Final Fantasy III (1994)
What we called Final Fantasy III in the United States was, in reality, the 6th installment of the Final Fantasy franchise.
I guess people don’t call it Final Fantasy III anymore. They haven’t for a long time. But if you want to hunt down the instruction booklet I am talking about, here, that’s how it’s branded:
Final Fantasy III (SNES)
In the USA, Final Fantasy II, III, and V were never released for their original ports; while Final Fantasy IV for the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo was released as Final Fantasy II.
Why, you ask?
I have wondered this, myself. Maybe these titles were considered too challenging for stupid American kids.
Or maybe American distributors thought the ubiquity of the Star of David/ Seal of Solomon motif would piss somebody off:
In Japanese media, the symbol appears to be generally associated with magic and the occult.
The Star of David was errata’d in later versions; that is, in the versions that were released in the United States.
The other possibility is that the second, third, and fifth Final Fantasy games were simply not that good.
When I played through a fan translation of Final Fantasy II (the original II, the one for Famicom/NES), at no point did I stop to think, “I am enjoying myself.” Like its precursor, the game is a grind-fest. Only a little worse.
Final Fantasy III for NES/FAMICOM feels like something the developers were in a hurry to complete, and Final Fantasy IV… I am in no position to judge. Every time I have tried to play it, I have immediately lost interest. (Fake fan!!)
But Final Fantasy VI… is. fucking. excellent.
I have played through it multiple times as an adult.
I am currently working through the T-Edition ROM hack, and consider myself emotionally dependent on the games presence in my life. (There are no safe spaces… except this one):
Final Fantasy VI was the last installment to feature 2D sprite-based graphics. For that reason, it was also the last to center on the work of the dynamic duo which I like to pretend had carried the franchise to that point.
Artist Yoshitaka Amano had been the chief visual designer since Final Fantasy’s inception, with digital artist Kazuko Shibuya re-interpretting Amano’s uncanny vision for the 8 and 16-bit screen.
Final Fantasy IV represents the climactic achievement of these two artists’ work for Squaresoft, while also representing the climax of an entire gaming epoch.
Within two years of the game’s release, Sony’s ‘Playstation’ would usher in the (short-lived) age of 32-bit graphic rendering. Developers, and the public at large, were eager to move away from the limitations of sprite-based gaming.
Final Fantasy IV stands uncontested as one of the best J-RPGs of the 2D era,with some die-hards arguing that it is instead one of the best J-RPGs of all time; Squaresoft’s magnum opus; the alpha and omega of J-RPG gaming experience.
It only looks that way in hindsight, and perhaps only to those of us who lived through it.
At the time, though, we couldn’t wait for what would come next. The possibilities were seemingly endless.
Yoshitaka Amano’s fluid, organic style could almost be replicated in static pixel renders, but was considered inappropriate for the sharp, angular, polygon-based graphic dispensation that would reign in the coming decade.
As such, Final Fantasy VI would be the last to feature Amano-san as lead designer, though he has remained a regular contributor. Kazuko Shibuya, who had earned her keep as an in-house pixel artist at Squaresoft, would also take a back seat, but remains actively employed by Square-Enix.
Final Fantasy VI was the first entry to replace franchise creator Hironobu Sakaguchi as director. Directorial credits are instead given to Yoshinori Kitase and Hiroyuki Ito.
Hiroyuki Ito is credited with developing the Active Time Battle System that would make Final Fantasy IV‘s approach to combat sequences revolutionary; combat systems seem to have been his specialty. He would go on to apply his unique talents in Final Fantasy VIII, as well as the vaunted Final Fantasy: Tactics.
Yoshinori Kitase would go on to direct the heavy-hitting SNES title Chrono Trigger, as well as future Final Fantasy installments VII, VIII, X, and XIII.
The Final Fantasy III Instruction Manual
The Final Fantasy III instruction manual greets you as soon as you open the box.
It falls into your lap and, before you are given the chance to insert the game cartridge, you’ve already been transported into an alternate reality.
I don’t think it is hyperbolic of me to say that this unassuming booklet encompasses my artistic awakening.
I remember thumbing through the pages repeatedly, the definition of a captive audience; I could not tear myself away.
It’s something I can’t place my finger on, but Yoshitaka Amano’s artwork is haunting.
The more I have steeped myself in literature and art, the more I circle back to those by-gone days of sitting cross-legged in my bedroom on the threshold of the 6th grade, contemplating the arcane riddle that is the Final Fantasy III instruction manual.
Shades of Henri Toulousse Lautrec, Ukiyo-e woodblock paintings, Jean Basquiat and American pop-art, Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley, Paul Klee, and Frank Franzetta all come through in Amano’s work to produce something entirely new and different.
Something that is compelling and addictive, yet oddly repulsive. Something cryptic, taboo, forbidden,… almost luciferic.
And this is appropriate, because the themes embraced by the storyline of Final Fantasy 6 are straight out of the Book of Enoch.
Final Fantasy 6 is like if the Gnostic Gospels were packed into the shell of a 16-bit game cartridge; like if a game were scripted by the Essenian Doomsday Cult, with Richard Wagner in charge of the soundtrack and set design.
It functions as much as a game as it does a legitimate work of art, being possessed of that quality which literary critic Matthew Arnold called ‘High Seriousness’.
Don’t believe me? Just watch:
The Toriyama/ Amano Axis
At the time, I don’t think any of us realized how spoiled we were with the level of craft and application went into commercial art. There is something about analog media that hits different, and it’s a distinction none of us would appreciate until it was too late.
This was back when every Magic card in the pack looked authentic. It wasn’t immediately obvious which were destined for the trash. In hindsight, none of them were. We were only on the Dark Age set. You could still pick up packs of Arabian Nights at Toys-R-Us.
You aren’t going to believe this, but there was a time in the history of ‘Magic: The Gathering‘ when even commons looked, well… magical.
But we wanted bigger, better, more. We would settle for nothing less than fully immersive artificial worlds.
Everyone was pumped for the next wave of digital graphics, the next phase of the digital renaissance.
We recorded the cut scenes from Resident Evil I and Final Fantasy VII on VHS in order to re-live them.
We eagerly pawned three gaming systems, along with all our games, at Funcoland, supplementing the trade-in with a year’s allowance to experience the latest next-gen gaming platform.
Analog art made with analog materials was something we took for granted. And why wouldn’t we? This stuff was just used for marketing.
In the picture above, you see the original box designs for the first three Final Fantasy titles released for the Famicom gaming platform.
These were exclusive to Japan; why they thought these wouldn’t fly with an American audience is beyond me. I’m American and I would have loved to see this shit.
But the fact is that Yoshitaka Amano was in the business of writing visual copy for Squaresoft’s marketing department.
Squaresoft was probably copying the homework of rival developer Chunsoft when they commissioned Yoshitaka Amano to boost Final Fantasy‘s aesthetic profile.
Chunsoft recieves credit for pioneering the J-RPG as a genre, and for launching that genre into the stratosphere; for Chunsoft is responsible for the first five titles of the Dragonquest franchise.
Wizardry and Ultima were both American Dungeons & Dragons emulations that had been making waves in Japan since 1981, but Dragonquest was the first digital Dungeons and Dragons emulation unleashed on the public that was distinctly and unapologetically Japanese.
Game designer Yujii Horii was driven by the goal of making RPGs more accessible when he translated the Dungeons and Dragons forumla into an introductory product for the Japanese console gaming market.
The result was 1986’s Dragonquest, a game which set itself apart from its inspiration by eschewing the extreme difficulty typical of Western RPGs, focusing instead on character development, emotional involvement, and rich storytelling.
Dragonquest also distinguished itself by committing to artistic excellence on every level. Chunsoft enlisted classically trained musician Koichi Sugiyama to compose the soundtrack, and manga artist Akira Toriyama was brought on board as lead character designer and illustrator.
Toriyama had only recently made a name for himself as the artist and creator behind Dragon Ball, which was first serialized by Shonen Jump in 1984. Though Dragon Ball only two years deep, it was already a cultural phenomena.
Collaborating with Akira Toriyama was not solely out of concern for Dragonquest‘s artistic merit; it was a marketing decision motivated by the desire to drive sales among targets unfamiliar with a new product.
The extra investment really paid off; 1.5 million copies of Dragonquest were sold in Japan alone. (It didn’t actually do that well in the rest of the world. Only 500,000 copies sold in the United States, where it was re-named Dragon Warrior; It probably would have done better if they had used Toriyama-san’s visual copy).
In 1986, the year Dragonquest was released, Hironobu Sakaguci and the gang over at Squaresoft were really struggling.
The story has made the rounds that Sakaguchi named the project Final Fantasy because it was his last chance to get it right; his final opportunity to make the fantasy of succeeding as a game developer a reality before giving up and going back to college.
Squaresoft’s answer to Dragonquest was Final Fantasy; their answer to Akira Toriyama was Yoshitaka Amano; and their answer to Koichi Sugiyama was Nobuo Uematsu, a self-taught musician who British radio’s Classic FM Hall of Fame has affectionately referred to as ‘the Beethoven of game music’.
Both franchises are a throw-back, not just to another graphic dispensation, but to what, when contrasted with today’s grabasstic and vile marketing approaches, appears to have been an entirely different belief system; a time when artistic integrity and commercial viability were not mutually exclusive categories.
We’ve lost something along the way, folks, and I’m not sure things are going to start looking up anytime soon.
But you can fit the entire 8 and 16-bit Dragonquest and Final Fantasy catalog onto a Samsung, so that’s pretty cool.
