Final Fantasy III DS: Starting up

I've just started playing my first Final Fantasy game since I played an hour or two of the original Final Fantasy on my NES in the mid-1990s.

• Let me get this straight: There's a curse on a town, so I need a mythril ring. So I go to the kingdom where such a ring can be found and they're cursed too...and need a mythril ring. So I go off to some cave to find the mythril ring...
  
  This sounds stupid.
• So far, decent use of stylus. The screen could give bigger clues to what's going on, but otherwise, decent.
• The artwork is a little jarring. There are these nice hand-drawn portraits of the characters but then when playing the characters are deformed cartoons? Yuck.
• The constant music is...ok. If it changes up enough, I can deal, but if it is the same stuff for hours and hours... Let's just say I hope there's a way to turn it down or off.
• Nice to have a story-driven game to play, at the very least. Every Extend Extra is engrossing, but a storyline is fun in its own way.
• Are there town maps? I haven't gotten it figured out yet, but I didn't see an obvious town/building map system yet.
  

That's it for now. I've got maybe 40 minutes logged in the game.