why fnaf 3 is the best?

I don't know about you but when FNaF 3 came out I didn't give it as much credit as it really deserved. It was definitely the black sheep of the first four games, the community had a lot of expectations that FNaF 3 didn't live up to, and I've never really been a big fan of the color green.

But recently, I reconsidered it, from a different point of view.

First off, there was no way FNaF 3 was going to deliver on everybody's expectations. Remember when everyone and their dead dog thought FNaF 3 was going to be set at an amusement park? Good times.

And I kind of like that the "one animatronic" thing was an intentional subversion of what everyone expected. I kind of feel like you were supposed to think "Wait, one animatronic? How could that be hard. Screw that, how could that be scary?" And then the fact that Springtrap did the job blew our goddamn minds. That was my experience, anyway.

The Phone Guy's role in the game is also too-often unappreciated. Part of the joke of Phone Guy's character starting in FNaF 2, at least in my eyes, is that he always shows up where he doesn't belong. When you see him in FNaF 2, you think "Wait how is he here? He died in the last game, right?" And then FNaF 3 tricks you with a new Phone Guy, but then surprise surprise he's like "oh hey I found these old training tapes" and then BAM, old Phone Guy again.

(Insert crack theory about the Phone Dude being the Phone Guy in witness protection.)

And then Phone Guy shows up where he doesn't belong again in FNaF 4, where his audio is hidden in plain sight, in a dream, that we're supposed to think is happening in 1987, then which we're supposed to think is in 1983. But Phone Guy's appearance itself is proof otherwise.

This is why I think they should've tried to include Phone Guy as an instructor in FNaF 6. They could've found an excuse. (Although his appearance in UCN is also a satisfying resolution to this running joke.)

The actual implementation of the Phone Guy in FNaF 3 - besides being 100% congruent with the plot of the game - serves a genius double-purpose. Even though the game is a sequel set in the far future, Scott still managed to fill in some of the blanks of the pre-FNaF-2 era, which was a lingering mystery back then.

The story of the game is also perfect. It's a textbook example of seemingly-unrelated storylines converging at the very end in an obviously-planned way, and it was executed flawlessly.

The mystery of what the fuck Springtrap is hits you like a truck, whether it be in the initial "I am still here" teaser that led everyone to think it was Golden Freddy, or the trailer, or the title screen. By the time you hit "start," you're already curious, even more so than the second game.

Then there's the Phone Guy exposition itself. The Phone Guy tells you about spring-lock suits and how to properly operate them, which seems completely unrelated to anything you're doing, at first. You're trying to keep away a weird bunny animatronic.

And finally there's the mini-games in-between nights where you're controlling the animatronics, before getting ambushed and smashed apart by the Purple Guy.

All three of these plot threads - getting hunted by this weird golden rabbit, the spring-lock safety training exposition, and the FNaF 1 characters being torn apart by Purple Guy, are completely unrelated. That is, until they all suddenly snap together within the span of a few seconds.

That one moment, at the climax of FNaF 3, is absolutely genius. That's the moment you first realize that the entire game, you've been going head-to-head with the one who murdered the original five children, without realizing it. And because of the Phone Guy tapes, the player knows exactly what's going on when it happens.

I was a child when I first saw that, so I wasn't as into media analysis. I didn't appreciate the masterful storytelling going on, I just thought "cool, but where's the 20/20/20/20 mode?" But now, as an adult, bravo, Scott. Bravo.

Don't forget Fazbear's Fright burning down, foreshadowed by the burnt nature of the Phantoms that we knew about since the pre-release teaser images. After wrapping up its three main plotlines in one dramatic finale, the newspaper about the fire is a perfect way to set up a mystery in the falling action for people to debate about.

The whole "Bad ending / The end" thing was done really well, too, in my opinion. You're a hundred times more likely to see the Bad Ending first, and see that it's just a screen with the animatronics with lights in their heads, like we see throughout Fazbear's Fright. Not really a particularly interesting sight, besides Golden Freddy in the back. (And, while I'm here, no, there aren't two lights in Fredbear's head, just one light shining through both eyes. Notice the glare ring around one eye, and compare to the light coming out of Bonnie and Freddy's right eyes.)

But seeing the Good Ending, you now see that the lights are gone, and the symbolism kicks in. You understand that the souls are gone now, and the previously-somber music takes on a much happier tone. The ending music perfectly captures childhood innocence, and where in the Bad Ending it invokes sadness in the player as they think about the innocent children trapped in these godforsaken machines, the exact same music in the Good Ending celebrates joyously that they're free.

Neither the Good Ending nor the Bad Ending screen on their own carry much meaning, but they're contrasted beautifully against each other, for such a simple difference.

Then there's the matter of the Cake mini-games. Possibly the most mocked aspect of FNaF 3 is the fact that it's absurd to expect even a tenth of the players to figure out these mini-games. They're stupid! How is a player supposed to figure out the wall panel thing?

Yes, FNaF 3 is not designed so that every player can find the secrets on their own intuitively. But neither is the original Legend of Zelda, or Metroid. I wasn't alive back then, but I've heard people talk about gaming in the '80s and early '90s, when secrets told on the school bus and discussion around the game was a big part of it. You might not have found out how to get the blue ring, but your friend did. He can tell you. Or maybe he knows a code to unlock a secret fighter in Mortal Kombat or maybe he knows where the warp whistles are in Super Mario 3.

That's not really a thing anymore. There's not a market for Nintendo Power.

But Scott brought it back.

Just like the designers of The Legend of Zelda on NES, Scott designed FNaF 3 (and really all the other games) for the community to solve, not each individual player on their own.

Yes, the wall panel thing is dumb to expect any one player to figure out, but Scott knew someone would, and they'd tell other people, and word would get around. That's an experience you can't recapture, being in that culture in 2015. And the way in which Scott did it, in my opinion, made it a great one.

Diverging a little bit, I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet.

A big issue with FNaF 1 and 2 is that they're cheesable.

FNaF 1 expected you to flip around all the cameras and constantly be checking on every animatronic to make sure they weren't close to you, but players soon figured out that wasn't necessary. Besides Pirate Cove in the early nights and East Hall Corner on the later nights, none of the other cameras are used, like, ever. They're not needed. And that's a bit flaw with the game.

FNaF 2 expected you to struggle balancing watching the cameras with winding the music box, and conserving flashlight battery, and reacting quickly to when there's an animatronic in the room. But players soon figured out you could put the mask up every time the camera comes down, spam the flashlight really quickly, and just always stay on the music box camera and never use the flashlight when the camera is up.

There are strategies in FNaF 1 and most of FNaF 2 that will basically get you through any night no problem, you just have to know how to game the system. The only exception being FNaF 2's Golden Freddy mode, which can screw you over even if you use the perfect strategy - the worst of both worlds.

FNaF 1 and 2 are still amazing games in their own right, but these are flaws with them that FNaF 3 fixed.

FNaF 3 expects you to balance the cameras with the maintenance panel, force yourself to examine the cameras closely to see where Springtrap is hiding, use every camera pretty much evenly, watch out for the Phantoms, and pay attention to when Springtrap goes into vents... and that's exactly what you have to do. There's no way to make the game easier on yourself other than simply getting really good at it. It's not the hardest FNaF game, or at least it's debatable, but it's the one out of the original three where you can't really break the game.

This game did what FNaF 1 tried and failed to do. FNaF 1 didn't fail at everything, don't get me wrong, but there are a few broken pieces of that game that FNaF 3 made into something better.

And the Phantoms - oh, God, the Phantoms are genius.

After about an hour or two of the first two FNaF games, your reaction to the jumpscares is no longer fear, but anger. By the time you've made it to night five, you're not actually scared of anything, you just yell at the screen when you die. You can watch this happen to Markiplier six separate times, in the first six FNaF games.

The Phantoms finds the perfect way to escape this problem, by making your instinctual reaction to jumpscares not be frustration, but panic.

When Nightmare BB hits you, you're not dead. It's not game over. So you're not immediately in I-just-lost-a-video-game mode, you're in panic mode. You're losing, perhaps, but it's not over yet - it gives you the adrenaline that you need to try and save yourself.

That's much better than every jumpscare resulting in a middle-finger to the screen, don't you think?

Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 completes one of the fastest-developed trilogies I’ve played. Like its months-old brothers, its stage feels primeval compared to the complexity of other games: a room, a desk, a glowing surveillance monitor, a softly buzzing fan, and a thing creeping in the darkness. It’s a familiar skeleton fleshed out with something noticeably—and refreshingly—different. In the end, I was scared as hell.

Yes, FNAF 3 has jump scares. A lot of them. As before, I risked cardiac seizure in a cramped security room as the night watch from midnight until 6 am, but my employer wasn’t a struggling pizzeria like last time. I instead guarded a horror house attraction pieced together by enthusiasts of the Fazbear legacy who’ve scrounged props and memorabilia from the shuttered original restaurants. I wouldn’t blink if the entire motif was creator Scott Cawthon indulging on the meta story of his games’ meteoric prominence, but it’s a suitable backdrop despite any subtext.

I liked how the ease of the first night (really, nothing happened for the entire five game hours) enabled me to absorb the place’s atmospheric spookiness without needing to fend off any attacks. There are 15 cameras stacked in two layers, which is the highest in quantity and intricacy of the series. They each frame relics of my past meetings with madness in each room: scuffed black and white tiling, Foxy’s gaping maw nailed to a wall like a hunting trophy, Chica’s head used as a strobe lantern. I specifically appreciate the sickly green and yellow hues, which remind me of body parts floating in mad-scientist preservation jars from classic horror films.

When the attacks began, I noticed how vastly different FNAF 3 played from its predecessors. Most conspicuous is the reduction of active animatronics to a single walking suit named Springtrap. He’s appropriately terrifying as a decayed and patchwork rabbit and rather critical in the barely comprehensible FNAF mythos, an intriguing angle I disappointingly didn’t see emphasized enough in his impetus for stalking me. His animation set compared to his robotic counterparts is wonderfully lifelike and fluid. I shuddered when he slunk into the office to stare right at me during a game-over sequence. Even more thrilling was glimpsing his quick shuffles across the uncovered portions of the office background while I had the camera screen up, both a stomach-dropping ‘uh oh’ of an impending demise and some skillful perspective work from Cawthon.

The original gang didn’t disappear. Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Freddy, and even a few newcomers from FNAF 2 (such as the baneful Balloon Boy) are now charred and hallucinatory phantom versions of themselves. They don’t kill me outright, but pile on sudden scares. A character would zap into the office whenever I spied it materializing somewhere on a camera feed. It’d pounce with a loud roar as soon as I lowered the screen, its face filling up my monitor before fading away. A phantom would sometimes loom silently in the corner of the office out of my view only to strike if I swiveled my head around. I loved those blink-and-gone moments of intense fear, but the novelty felt a little stale by the third night.

The best part of FNAF 3 is that the cameras have seen a complete rework as a system finally crucial to survival as a whole. One of the largest letdowns in the previous games was that only certain angles were important. They failed to really take advantage of the creative aspects of staying alive through surveillance. Here, every camera is equally vital in keeping Springtrap away. By generating a noise through the camera, I can distract Springtrap into investigating, buying me precious additional seconds on the clock. If Springtrap feels adventurous and clambers into a crawlspace, I can seal shut the passageway—again, I need all the cameras to pull it off.

I was constantly reminded of the first game’s thrumming sense of paranoia, always struggling to keep my stress in check. Whereas FNAF 2 eschewed that emotional pressure, demanding fast reflexes, its successor relies on the eventuality of me making a mistake to start a slow snowball effect of disaster.

For instance, I’d scan the static fuzz of the camera feed for Springtrap, but oops, I found a phantom instead! It lunges at me and disables my tools, cutting power to my video, audio, or ventilation control. I access another interface to reboot the stricken software while alarms bleat imminent danger. All the while, Springtrap creeps ever closer, but I can’t keep track of him because I’m busy restarting everything. Before I can get back to the camera, he’s in my face. Game over.

But screeching into death never felt too frustrating. I valued the phantoms’ ability to instantly halt my momentum and strain my skills for the fleeting seconds when I couldn’t defend myself. I wasn’t bested by the game directly overpowering me, but by having my brain fatally outmaneuver itself. Helplessly watching the reboot screen was like repeatedly turning over a stubborn car engine while the killer slowly grew larger in the rearview mirror. Errors were small lessons.

A final nitpick: The original animatronics lack their personalities here. All they did was fly at my face, which inevitably turned repetitious, an issue the series still hasn’t shaken three games in. I missed catching Freddy’s demonic chuckle or Foxy’s short snatches of song. I don’t understand why ghost Chica can’t be as clumsy as her pots-crashing corporeal form.