Romancing SaGa 3 (abbreviated as RS3 from now
on) is an RPG game released by Square Corp. Ltd. of Japan
in around 1995. It is released for the Super Famicom in
Japan (a Japanese version of Super Nintendo of USA). It
uses a 32Mb cartridge. It is one of the more popular RPG
series in Japan, with RS1 and RS2 made before it. The
SaGa Frontier series in PSX are considered sequels to the
RS series. Until the SaGa Frontier series, none of the
game in the RS series has been released in English.
Of course I personally consider it as very good,
or I won’t spend so much time trying to translate
it. In my opinion, it’s one of the big 6 RPG games
for SNES. (For those who are curious, they are RS3, SD3,
FF3, TOP, DQ6, and CT). But people may have different
opinions. Anyway, I particularly like the battle music of
this game. And I think this game is much more challenging
than the others, too.
The most well known feature of the RS series is the free-scenario system. This means one can do a lot of different things, make different decisions and do things in any order (of course there are some limitations to the last part). Amateur RPG gamers may find this annoying at first because he or she will not know what to do next or what is the best way to finish certain tasks for a while. And because one can complete certain things in several different ways, one may never see all the dialogues or scenarios existing in the cart.
There are 8 different main characters that you can choose to play. Each one has his/her unique quests and story. I would say the replay value is quite high.
Also, the level up system is also quite
unique. "Chance" and "luck" play a
part in level up, so it is much harder to level up
(unlike FF3, in which anyone can level up to level 99 by
just taking an extra 10 to 20 hours of
"training").
That’s actually a tough question. If you
skip everything just to complete the main quest, you may
only take about 30 to 40 hours. If you want to get 999HP
for all characters, learn every tech etc, I would say
that even 80 hours are not enough. You will know what I
mean when you play it, or see the other parts of this FAQ
for more details.
Since it is an old Japanese game it may be hard to find. You may have to try some Internet sites or Ebay in order to get a cartridge. I buy it from Ebay myself for $50 (yeah, it’s expensive, but some nasty guys out there bid the price up) with box and manual.
Don’t ask me for roms and such.
You can find those lying around in the Internet, though
you should know that keeping the rom without having the
cartridge is illegal.
Do
some research on the RPGd, Whirlpool etc. I'm
too lazy to write detail about this.