I love 3 so much, but the remake wrecked a lot of what I love about the game. So if you don't want to play the NES version (it still plays pretty well today, IMO), then I wouldn't bother.
I'm curious about III, but what I hear about the final dungeon is a bit worrying, what with being long and with no save points. I wonder to which extent knowledge that levelling 2 ninjas and 2 sages is the accepted way to deal with that (since it even reflected on the Dissidia take on Onion Knight) is enough to deal with that.
I think I bought the 3D version on Steam some time ago, so my conscience might be a bit clearer should I try some translated emulated version, but I guess that may be too grey an area to elaborate on here.
I know only a few things about it: 4 orphans, floating island, warriors of the dark (this concept seems like one of the more interesting ones introduced to the series), the crystal tower, and this Xander guy summoning Cloud of Darkness, to everyone's detriment.
I always found weird how Dissidia picked Cloud of Darkness as its villain rep for III, since she seems more like an absolute concept than a character, even if perhaps a memorable one - she ends up not bringing too much to the table in Dissidia´s story as a result, unlike many of the other antagonists. As a fan of XI, I often also worry about the relatively unimportant Shantotto becoming the de facto representative of her whole game in crossovers despite having little bearing in its major stories, so I get the feeling III may be best understood by playing it than trusting the skimmed version that makes it to the crossovers...
I'm down for this. Bought a load of Final Fantasy's I'd never played before (which is pretty much all of them bar 7 and 10) in anticipation of 15. I managed to finish 8 (which I loved) before 15 came out so this is the perfect reason to finish off the others I got. The other FF games I got were:
FFV
FFVI
FFXI
FFXIII
And I'll be getting FFXII when it comes out on PS4 next year. I'll probably start with FFXI soon and move on from there. Looking forward to playing these games!
If you're looking to get into XI, nowadays the game is a lot more streamlined in terms of levelling and travel. You might find these useful:
* Speedrunning guide focused on levelling:
https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/User:Korvana/Speedrun - much of the game was conceived with level 75 in mind, and the cap nowadays is 99 (and beyond that with gear), so a high level can help maximize enjoyment of the story; this guide goes for specific job combinations that need not be followed, but much of its content can be handy
* Estimates of all major story lines, and some of the optional quests are ranked too as a bonus, by the person that wrote the speedrunning guide above:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/5i6qdt/story_questions/db5yy7y/
So I have this bizarre situation where I've played every game in the franchise, and nearly every spin-off, but I've never actually beaten the ending to almost all of them. Maybe it's time to finally right that wrong in this coming year.
XI's ending, specifically for Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, which requires progress in past stories, is the only time a video game brought me to tears -the years I spent playing it for the story probably help, but so does the way the devs expressed through the characters there after so many years, and the fact that
much of the ending song was sung by the actual players.
After playing XI for so many years there are things I notice about the game that I never see mentioned anywhere which make me wonder if I should write one or more articles about it or try to make videos about it. So much of the game's public perception seems to consist on: it's online with a subscription ("so won't bother'"), has 5 selectable races in 3 selectable nations with an enemy known as the Shadow Lord (tip of the iceberg, beating that enemy in the grand scope of things is rougly equivalent to beating Garland in the original FF1, not to mention the individual nation narratives never even come up), Shantotto is in it (she's not even important most of the time - plays a secondary role in her nation's missions, has some quests of her own, also has a secondary role in the Aht Urghan missions, and got her own mini-expansion around the time she was selected to be in Dissidia - she's completely avoidable in the primary stories of her own game), there were some bosses that look a really long time to fight (they got adjusted even before the level cap was raised above 75, were entirely optional in the first place, not really a factor anymore).
I wonder if there'd be some interest in elaborating on some interesting points of the game in this thread, or if there are specific points people may be curious about... there's so much ground to cover - off the top of my head:
* The game's 3-way symmetry regarding the starting cities in terms of early story and zones separating them from the original hub city of Jeuno - and how to some extent some of those city's design principles reflect the classic roles of tank, damage dealer and mage
* How elements introduced in the original version of the game, like the crags, were clearly part of a wider plan that would take the release of the first 2 expansions (Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia) to fully come to fruition. As a side effect, in a way the expansion after that, Treasures of Aht Urghan, felt like XI's "internal sequel" in many ways.
* How XI's blue mage implementation is one of the more mechanically interesting jobs in the whole series, in no small part thanks to some of the mechanics introduced in the original version of the game, mostly for the use of the black mage and beastmaster jobs
* Acceptable changes to convert the game to a single-player version, because not only the mobile version that'd planned won't be able to do justice to the intricacies of the game, there are current improvements to the game that were not possible in its original release that could be used to revise their implementation (like how in the original missions some NPCs joined you before and after fights in cutscenes, but wouldn't join you in the actual fights for lack of battle data - nowadays practically all of them can join you as NPC party members)
* A spoilerish overview of chapter 3 of Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, the grand finale to the game's major stories - it brought together concepts from past game's stories, parallels with the game's online nature, played with expectations from past story endings, and showed off a lot of things only mentioned by name before... it was one hell of a ride...