In ancient days before the dawn of time the Powers That Be decreed that the third, fourth, and fifth games in the Final Fantasy series would not see the light of day outside of Japan, and that Europe and North America would get Final Fantasy VI wearing the guise of Final Fantasy III.

And lo, there was an anglophonic wailing and gnashing of nerdish teeth.

But then came the power of the Nintendo DS, with its dual screens of crystal glittering in the fairy starlight, and Square-Enix saw that there was money to be made. "Let's port Final Fantasy III to it," they said. "The real one, not the Final Fantasy VI we put out for the North American and European markets. And let's make it really pretty."

And lo, the new version of Final Fantasy III is very pretty. But not quite as pretty as it first appears. It opens with a really nice cut scene, with flying islands and flocks of birds and magic and wizards and a bunch of dudes riding chocobos through beautiful countryside; however, this high standard of animation is not replicated in the rest of the cut scenes, which are mostly rendered using the same simple but adorable CGI that the bulk of the game's action takes place in. This is a Final Fantasy game, and so to a great extent the gameplay is pretty much what you'd expect: you wander around fighting monsters, ostensibly to advance some nebulous quest you're on which has something to do with the end of the world. This time around, the quest is to gain the power of the crystals of light to beat back the overwhelming forces of darkness and restore balance to the world, and the world in question is a floating continent. Fair enough.

This is an early installment in the series, and therefore those who have played the first couple of Final Fantasy games will find few surprises. There are chocobo birds. There are red, black, and white mages (like in Dragonlance!). There is an interesting jobs system where any of your characters can switch to any character class whenever they like, but they must work their way up through the ranks in their new class before they are any good at it. There is incredibly graphical design - your adorable little player characters all adopt the costume of whichever job they are currently working in, so it's tempting to switch them about a lot for the sheer joy of playing dress-up. The steampunk aesthetics of later Final Fantasy games have not yet crept in, so the whole thing is very much back to basics.

Which, for me, was part of the problem. I am virulently allergic to aimless grinding in computer RPGs. The reason I played through Knights of the Old Republic and Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate II so happily was that each of those games bends over backwards to shower you with interesting side-quests, and so long as you do all the side quests you possibly can (and there's no reason not to) you'll progress at a sufficient rate to tackle the slings and arrows of the outrageous main plotline, thus minimising the need to wander around fighting random monsters to fight in order to train your characters up to the level they need to be to avoid being steamrollered horribly by the next boss. Given that combat in computer RPGs tends to get repetitive once you've worked out a reasonable tactic, I find meaningless grinding - fighting for no reason other than to boost levels - to be incredibly tedious. I need a plot underling the fighting in order to keep my interest in a computer RPG: if the fight I'm in isn't progressing a quest I'm on, I'm not interested. (Okami, incidentally, does an excellent job of not letting you run out of things to do, so it's not impossible to have a console RPG without pointless grinding.)

Unfortunately, pointless monster-bashing is somewhat necessary in Final Fantasy III. There is the main plotline, a tiny number of sidequests (we're talking two or three, if the walkthroughs are to be believed), and that's it. I was ticking along perfectly happily, progressing nicely through the main plot, until now: I'm halfway through and I've encountered a boss which is clearly too powerful for me. Obviously, I need to go and level-grind a while in order to progress. Am I going to do it? Fuck no, I have better things to do with my time.

Final Fantasy III has other failures - it barely uses the DS's dual screens and other features, which seems such an incredible waste when The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass used them to such excellent effect, and heightens the sensation of playing through an old ROM rather than a game released in 2007. Furthermore, as an early Final Fantasy game III lacks the extensive cut scenes and character development that is so appealing to players of later games in the series, so they're likely to find that III lacks depth.

What was obviously a reasonable effort back in the days of the NES isn't quite as engaging in a full-priced game coming out for the Nintendo DS in 2007, and dressing it up in pretty graphics won't fool dedicated players for long. As far as Nintendo DS RPGs go, Final Fantasy III is a servicable but ultimately unsatisfying effort. If only someone would convert Planescape: Torment...