We’ve got two Final Fantasy games coming out later this year: Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy XII.

Final Fantasy III is a remake of of the original Final Fantasy III for the Famicom. It was never released in the United States…probably for good reason. The first three Final Fantasy games all had the same plot: the Crystal chooses four young people to be heroes who then sally forth to defeat the Big Bad. The games differed in the name of the Big Bad, the world the heroes travelled through and the system by which the heroes gained in power, but plotwise the games were exactly the same…you even fought a lot of the same monsters in all three games.

(Historical aside: this was what made Final Fantasy IV such a revelation to gamers. With IV, all of a sudden you had heroes who already had names and personalities and actually said things. You didn’t start with your entire party intact; instead you recruited members into your party as the game progressed. And the game had a storyline beyond “kill the big bad”. FF IV set the tone for the Super Nintendo iterations of the series, which of course culminated in the superb FF VI.)

The new FF III is a complete remake being released on the Nintendo DS. It’ll have an expanded storyline and prenamed characters who speak, so it’ll be much more like a modern Final Fantasy game.

And I’ll be honest: I’m looking forward to the release of Final Fantasy III on the DS more than the release of Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. Why?

Well, because Final Fantasy XII is apparently some sort of action-adventure game set in a hybrid fantasy/sci-fi world with the name “Final Fantasy” on it. Square honestly doesn’t know what to do with this series so they are reinventing it with every new game with disastrous results.

Final Fantasy III, on the other hand, will be a true Final Fantasy game. And it will be the last one ever made.