FF3, AA2

Finally felt like sitting down and writing some thoughts on FF3 and AA2, and I just so happened to finish some cool stuff in FFXIV in the time it took to actually write this so that'll be at the end too.

FF3 (DS)
	I was not expecting to have a ton of fun with this game to be brutally honest. I had previously played through about half of it back when I was a lot younger and remembered not liking it all that much, so I went in with that impression in my mind. Some things about the game are very messy. Zooming in to see hidden switches and items is dumb, but luckily you can activate them without doing so. The class system is a bit of a mess, as there is no clear indication of what each class does prior to changing to it (This might actually be in the instruction manual, but my copy of the game did not come with one), and once you've changed you suffer a penalty for X number of battles, what the penalty does is never explained, and you can't use other job commands on new jobs, so switching feels extremely pointless, and picking a "bad" job or one you don't like is a pretty heavy punishment. That being said, I felt like all the jobs I chose played fairly well. I picked some odd ones I wouldn't normally go with, like scholar, dark knight, and geomancer. I actually felt comfortable enough to play without a white mage for a while, leaving the healing to the scholar and knight, which I thought was pretty cool as I generally feel a dedicated healing class is a must have.
	Oh yeah, the crystal tower is a thing. It exists.
	Overall, the game took me about 20 hours to complete, and I can say that it was an enjoyable experience. Nothing absolutely amazing, but worth playing for fans of the earlier games. It maintained the spell slot system as opposed to MP, which I feel adds a lot of pressure to deal with every encounter intelligently. Bosses fully replenish your spell slots and HP, which lends itself really well to the final sequence in the game, as well as the quest to get the ultimate weapons. All in all, this game is by no means the worst or the best, but if you enjoy a huge range of jobs -albeit not the best implementation of them-, the intensity of the spell slot system as well as limited revival items (you cant buy phoenix down), and well put together boss fights and dungeons, it's solid. It also has my personal favorite boss theme in the series, so it gets a bonus for that.

AA2
	Ok this series owns and I'm so so so bad at playing them. It has always been fun though so I'll probably keep going with them. AA2 in particular was pretty good. I think 1 was still overall the better game, but 2's case 4 blew me away. It really upped the intensity, and was amazingly written and played out perfectly.
	For AA2 in particular, there were some things that really killed me while playing. almost all of case 3 was just a nightmare, between the clown and the puppet I spent a solid 4 hours staring at the screen frustrated, usually because I hadn't pressed the right statement the right number of times or didn't pick the right option once I had. Besides that, the game followed in 1's footsteps very well. The new characters were just as charismatic as I had come to expect after the first game, and it brought back some of my favorites from the first as well. Oh, and also Lotta, I guess. Cases 1 2 and 4 were all much better, 2 and 4 standing out in particular as the stars of the game for sure.
	I will play AA3 at some point, but maybe not for a bit. No idea really, but I don't really feel like starting another VN-ish game for a while, been having fun on my final fantasy games grind and am going to stick with that until I burn out.