Choose your flair by clicking the (edit) button directly above! A subreddit for Japanese RPGs, past and present. Allowed Submissions. News and articles.
Dec 29, 2014 Romancing SaGa 3 Hack Music: Melody of Evil and Divinity (Minstrel Song). Melody of Evil and Divinity (Minstrel Song). Romancing Saga 3 Bokuno Hack. Bokuno/aabeta is a Romancing SaGa 3 hack. It adds content from other SaGa games such as characters, events, bosses, item, etc.
Informative self-posts. Trailers & Promotional Gameplay Rules.
No Personal Attacks against redditors. Images are not allowed. Do not ask for specific questions about specific games. Do not ask which game you should play.
Do not ask for game recommendations. No personal streams or Let's Plays. No low-effort posts.
Use spoiler tags when necessary. X kills Y!(/spoiler) = X kills Y!. No blatant self-promotion. For more details on the rules,.
If your post disappears, please to see if it got caught in the spam filter. Scheduled JRPG Weekly Discussions. Monday: Suggestion Request Free For All.
Thursday: Let's Play / Stream JRPG Weekly. Friday: What have you been playing, and what do you think of it?. Sunday: Music Sunday Free For All, Let's Plays/Streams, and Music must be posted as a comment in their respective weekly post, not on the front page.
Let's Plays/Streams/Twitch Channels -Useful Links. / Help us add to it!.
and. and the. Other subreddits you may enjoy.
The Romancing SaGa series is pretty much Square's open-world counterpart to the more linear Final Fantasy. The story's pretty simple, but there are tons of side quests to unlock and complete.
The game has more of an emphasis on gameplay and there's quite a bit of depth to the battle system. There are many characters to recruit, and they level up similar to Final Fantasy 2's system (use abilities more and they get stronger). As a result, the game has a fair bit of replay value, in that the game differs a bit depending on which main character you choose, which other characters you recruit, and which side quests you do. Graphics-wise, they're pretty similar to the Final Fantasy games released at around the same time (RS1 = FF4, RS2 = FF5, RS3 = FF6). The music is exceptional, definitely on par with the Final Fantasy games. Romancing SaGa 3's soundtrack is probably my favourite game soundtrack not counting Falcom's games. Of the three games, I've only played Romancing SaGa 3, but it was great and I'd definitely recommend it if you like JRPGs.
Romancing SaGa was also remade for PS2. I played that for a while, then tried the in-progress fan translation.
Pros of the remake:. They fixed some missing quests and added some new ones as well. SNES version is missing some things - you can't get all the fate stones for example.
A few new systems such as classes, environment abilities, crafting. Really gives the game a ton of depth. They substituted the old HP/MP with the SaGa Frontier style HP/LP/BP system, which you may or may not prefer. You can revive downed characters in battle by healing them, but if they run out of LP they're permanently dead.
Characters also regain a set amount of BP per turn which encourages you to actually use those abilities. Ability 'sparking' and combos a la SaGa Frontier, plus significantly more combat abilities in general, makes for more depth in combat. Weapon levels.
In the SNES version weapon levels are per individual weapon (so no 'sword level', just levels with individual swords) and actually reset if you unequip and then reequip the same weapon, discouraging you from ever changing equipment. Cons:. Graphics don't appeal to everyone (I'm in this camp). Voice acting is hammed up and people take forever to say anything.
You have no control over the camera, which in a 3D game with touch encounters is extremely annoying. You're walking along and suddenly it rotates 90 degrees and you can't see where you're going. Also makes finding your way back to the start of an area very tough. #1 annoyance with the remake. Only 5 max party members instead of 6.
All in all, the SNES version is worth playing and is nice to carry around on a handheld emulation device, but if you enjoy it I'd suggest looking into the PS2 remake as well. I played this some months ago when the translation was still in beta.
I really can't say anything good about it, though. The translation is AMAZING and is very well done. But the game itself is filled to the brim with problems and I don't even know where to begin.
The biggest problem imo is that the walking speed is too slow (I think you can't even run) and the maps are not exactly small. Some are pretty expansive. Instead of random encounters, you can see the monsters in the field and fight them. This is generally great since random encounters tend to be annoying. But in this game there are DOZENS of enemies in the same room and it's practically the same thing. I've been through caves and plains where I had to fight 20 battles in a row because of the huge amount of monsters in the same SMALL space I couldn't get away from.
It gets old really, REALLY fast. The battles are very slow. They're not really engaging since the graphics are definitely not Square's best, the attack animations are rather meh and the general pace of the battle is slow.
Japanese wikis recommend having less party members but I found that that didn't really help the issue. I'm not one to speed-up battles when emulating, but I had to do it unfortunately. Since the game is based on quests instead of one main linear storyline, you'll have to go around town looking for NPCs with quests.
Considering this is one of the very first quest-driven RPGs and considering it was released on SNES, the quest system is pretty bare bones. No notebook to keep a record of your progress, no markers, no real help from the game either. Most of the quests objectives are rather lame and they're not that varied. Sure, some quests do open up special dungeons, but there's just not enough variety or enjoyment from them. Weapon levels.
They are tied TO EACH PARTICULAR WEAPON, not to the type of weapon. And if you unequip a weapon IT LOSES ALL OF ITS LEVELS, meaning, all of your skills. Super annoying Party members don't interact with each other and are largely disposable.
There's no real bonding with the protagonist and the player either. It's just too cryptic and you'll most likely have to use a guide for absolutely everything, even understanding the battle system.
Really, the only positive thing is the music composed by gaming god Kenji Ito. I really wanted to love this game, but it's just so primitive. They wanted to do so much with it and they kind of did, it must have been a blast to play at the time, but this game has been overdone by many other jrpgs and even its remake. I can't really recommend it, not even to fans of SaGa. I wanted to love this game, too, but I just couldn't, it's terribly flawed:'(. I'm not one to speed-up battles when emulating, but I had to do it unfortunately.
I like to speed-up my battles for some level grinding when playing rpg's. But Romancing Saga makes it REALLY difficult since you're constantly interrupted by the need to move your characters forward. It's also infuriating when enemies cast certain spells that change the default option on your next move to 'defend'. Minutes into a battle I realize that I haven't been attacking. Or when I use a spell in one battle and then forget to change the default attack on the subsequent fights, making me use up all my specials when speeding through fights. That was a deal-breaker for me and I gave up.
The game really lacked FF's intuitiveness. I'm curious to see whether RS 2 or 3 tidy up the controls.
Edit: clarification. All those examples are terrible examples. Chrono trigger was a fan game, so it's the least useful to shut down, but square are still using the chrono ip so they want to protect it. The type zero translation was shut down because square were releasing their own version and had asked the debs to stop, all. It 1 agreed to it too.
Dragon Quest VII is the same, square are still using the dragon quest IP to make money, they're releasing dragon quest heroes in like a month or 2. If it sells well it'll help with any potential official translation for dragon quest VII. Mother is a dead IP, a fan translation that was released years ago, when Nintendo had no plans to release the game themselves, or cared about protecting a dead IP. The only reason they revived the IP for a port is because people requested it and feedback for the fan translation was widespread and clear it was popular, so Nintendo wanted to cash in on that. A company is a bit dickish when they protect a dead IP, but protecting an existing IP they're still trying to make money from, it's common sense they'd want to protect it. What if a fan translation is shitty, people will say X game was done badly, and you'll get some people who just end up associating bad quality with that games name, irregardless of whether it's a fan translation or not, thus potentially hurting sales.
As a developer myself I'd probably do the exact same thing if I was still using the IP, it's just normal business.