1. It starts off really slowly. The first third or so of the game was really boring. It was all about finding parts for the time-traveling ship. Go here, do this, go there, do that. Zzzz… I literally fell asleep behind the DS more than once. Things pick up a bit once you go to the past and visit a few places, but it’s still a bit of a snoozefest. SaGa 3
2. Sidequests are a pain. The majority of them require a certain number of Time Gear points in order to unlock certain solutions. If, for example, you want to go back in time and fight a certain boss, you might need anything between 1 and 4 Time Gear points to unlock that option. Time Gear points can only be accumulated by fighting battles, so you may very well have to walk away and fight a little before coming back to finish the quest. Some quests also require time travel, sometimes more than once. At least one of them also disappears without warning when you pass a certain point in the game. All this suffering would be somewhat bearable if the quest rewards were worth it but sadly they almost never were. Easily acquirable items or paltry sums of money? Thanks for nothing.
3. I missed the true ending because of three stupid sidequests. I’ve ranted enough about this. I won’t go over it again. Unlocking the True Ending doesn’t just depend on those sidequests, though. You also have to pick the “right” answers in certain sidequests in order to raise the friendship points of your party to a certain level. However, these answers aren’t always intuitive. Sometimes doing the sensible, logical thing is the wrong choice and you were supposed to pick the stupid option instead. To worsen things, you can’t even see those points you’re accumulating, so you won’t even know that you’ve failed until you finish the game and get…nothing. *sigh*
4. Traveling back and forth through time gets old. I did it a lot because I was trying to do sidequests. Massive pain in the buttocks. Never again. Next time I’ll… wait, there won’t be a next time. Forget it.
5. The game is a little too easy on Normal. If you know what you’re doing (which stats grow best with which class, which weapon raises which stat, etc), you can break the game pretty quickly with judicious raising of your stats, which rise much more readily than they did in SaGa 2.
What’s worse than that, though, is that you can recharge your weapons. In SaGa 2 (or think Fire Emblem, which has a similar mechanic), when your weapons ran out of uses, that was it. You couldn’t whack away with your best swords and expect to have plenty left over for the final boss. In SaGa 3, it’s no problem at all. Recharging weapons just costs a bit of money and can be done at any inn. I had 500,000G cash by the end of the game so you can tell the costs didn’t hold me back at all.
Status effects were a joke as well. They almost never hit, and when they did they didn’t hurt much. I was poisoned occasionally and cursed a few times and that was it. Around the 25 hour mark, I managed to mass-produce an item that blocked all stat effects, which sealed the deal for good. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the game also threw several powerful guest party members my way. Or more like they would be powerful if I ever used them for more than healing. Can’t have the enemies dying too quickly, can we?
6. Bosses are pushovers. They were so wimpy, in fact, that I had to hit them with my weakest weapons and attacks so they could stay alive longer for more stats-leveling. The only one who made me sweat briefly was Ashera, and even he went down pretty quickly. Wusses.
7. There are a lot of useless gameplay features. Passwords, for example. You’re taught to enter passwords at the beginning, but you will almost never have to. Passwords you find will be automatically entered and the useless item you get will be delivered to you in your ship. Battle Drives were “awesome but impractical,” to borrow a term. To their credit, they would be useful in battle if a) everyone you fight wasn’t a wuss and b) Time Gear points weren’t so precious. Those points take time to accumulate and I used them frequently so wasting a whole node of them on some walking-dead boss was out of the question. Thus Battle Drives went into the unused bag as well.
8. Your airship (Stethros) was useless in battle, especially considering the amount of game-time I devoted to beefing it up. In theory, you could scout monsters to strengthen your airship’s laser attack. Well, I scouted a ton just to get them off the screen and found out it takes tons and tons of them to make even a slight difference to your weaksauce laser. And you know what? You don’t want to make it strong, because then it’ll kill the enemies too fast and you don’t gain any skill levels or stat levels from using it. On some of the later battles, I used the “strengthening” beam to buff my party, but as far as I can tell it didn’t make a lick of difference. Waste of time. Nice ship, though.
9. Transforming into mecha and monsters was worthless. Mecha are weak against magic and can’t gain any stats. Unless you intend to keep that character as a mecha for the rest of the game, you’ll be hurting yourself. Monsters are too limited in what they can do. Getting a useful monster transformation in the first place is luck of the draw. Then you can’t use magic that isn’t yours innately, you can’t wear armor and you can’t use weapons. When you switch forms, you can’t carry over attacks, whereas if you stay a cyborg/human/esper/beast, you get to keep and use attacks you’ve learned. The special attacks are even unlocked on weapons you haven’t used yet, as long as you have learned them. It’s a no-brainer, really.
10. I liked being able to skip battle animations, but having to reenter commands every round was a pain. An auto-battle feature would have been great. I also didn’t like that running away from battle would leave you standing right by the enemy, ready for it to attack you again. Gimme some space, man.
11. The time travel plot didn’t make any sense at the end. After Dune and his friends save the world in the future, they leave the future and go back 15 years to live there. Doesn’t that mean, first, that they’ll change Dior and Nemesis’s futures and personalities just by growing up with them? Second, that in 15 years time there’ll be two of them in New Dam village when the originals who were originally from the future but came back to the present and then later went into the future catch up with the ones who beat the boss then came back to the present to live and have naturally grown into the future? (It makes sense in context…I think)
Thirdly, are they then going to sit back and let the rest of the resistance handle everything just because “It’s up to our childhood selves to handle it?” Does this mean that even as I play this game, future-present-grownup Dune, Milfy, Polnareff and Shiryu are chilling on a beach somewhere sipping piña coladas because they already know I’m going to succeed? If not, what happened to them? Finally, where did Jupiter (Dune’s dad) come from? He’s not in Dam village in the present, but the present is only 15 years from the future where he’s a married adult, so he can’t not have been born then. I went to every town/village on the planet in the past and present and never ran into him. Speaking of which, where’s Boraju as well? Few time travel plots resolve issues like this, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give SaGa 3 a free pass for it.
So there were a couple of things I didn’t enjoy. It was a long journey from start to finish, and I don’t think I have it in me to replay it any time soon. But I had a fine time while it lasted, flaws notwithstanding. Not that it’s ever going to come out in North America, but if you ever learn Japanese (you should, anyway), give it a shot. Now back to Arabians Lost, which is finally starting to pick up.
“10. I liked being able to skip battle animations, but having to reenter commands every round was a pain. An auto-battle feature would have been great.”
The game has an autobattle feature, in the last category of the battle menu (press L once). You have to select auto-battle for each character, but the cursor will stay on auto-battle for the next round/battle. It will randomly select abilities that are equipped, and heal when someone is low HP. It makes random battles less tedious. Cheers
Wow, I wish I had known that. It would have made things a lot faster and less painful. Thank you very much for putting it out there for future players.👍