3/5 ★ – Jrdotan's review of Romancing SaGa 3.

After Romancing SaGa 2 was released, the series had a very sucessful boom in Japan, the ideas were inovative and so many of them were very ahead of its time. Said sucess asked for a sequel and as a result, Kawazu and his team went back to work and in 1995, Romancing SaGa 3 was released. To first talk about this game, its important to talk about its technical evolution. this game was released right after FF6 and as such, the ammount of detail put into it is phenomenal to say the least. Not only sprites are huge, full of detail and cool animations during cutscenes, but the backgrounds have animations at times, theres way more color to everything and the battle arts are even cooler than they used to be in Romancing SaGa 2, in particular, spells look so cool i sometimes felt like they put chrono trigger to shame. Not to mention how terribly strong enemies look only based on the level of detail an sheer size of some of their sprites in-game. this all adds up to the amazing soundtrack which is honestly, one of the better soundtracks put into an Snes jrpg and i dare to say, the most iconic out of Ito's works. So its well stablished that the game looks gorgeous and sound awesome, what about the rest of it? The story takes place a thousand years after what is called a "death eclipse", which is the period of time in which something called "divine children" is born, said children can either be a divine king or a devil king, while the former lead the world to salvation, the later will destroy it and burn all of the world to ashes, resetting it all to zero. The last time a death eclipse happened, a divine king was the chosen, which leads us to the current times. Like all other SaGa games, the premise is what moves the setting, but theres barely any actual plot progression going since the game is all about exploration and how the small stories around the world will make the world come together, sadly tho, its one of the weaker entries when it comes to setting, in fact, while some of its details can seen quite interesting, at some points the setting lose weight due to the ammount of fantastical elements that simply wouldnt't fit, such as talking lobsters and super heroes. RS1/MS' mardias was still the strongest setting in the series at the time of Rs3's release, which is sad considering how much this improved on that game's concepts. The real meat of every SaGa game is the gameplay and thats what we have to talk about now. The game has a character selection system like RS1, where you can pick a character, select a sign and class (which determine its base attributes) and then you can set it to start and begin your adventure. once you begin, you'll immediately notice that 1 half of the cast (even more than that) start at the exact same prologue, which is different from Rs1's radically different intros that i used to like a lot, regardless of that, after the prologue ends, they will be thrown at the open world within a random location and then the common SaGa gameplay start. To anyone familiar with the series, exploration and finding new places is quite similar to what you would see in crpgs. In particular, things like the og Fallout where you walk around talking to people around towns and having them pointing the position of new locations on your map. When you get those locations to show up, you can open your map and teleport to any location you want with one button. this is also how you get to learn new events, which will then get registered at your quest log (which is nothing but a title for the event with no more information, sadly). The events aren't highlighted by a singular helpful npc like Romancing SaGa 2, so you often have to ask for gossips and rumors in pubs until someone say something useful, which is a bit of a lame spot if you ask me (since Rs2 made progression so simple). Dungeon design was an improvement over 1 and 2 definitively. Not only dungeons have more thematic minibosses and enemies, but they often have more to it rather than just walking such as hidden paths, a good implementation of the movement mechanics with enemies that get hidden in certain spots, traps, fake rooms and such which makes it more of a varied experience, even if still not on par with something like Dragon quest. Combat had some nice additions too, such as the commander mode, which sadly is a hidden feature that its extremely easy to miss, basically being a gameplay mode in which the player can set battle commands and formations, so the party act automatically and can even perform combos and such (later, this would lead to SaGa frontier's combo system). Enemy variety is also great, with almost 200 different enemies to fight and surprinsingly this time, theres very few recolors of enemies, which means youll often find new enemies and formations while playing and it will take some replays to actually see every possible enemy and formation, which is rather great and goes well with the changes in battle rank (now, battle rank scales based on individual enemy types instead of having a global enemy rank for every enemy in the game, which means its a lot more forgiving than past entries in this regard). But as i often say, not everything are flowers and this game have some nasty stinkers such as the guest character system. Instead of having 5 party slots like past entries, you can recruit up to 6 characters at a time, the main problem with it, is that the sixth slot shouldn't be open for the player to use freely, because at lots of points, you need to make a character leave the party in order to recruit a temporary guest. Not only it is an extremely annoying process, but sometimes a character simply won't want to leave your party, forcing you to maybe ban someone you actually wanted in your retinue. It's a terrible system and i'm glad they only reused this in Ministrel song and in no other place. On top of that, theres something that makes party building a bit harder than previous games, atleast when it comes to casters, because the game introduces something called "crowns", which are basically sp/wp reductions by the understandment of a character's mastery in a way of combat. basically, if you only use magic youll have a cost reduction in spell casting and vice versa if you use only techs. thats only on the paper tho, on practice, most characters come with a set value of tech points, which means the game will understand those have a certain experience with combat skills, as a result, most characters can never get a magic crown regardless of how much they only use magic, being significantly harder to build casters than fighters. This may lead you to think you shouldn't use casters and only fighters, but believe me you DEFINITIVELY want to build casters, because the endgame requires you to either have way too much meta knowledge in the game or have casters to be sanely doable. Let me put an emphasys on the fact that while this entry is a very cool entry for new players for the most part, the endgame stretch is so insanely hard, that its very possible that you go the entire way throught it, just to get stuck at the final boss and never beat it. It also a bit harder to know which location is sanely beatable at which point on your first playtrought because while enemies do scale by enemy type, bosses are fixed, which means you can find enemies significantly weaker than the stronger bosses on the same location. its very easy to get stuck at a combat encounter that you shouldn't be trying to beat, simply because you went to explore. But its also easy to just leave the area and return later (unless its one point of no return, which this game has some of, but not a whole lot.) While the game has a lot of begginer traps, it has a very unbalanced and frankly not so well designed final boss and some gameplay elements are a bit baffling and may require way more grinding than its predecessor, it is solid enough that will keep you engaged and returning to it time after time despite the initial frustrations, because itsquite addictive and open ended, in fact, in some ways its better than its predecessor, even if not nearly as original and Its worth of your time, but only if you have enough patience to take it with its more annoying minor issues. Rank- 6/10