Final Fantasy 3 may have been one of the series’ hardest games to port

The third installment of the Final Fantasy series set many new standards for the RPG genre, earning critical acclaim and selling over a million units worldwide. However, despite its success, it took 16 years for Final Fantasy III to get ported or released outside of Japan. According to a recent article by MagMix, this could be because nobody was able to recreate the speed of Final Fantasy 3’s airships on another platform.

Final Fantasy III was released for the NES in 1990 by Square, but was not ported until 2006, even though all other numbered titles from FF1 to FF6 had been ported to other consoles at least once by 2002. The reason for this may lie with the title’s main programmer – Nasir Gebelli. Nasir Gebelli, most often credited as “Nasir,” is an Iranian programmer of royal descent who studied computer sciences in the US and got hired directly by Square CEO Masafumi Miyamoto.

He was involved in a number of Squaresoft titles and was a core developer of the first three entries to the Final Fantasy series. According to MagMix, Gebelli achieved an impossible feat in Final Fantasy III – the super high-speed scrolling occurring when the player travels in the airship. Although it is rumored that Gebelli exploited a bug to achieve this, he managed to fit the processing of the airship’s movement into 1/60th of a second, which included the loading and displaying of map data, ocean and waterfall animations as well as the shadow casted by the airship. A programmer interviewed by MegaMix attests that fellow programmers at the time were unable to recreate what Gebelli had done, and that even those who were in a position to read his source codes found them difficult to comprehend.

Ultimately, the first port (and first overseas release) of Final Fantasy III came in 2006 with the Nintendo DS remake, and even with the long gap, the high-speed scrolling of the NES version was not recreated entirely. It was not until the remastered versions for the PS4 and Switch came out in 2023 that a difference could no longer be felt.