I've made it up to the Mist Dragon in the first cave (a whole like, what, 30 minutes into the game?) and thought I'd post some impressions, both good and bad. I didn't play the FF3 remake, so I don't know if these changes were also in that one or not.
- The voice acting is good. It's a lot better than I thought it would be.
- The difficulty hasn't just been raised, it's been ramped. In the cave, instead of fighting a rat and maybe two snakes, you now fight four snakes and two rats. It's pretty overwhelming, but luckily you level up fairly often. Potions are pretty hard to come across, so use them sparingly, which brings me to..
- Using potions in the battles is awesome. After you select the potion, you see little HP bars above your party's head, letting you know how far off from their max HP they are. It's a welcome addition, but it's almost an almost facepalm-obvious inclusion and I don't know how I survived without it before.
- The battle speed, by default, is way too slow. Thank god you can change it. I set mine to 2.
- The item menu at the bottom, during battles, tells you what the item does. I don't think it was like this in other versions. You either knew what the item did or you didn't. This is invaluable when you are trying to heal a sickness or something and you don't know what to use.. I can't tell you how many wasted items I used trying to heal random illnesses during battles before.
Overall, I am enjoying this version much more than any other version.