Outside of the eight starting choices, there’s a rogue’s gallery of over twenty optional party members to find and recruit, and the overwhelming majority of them are woefully underdeveloped and, therefore, far too uninteresting. This lack of development is especially felt in the characters.

The Rat Mischief boss is arguably one of the more interesting, at least design-wise. A few cursory text boxes serve to introduce the conflict as well as conclude it, and that’s it a reward might be gained, a party member might join up, but other than that the episode is never referred to again, and is of little to (usually) no consequence to the main quest or world in general. There is no intriguing web of interactions to build up lore and backstory a situation is encountered (often by accident) and dealt with, generally by defeating some monsters in a certain location. Unfortunately, the side quests aren’t very fulfilling, and often far too brief and underdeveloped. There is, of course, an ultimate goal consisting of standard “stop the bad guy and save the world” JRPG trappings, but over the course of most of the adventure, this is largely pushed aside unless the player decides to abandon the current course and steer toward the endgame. Occasionally, this will result in stumbling upon one of numerous side quests, often triggered by talking to the right person or being in the right location. There are towns to visit, caves and dungeons to explore, and people to meet. Instead, after a fairly brief linear intro chapter that varies by character, the world opens up to explore as the player sees fit. One should not expect a complicated and intriguing narrative from a SaGa game being able to choose from eight starting characters, each with unique story elements, might sound like there’s some deep connective tissue to delve into, but that’s never been the case in this series. For all others, however, this game is a plunge which shouldn’t be taken lightly, particularly since this remaster marks the first time it’s been available outside of Japan, expanding its audience. The game features the same open-world, non-linear storytelling and free-form character progression as its predecessors, which is good news for series veterans. This was the best summation of Romancing SaGa 3 that I could find, given as advice to a SaGa series newcomer.

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