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Game, set, and match.

This was a doozy. The extra levels and access to Gaze defense certainly helped me out with Byunei, but I ended up having to sacrifice one of my Vivacity Staffs to save my party towards the end, cause it seems like she gets a boost to all of her attacks after her HP is nearly depleted. In fact, every boss in this dungeon seems to do that, but its never telegraphed to you, you start noticing attacks OHKO people. On the brightside, I managed to spark a new sword tech with Khalid and I got the Greatsword one back as well, though I only managed to master the sword one. She was easily the toughest fight of this bunch, and I would argue she ended up being the hardest boss in the final area overall with some stiff competition.

Forneus, who turns out is a sexy Greek god in his true form, was far more manageable than the other bosses. Switching to the defensive formation really helped because he likes physical attacks more than magic. The real fun part was deciding I wasn't going to bother switching the elemental field with him cause it was too much of a pain in the ass and lo and behold, I managed to do by accident anyway.

With those two out of the way, it was time to face the final boss, but RS3 had one more below the belt punch waiting for me. After spending so much time leveling up the Boy, the game removed him from my party for story reasons, meaning I got stuck using Robin of whom I had benched for quite awhile. This caused me to have to rearrange a few things and dropped a second magic healer from my team since only Earth, Water, and Lunar have healing spells. I now kind of regretted using that fourth Vivacity Staff I had. The final boss... is weird. Not that this isn't new for the series in general. Thank god I defeated the Four Sinistral first otherwise I wouldn't have stood a chance. The boss pulls a Xenogears, or more correctly Xenogears does a RS3, and they boss is powered up if you don't tackle the other Sinistrals, gaining more HP and their signature attacks. This leaves me with just three phases. The Light Phase is annoying cause the boss takes half damage from everything, and while most of its attacks are not threatening, they can easily wear you down if you're not careful. This is important cause just before it goes to Dark Phase, it gives you a taste of its true power and can knock out a few weaker characters in a round, before it gets two more turns to pull off its phase shift. Dark Phase is a bigger pain in the ass with more group hitting attacks, harder hitting single attacks, and instant death attack, and a move that makes a character accidentally attack their comrades instead. On the brightside, he takes full damage, on the downside, your party takes area damage during this shift making all of those attacks I mentioned above and easy means of getting killed quickly. In act, dying to this boss pulls a Lavos and you get a special ending where the bad guy wins.

He annihilated me about twice and then I reformed the team a bit. The big issue is that I'm not sure if the boss shares HP or not between its phases. Which came as a shock when it went back to its previous phase. I had to use the Genbu Formation for its Regen effect as well as sacrificing all of my Vivacity Staffs (for those wondering, SaGa traditionally never has group healing magic, the staff has one as its ability but it sacrifices the staff when you use it) and was down to almost no SP when Mikhail managed to land the killing blow. You have no idea how relieved I was cause I was really not prepared for this endgame.

The ending is pretty interesting, especially since it shares some elements of the bad ending. Ellen's personal ending was kind of boring, but to be fair, Ellen is probably the most down to earth character from the initial lead selection. She's just a tomboy from some back wood village, and unlike Justian she has no desire to get mixed up with royals, and her sister ended up being more important to the plot than was first thought. In fact, that may be one of the bigger criticisms with RS3. It has a similar issue from RS1 where your chosen lead doesn't matter after the intro. Until we sealed the fourth Abyss Gate, Ellen honestly had no stake in anything in the game. I don't even really know why she bothered to face off against the Sinistrals in the first place other than she was a traveling mercenary who took some odd jobs towards it. Granted, we the player are meant to fill in the blanks, and I did so, so I'm not that annoyed, but for a game that does a lot more for characterization, it was a bit disappointing it still ultimately fell into the same trappings as RS1.

Until the very end, I really enjoyed this game overall. I really wish I had not jumped the gun and went into the final area unprepared, because the last two nights have been frustrating and stressful, and while I want to blame the game, it technically gave me fair warning. So I have no one to blame but myself. Still, I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth which is a shame cause I was having a blast before that. I imagine a second playthrough will be much nicer. I still wish I could have figured out how to do fusion spells and combo attacks cause the ending exhibition made them look super cool and useful. I'm not surprised the game made them harder to implement seeing how utterly broken fusion magic is in RS2. So let's do a breakdown:

  • Favorite Weapon Techs: Axes and Greatswords
  • Most useful tech: Focus (I can never remember the long winded new translation name)
  • Least favorite Weapon: Rapiers as usual.
  • Weapon I wish I mastered more: Bows and Fists.
  • Best magic: Earth and Fire
  • Magic I wish I used more: Solar and Lunar
  • Favorite characters: Ellen, Robin, Boston, Mikhail, and the pushy old lady from the Far East
  • Least favorite: Muse and the Minstrel since he cost me a few quests.
  • Favorite boss fight: Byunei/Gwayne fight, and the Hot Rod battles
  • Least Favorite Boss Fights: Yama, True Byunei, and the Final Boss
  • Favorite story arc: The Warring mage village, anything with the Professor, Vanguard, Muse's Nightmare.
  • Least Favorite: Finding the East, Forneus' Dungeon, and screwing myself over with a few quest cause I had a full party.
  • Best soundtrack of the 16-bit entries? Yep
  • War Battles? They were fun if a bit tricky.
  • NG+ Lead: Either Mikhail, Theodore, or Katrina.


I'm happy that I got a chance to play this entry. I still prefer RS2, but this game is a strong contender in its own right. Now I only need to play SaGa 3 (FFL3), SaGa Frontier 1, Unlimited SaGa, SaGa Scarlet Graces. Of course I only own one of those four right now (Unlimited) but I'll definitely invest in the others when the time comes. It will be interesting to see what the new mobile title is going to be like considering its a distant sequel to this entry.