Romancing SaGa 3 - Review

I’d heard of the Romancing SaGa series, mostly when the second game came out for the first time in English only a few years ago. Technically it is the fifth game in an ongoing series, which can seem very daunting. Thankfully Romancing SaGa 3 is its own game so I was able to jump right in. But would I enjoy what I found would be another matter.

An event called Rise of Morastrum occurs every 300 years, resulting in every newborn dying during an eclipse. All except for one baby. It is an event that changes the world, for the better or worse. It is years after the last Rise of Morastrum, but worse is the potential opening of Abyssal Gates which would bring about the end of the world if the situation in this world aren’t dire enough. You and your band of adventurers have to stop this...and that's kind of it. It might sound like a reductionist view, but it’s all that really matters as far as the overall story is concerned. In a cliche way, the journey is the people we meet along the way.

At the beginning you’re thrown into the thick of things. Any familiarity with older JRPGs will help, but there’s a lot that doesn’t really get explained. As the story and adventure progresses I wish I could say it gets clearer, but with the game intentionally nonlinear you often feel lost. That’s right, for its time it’s a wild decision to have a game so open and putting the onus on you to work it all out. After the opening section you’re left to walk around and talk to people in the hope they might drop location names and quests. You select one from a group of eight heroes. Each has a different story to tell and some interweave with one another. Mikhail is one of the characters who is also responsible for ruling a Kingdom, so there's other mini games that involve that as well. Choosing another character will also involve a business management element to your game as well. It’s quite neat how every character will see different interactions. On top of this your decisions matter, setting you off on different branching paths depending on what you choose. It’s hard to know how different these paths are without me playing through the game several times, especially with one play through being over 30 hours.

Romancing SaGa 3 feels quite different from the other JRPGs that came out at the time. A mechanic that really made me have to rethink how I played these older games was how health works. You have two counters, one for hit points which are exactly as stated, and the other is Life Points which is where things get interesting. While the hit points work as they do in any other game, when a character is knocked out they are still a presence in the fight. After the hit points hit zero, every hit after that comes from a much more limited life point counter. When this hits zero then the hero is removed from the party. This adds more weight than usual for a game of this sort, a particularly tough battle could cost you characters you’ve built up over hours. At the end of a battle everyone’s health is restored which in itself changes enough, however life points don’t return until you’ve rest at the Inn. Just like when playing Fire Emblem with permanent death turned on there is tension to fights, adding a level of caution while also alleviating some party management not having to heal hit points after every fight. Because you can lose members, you will also have to recruit new heroes throughout the adventure. After the initial introduction you have no choice, which was bad enough losing the group I thought I’d have with me a while longer at least.

The non linear set up of Romancing SaGa 3 is interesting, discovering locations through information gathered in the world. It’s immersive, and growing up it's the kind of immersive I always wanted my dream game to be. But it turns out there’s a good reason why games rarely do it, it’s not fun to have to track down every person and hope they have some new leads to a new location or to what you should do next. It ends up feeling like busywork to make up for not having a more conventional overworld. It’s not helped that the game rarely shares much information with you. To be fair it is from a time where game manuals were often vital to the experience, but what happens when that is no longer the case? At the beginning it feels like you’re thrown into the deep end and over time you just have to work it out or look it up. If you’re familiar with turn based RPGs then you’ll figure it out, even though this game seems determined to set itself apart from similar games. Leveling up doesn’t even happen in the traditional way with experience points, instead party members get stat increases randomly at the end of battle. In some cases a character will learn a new move mid battle by unleashing it on an unsuspecting group of monsters.

In the age of the remasters and the extra settings that are available in the Final Fantasy games, it feels like a missed opportunity to leave them out of even older games where everything feels drawn out. Just a 2X speed would make a world of difference here, even though I know for some it should be enjoyed as how it was released. For new audiences it just highlights how much this game is from another time as battles drag out between grinding.

While the game is over twenty years old the sprite based visuals still look great, helped by the work put in to remaster it. The remastering may have helped make the game look much nicer, but the sound seems just fine as it was. Romancing SaGa 3 was nice to listen to throughout, as you’d expect of Square games of that time. Unlike the flak that Square Enix games often cop when they mess with their older games, it would be hard to see any frowns with the work done one this game.

Romancing SaGa 3 is an interesting game. It definitely would have been more notable if it was released worldwide at the time. The game is filled with all kinds of interesting mechanics that other big RPGs didn’t have at the time. Most of the issues I have with the game stem from the fact it’s an older game. In 2019 they’re not as game changing, and in some cases just not fun now narrative has come so far since then. That doesn’t mean it’s bad for what it is, and there are plenty of fans of old RPGs that will relish the opportunity to experience this game. If you want a classic JRPG that hasn’t been available in English until now it is worth checking out. It’s great to see games like this get a new life outside of old constraints such as language barriers and availability.

Review code provided by Square Enix