REVIEW: Final Fantasy Legend 3 1993 Game Boy
	By: Squaresoft Type: RPG Players: 1 Difficulty: Hard

Beautifully rendered Full Motion Videos, massively varied sub-games linked seamlessly into the main plot, and breathtaking spell effects played out in wondrous polygonal 3D. Nope, none of those are in this handheld incarnation of the Final Fantasy series, unsurprisingly. To fill in the six or so people who don't yet know, the Final Fantasy games have sold millions of copies throughout the world. The baby of Japanese company Square, the FF series is probably one of the few videogame franchises with an almost untarnished heritage of excellent games. The series began some time in the dark ages (well, the 1980s) with three NES titles, only one of which was released outside of Japan. Three SNES games followed before Square jumped ship to the Sony PlayStation for the now legendary seventh and eighth installments.

Despite the undoubted worldwide success of the series, it wasn't until fairly recently that the Game Boy games came to widespread public attention. The Final Fantasy Legend trilogy (this, of course, being the last in the series) is currently on re-release via SunSoft in the US and can be found on import in Europe - which is how I managed to pick up a copy. Actually, the Legends trio are more in keeping with the SNES 'Secret of Mana' than the FF series. Indeed, they aren't true FF games: their names were changed to make them more 'marketable' in the American market.

Enough of the history, I hear you cry, what's the game actually like? If you've played GB Zelda: Link's Awakening (and who hasn't?) you'll feel instantly at home once you've powered up the cartridge. The first few minutes set up the story, after which you can wander about the small town of Dharm via an angled top-down view and chat to the various non-player characters. However, once you leave town and start roaming around the world, you'll suddenly and without warning be plunged into combat. In Zelda, combat was a simple matter of swishing your sword in the general direction of the monster. FFLIII is different. For starters, the combat is not in real-time. You decide the actions your characters are going to take, the CPU works out the bad guys' moves and then they're all carried out. Simple, but hardly exciting. The game really needed the mixture of real-time and turn-based combat that the big console titles have, but maybe the GB wasn't up to the task. Another thing you'll notice is the abundance of numbers. HP, MP, EXP, BP, GP - they're all here. This is really where Zelda and FFLIII split apart: this game is far more of a RPG in the traditional sense. There's nothing really wrong with this, but I couldn't help thinking that the fifty-plus pages of instruction manual and tables of weapons and battle power ratings made a mockery of the 'pick-up-and-play' philosophy central to the GB.

The world is well-detailed, but can look a tad sparse at times. The monsters when they appear on screen in combat are stationary, which has enabled the designers to squeeze a lot of detail into them without clogging the GB's tiny processor up too much. Surprisingly enough, there are a few catchy tunes as well. Although, because this is the GB, there's a whole host of bloody awful ones as well. Still, seeing as recent research has shown that 86% of the time GB users play with the volume right down, I don't suppose it really matters. Actually, that's a complete lie, but I had you going there for a moment, didn't I? No? Damn.

Anyhow, one of the most impressive things about the game is the size. Although the world might not seem all that big, the story is neatly spread over three time zones, and you can view the world from underwater as well as hop onto an FFVI-style floating continent. The plot's a bit weird, as you might expect what with it being a Japanese game, involving giant Water Entities and whatnot, but it's pretty good. Hardly up to Zelda standards, but better than the usual tripe you find masquerading as a game storyline. The translation is a bit dodgy in places, though, and it would appear that a shortage of cartridge space (either that or illiteracy) has led to the removal of a lot of articles, definite or otherwise, making it seem like the characters are speaking English as their third or fourth language. Still, you can live with it.

If you can get over the bizarre plot and even more bizarre translation, the depth of FFLIII will suck you in. There's loads to discover, and you'll spend ages working out the different characters/mutant/cyborg combinations you can create by defeating bad guys and installing or eating their remains (don't ask). Don't expect a game up to the standards of the big console FF titles, though, otherwise you might be a bit disappointed. Shame about the slow-paced combat, but you can't have everything, can you? - Gareth Hall 89%

[Key to the reviewing system]