Instead, your weapon skill, HP, SP, and MP grow through repeated use. In Romancing SaGa 3, you don’t level up through experience points.

This mechanic was (thankfully) dropped in Final Fantasy III, but lived on in the SaGa series. Likewise, the more damage you take, the higher your HP climbs. Rather than using a traditional leveling system like in the original, FFII experimented with a system wherein the more you use a skill or weapon in battle, the more it levels up. Speaking of Square Enix’s other much-loved JRPG series, SaGa and Final Fantasy share much of the same DNA, going back to 1988 with Final Fantasy II. At least Final Fantasy had Beginner’s Halls to break down the basics! If you’re someone who never bothers to read the manual, I would reconsider that stance as you’re thrown into the deep end without a single word about how the game’s systems work. The complex mechanics are not intuitive or taught anywhere in the game. Romancing SaGa 3 is as heavy on mechanics as Final Fantasy VI is on plot.

Weird seeing someone in this graphic style NOT riding a chocobo. Having one of your party slots permanently occupied by an abrasive little girl or a spoony bard tends to put a crimp on party customization. Even more annoying, some of these characters will forcibly join your party after talking with them once and refuse to leave. There are almost two dozen recruitable characters scattered throughout the world, but they rarely have in-depth backstories and feel interchangeable. It’s a perfectly adequate localization hampered by the fact that the characters and plot are generally not well developed. Multiple playthroughs are necessary to see everything Romancing SaGa 3 has to offer, facilitated in this remake thanks to a newly added New Game + option.Īs far as the new official translation goes, it’s okay. This structure also means that it’s easy to miss recruitable characters or potentially exciting events. It ends up feeling like an entire game of lightweight side quests and mini-games. The idea of an open-world 16-bit JRPG was intriguing to me at first, but soon disappointed. Rather than a traditional narrative, you set out to make your own plot, going from town to town, solving problems, and more or less stumbling into the main conflict randomly. Each character has a unique opening section, with their stories converging soon after the prologue. You start out picking one of eight characters, split evenly male and female. Despite this fantastic central story concept, it rarely comes into play during the game.

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