacks do anywhere from 0-1000 damage per character (yes, the range begins with 0). Swipe does a bit more, up to maybe 2000 per character, but still nowhere near enough to be dangerous unless you refuse to heal or something.
But what this means is you need to grind on dragons in the ??? cave for days to get to those levels and equipment. This leads to FFIII being the longest Final Fantasy I have ever played. Once I got to level 98, I beat the Iron Giant without much difficulty. The only thing I was ever worried about was Luneth dying, since he needed to stay in the Summoner job to use his summons; everyone else was an Onion Knight with full or near-full Onion equipment in the back row.
The rest of the game survived a maximum of 2 rounds against my party, and that includes the last boss.
And on a final note: yes, there’s a strategy involving the Viking class that allows you to beat the Iron Giant at lower levels, but I never leveled a Viking.
Character award: Refia
Yes, I'm giving my character award to the only female member of the party, like I did with FFII. I'd say Arc is a close second because I identify with him a lot, but it's nice to see a female protagonist, especially one who isn't cliché/oversexualized. Also, in my game, she was the Onion Knight and utterly annihilated anything that dared stand in her way.
Villain rating: bad
If you say the Cloud of Darkness is the main villain, she's kind of random and has a generic nihilist goal (return all existence to non-existence). She's kind of this random force of nature that shows up but is inexplicably given a personality and motivation. If we're looking at Xande, he's better in that he has a more believable role in the plot and motivation.
Gameplay rating
This is the last game without the ATB, so that part is pretty clean; unfortunately, the battle mechanics are kind of random. It's pretty inconsistent what character goes before whom and the randomness in damage is pretty high. All in all, though, I'd say the gameplay flaws aren't game-breaking.
Difficulty rating
This game is pretty hard at the beginning. If you don't bother going the route of the Onion Knight, the difficulty kind of stays with you until the end (made worse by the fact that there are no save points). If you spend the exorbitant amount of time building up an Onion Knight, everything after that becomes laughably easy, except for maybe the superboss (see above).
Storyline rating: okay
It's nothing special, but still entertaining.
Quote award
“Odin feared the use of his own power…and so he sealed himself…” – some random bard
This quote always made me laugh (especially when you remember that the Odin summon rarely does anything in this game).
Overpowered award
The Holy Wand, ultimate equipment for the Devout, allows him to cast Curaja on a single target in battle for free. So for all except a handful of encounters, we got free instant-to-max healing.
The Cloud of Darkness, the mother or many future villains desiring to return existence to Void