Last night I made it into what I believe to be the final dungeon in Final Fantasy III and I have some issues with the design. The first issue is one with the game in general which is that you simply cannot save anywhere except on the world map. This is annoying in the sense that you can clear out a dungeon, find all the treasure, and then lose to the boss of the dungeon and have all the previous progress thrown out. I want the bosses in dungeons to be a challenge but it's frustrating to find one that actually is a challenge if you lose an hour of progress because of it. I've dealt with this so far by leaving a couple dungeons after clearing out most of the loot and then saving so I'm risking less when I fight the boss. (This has also meant doing more fights than I normally would which makes the challenging fights less of a challenge. I don't know if this is a good thing or not.)
The second problem, which links into the first one, is I can't leave the final dungeon. There is no exit and the teleport spell is greyed out. This makes sense from a story point of view as my party has been transported to another world where I'm supposed to team up with the warriors of dark to vanquish the big bad. But from a gameplay point of view it really sucks. From the last point I can save until when I expect to meet the final boss will be around 3 hours of gameplay, a dozen or so treasure chests, and at least 9 mid-boss fights. The random encounters have a chance to get a sneak attack and possibly wipe me out and the bosses can certainly get lucky and kill me as well. (Action order in the round is based on agility and job level but has a random component as well. It is very possible the boss will get 2 turns between actions from my healer which could be very bad news.)
I'm not opposed to the final dungeon being long, or to it being hard. I want the final boss to be tricky and to require building a good party for the task or leveling a bunch. I feel like I should die while I get the hang of the fight. But when I'm probably going to lose 5+ hours in the process? That's not cool. (If I die then I lose the 3 hours it will take me to get back to that point and probably I'll want to grind out a couple hours worth of levels before I do if I died for power level reasons.)
The last time I played Final Fantasy III, after buying it for the DS a few years ago, I actually didn't finish the game. I died in the final dungeon, lost a couple hours, and got fed up. I don't remember if I just took a break to play something else or what but I never did go back and finish up. Andrew bought the game on DS at the same time I did and I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to him. It's just so demoralizing to lose a couple hours worth of progress because the game simply doesn't let you prevent it from happening in any way except by being perfect and lucky in every single fight in the final dungeon.
I don't have a clue what the final boss is going to be like but I think my current party set-up is going to be pretty good for winning no matter what it ends up being. Viking, black belt, devout, ninja is working out pretty well. The black belt and ninja take way too much damage from melee hits and from spells but I've leveled enough that it should take three hits to kill them. The devout casts a full heal spell on the whole party every round and the viking taunts 80% of the time. Bosses so far have only ever cast one spell per round so the only way I can lose someone is if the taunt fails AND the timing works out poorly such that the boss goes twice between devout rounds AND he actually casts two spells AND he targets one of the squishies with his attack. Then I have to spend an arise spell on them which prevents the party from getting healed so things do get dangerous but I can probably survive. I'll probably get to find out tonight if I'm going to have won the game or if I'm going to be very bitter...
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