There have been many remakes, spin-offs, and fangames of the Final Fantasy series over the years on the OHRRPGCE. Unfortunately, most of them have not been very good, but some were done extremely well and became popular even outside of the OHRRPGCE community. The remaking of a popular game series is quite a daunting task, primarily because you set yourself up for feedback slaughter due to your audience having such high standards from the original game(s).


What attracted me to Voltire's remake of Final Fantasy 3 (the actual FF3, not FF6US) initially was the fact that he is a fairly new OHR user and claimed to have made all the graphics himself. It's very easy, especially when designing a remake, to rip the graphics from the original title or elsewhere. Voltire was bold enough to use his own graphics, and they are fairly respectable at that for a new user.


The game follows closely to the Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy 3, and features Luneth as the main protagonist. He discovers the Wind Cave and explores it thoroughly, uncovering the Wind Crystal. The crystal in turn chooses him as a Warrior of Light, and your quest begins there. Kudos to Voltire for using his own graphics as well as sticking close to the original story and soundtrack. Unfortunately, that is where the fun and joy ends.


The first thing I noticed was the possible spelling mistake in the title screen; "Remkake for the OHRRPGCE by Voltire". I ignored this for a little while, dismissing it as a possible joke or just something that I did not get. However, the more I played it the more I noticed numerous spelling mistakes throughout the entire game. I really find it hard to believe that someone could misspell something in a title screen, but I suppose it could happen. Perhaps Voltire can chime in on whether this was some sort of joke or if it was actually a mistake. Either way, the spelling mistakes as a whole leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.

The next thing you are likely to notice is that the battle frequency is a tad bit too high given how the other game mechanics are set up. Can't you just run? Yes you can, but that literally hurts you. Say what? On my second playthrough, in hopes of avoiding some of the random battles, I ran twice in a row and actually killed myself; starting the game over again. I'm not sure whether this was intended or not, but to me it is a strange feature to have considering the ease of difficulty and frequency of battles.


There are several bugs in FF3, some of them minor while others are literally game breaking issues. After you clear the Wind Cave, you can actually skip the first town, visit the second town to get Arc, then go back to the first town and people will still say that Arc has run away. Also, the bow/arrow design does not work quite like what the author likely intended it too. You can skip equipping a bow and just use something like a long sword in your main hand with a holy arrow in your offhand and it still increases your damage (by a large amount at that). Again, these aren't serious issues, but they need to be addressed nonetheless.


What really hurts this game are the few bugs that more or less cause the game to crash. If you fly the airship into certain mountain ranges (notably those around the Djinn Cave), you will cause it to hover over the mountain and not be able to go back to flat land. In Sasune's Castle, if you attempt to walk towards the king, you fall into what looks like a dungeon area but you can't move at all. Those issues set aside, the one that finally did me in was the job system bug. Admittedly, Voltire says it is unfinished, but it shouldn't crash the game either. I just wanted to check out the job options for each character. Luneth and Arc's worked fine, but when I went to Refia, the game froze. At this point, my only option was to restart the game at the beginning of the Djinn Cave; not something I wanted to do due to an easily fixable bug.

With that being said, I did not finish the game. Considering I was forced to restart it three or four times due to simple, yet overlooked, bugs, I lost my desire to finish it. Perhaps when the issues are resolved, I will give it another shot. Given its current condition though, I can't recommend it to anyone; not even diehard fans of the original series.