Seiken Densetsu 3

Available on - SNES
Score between 7 and 10 - 8(Good)by todays standards and 9(great)for when it was released
You may like Seiken Densetsu 3 if you like - Secret of Mana or any of the other Mana titles. You may also like it if you like old school RPGs or Action based RPGs such as Dark Cloud 2 or Secret of Evermore.

About the game - Seiken 3 lets you chose a party of three out of six possible characters at the beginning of the game and then puts you on a quest where fate leads the three to both complete their own personal quests, but also to defend the world as a whole from a great evil. Outside getting to pick your party, it really is a pretty common and typical quest for an old school RPG. Each character has their own reason such as a lost loved one, a humiliation at the hands of the enemy or a exile from their kingdom to journey from home and by chance save the world. Seiken 3 was one of the rare RPGs back in the SNES days that had the gusto to go action vs turn based. The combat lets you freely move around, swing your sword and cast spells in real time(minus a brief pause when a spell goes off). The Seiken games were not only among the first action RPGs, but also one of the first to allow you to power up your attacks over time for larger more deadly special attacks. In Seiken 2 this was by holding down your attack button to charge up, but in Seiken 3 they instead took the route of every time you successfully strike an enemy your bar builds up till you can unleash bigger attacks. Early in the game its a basic flip or flourish with your weapon that does a bit more damage, but as the game goes on you will unlock two more attacks with larger charges that do crazy things like pause time as your character spazzes out and does damage to one enemy...and then eventually to every enemy on the whole screen!


Pros
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Great Music -While not as stunning as Squares top efforts on the SNES such as the first Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger, Square still shows with Seiken 3 they know how to rock some old school tunes.

Multiple characters to play as - As I mentioned in my opening there are six total characters to play as and each game is made up of three characters. This means to experience all six characters you will have to play through at least twice. Playing through twice should not be a problem though thanks to the fact that each character has unique abilities that help to keep things interesting! Angela is your typical mage focusing on attack magic, while Carlie focuses largely on healing magic and buffs. Duran, Kevin and Hawk are your melee characters and play somewhat similar to each other, but each has a unique twist. Duran is your most basic and vanilla character, but later gets the ability to either cast elemental blades and has devastating attacks or he gains the ability to cast healing spells and equip shields. Kevin is a beast man who attacks twice in one go and at night changes into larger wolf man that does more damage with each attack. Hawk meanwhile is more like a typical thief where his attack and defense might not be the best, but his agility and luck are higher and he can learn elemental jutsus and debuffs. Finally, Lise fights pretty close to the boys, but gets summons and either buffs or status attacks.

Multiple paths of growth - You might have noticed above I was making a lot of this or that statements, the reason for this is because twice in the game your character is going to change their class which drastically effects their ability depending on if they go light or dark path. Since you have two choices this means not counting the characters starting class each character has a total of six different classes they can be! This allows a lot of customization in your party, you could play through the game with the exact same party two games in a row but end up playing different games! Using Angela as an example on path gives her tons of elemental spells with uber power, another they are not as powerful but you can double cast them, another she is not as powerful but is extremely mana efficient and a final option makes it so she can target all enemies at once!

Great replay value - I am sure I do not need to go into great depth here and anyone reading the review can understand where six characters with six different classes offers up a ton of replay value.

Solid story - While the story may not compare to games like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI it is still impressive given the fact that your party is not the same every play through! Little differences in each play through make the story a lot more enjoyable too.

Epic Bosses - Many of the bosses are either huge taking up a lot of the screen, or they are just designed very well and give a feel of actually being up against a great foe.

Class changing gives a minor change to your look - While the way the character is designed ultimately stays largely the same your characters color palettes do shift as you change. For example Kevin's hair turns blood red and his outfit turns darker down the evil path and Angela's hair turns blonde down the good path.

Humorous Translation - The US fan translation is not only a solid translation but it leaves in a lot of funny stuff that would normally have been taken out of a SNES game. Angela has moves that flash her ass as she blows kisses at the enemy, there is a joke with Durant about hiding his porn collection and at one point in the story when she is trapped in jail she gets out by tricking the guard into thinking he is getting lucky as she shows him her bare ass.

Cons
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Slow menu system - The games menu system is slow as hell, which makes no sense since this is a SNES game! Honestly there is a pause every time you try and shift between stats, equipment or other options.

Characters move far too slow when in battle - In most games where you can see enemies if you chose not to fight them you can simply run past them....but not Seiken 3! Nope, in Seiken 3 they keep their weapons held up and slowly shuffle their feet anytime there is an enemy on screen. This essentially means its often faster and safer just to fight enemies then try and move past them! It might not be so bothersome, but Seiken has a lot of back tracking(which is another con!).

Chest drops are slow to spawn after you defeat enemies - In the mana series instead of enemies simply dropping items automatically as you kill them, they drop them in treasure chests. The problem is the treasure chests do not spawn instantly or even a slight second after defeating an enemy, instead the delay is long enough that I frequently found myself already moving onto the next screen by the time the enemy dropped their chest! The one nice thing about this though is that 98% of what enemies drop is junk, so it at least does not feel like a large loss.

Kevin's werewolf form should not require a transformation every new battle - You would think that when it turned night Kevin the beastman would turn into his werewolf form and stay it right? Well annoyingly that is not how it works! Instead whenever night time comes Kevin does not transform till he is near enemies, then he transforms...then has to re transform and detransforms with every new group of enemies. This would not be a huge issue if not for the fact that the transformation takes long enough that I can land two or three hits with my other charcters in the time it takes him to finish transforming...which kind of defeats the point of being a more powerful beastman!

Dumb A.I/You must order the characters you are not controlling to cast spells - In most games where you have no control over your partners such as in the Tales series you can set their A.I to perform in numerous ways. Seiken 3 though limits you to chosing to attack the closest enemy to you, furthest or attacking with/separate then the other characters! The worst part about this though is that your partners will not even cast magic spells less you essentially force them to through the menu system. This makes characters like Angela and Carlie that are casters either useless or time consuming when fighting non boss monsters, since you are faced with either having to just rely on their craptastic melee damage, or constantly going into the menu and telling them to cast spells! The addition of an A.I system letting you program them to cast or not cast at given moments would have increased my enjoyment of this game dramatically.

Some bosses tend to stay unreachable to melee characters through much of the fight - A lot of bosses fly, hover or hide in ways that make it so that casters may be able to keep blasting away at them, but your physical fighters are essentially useless.

It is not always clear where to go or what to do - Seiken 3 can be downright frustrating at times thanks to the fact that the story does not always make it clear where to go, or it does but the environment does not! A good example would be early in the game where you know you need to find the wind crystal, but the crystal is blocked...so you just have to wander around lost till you find a random field of flowers where an event happens telling you where to go next. Another good example is shortly after that there is a point where the story makes it clear you are supposed to find this cave....but not that to find the cave you must search this one tiny little rock and chose to cast a spell on it to open the hidden cave! There are just far too many moments where I found myself frustrated over unclear progression points like this, and making matters worse is that as I said its not easy to run past enemies so you must continue fighting constantly while trying to figure out where to go!

Closing Comments - Secret of Mana was one of my favorite games as a kid, so when I found out that fans had translated Seiken 3 I was thrilled! Since then I have played Seiken Densetsu 3 at least a good dozen or more times, which speaks volumes both for how well it holds up and to how great of a game it must have been back in the day. The class system offers up a ton of options and it is just a blast to explore each and every possible class, character and story change with each replay! That said though, the more I play Seiken 3 the more I feel it just does not live up to Secret of Mana(again Seiken 2). While Seiken 3 is still an awesome game, it just seems to fall short of Seiken 2 in every area. The class system does not offer the game play depth of the weapon system from 2, the ring system from 2 beats the menu system of 3 for accessibility, the story of 2 felt like it was more thought out, 3 has more bugs and issues...and in general is just not as much fun! At the end of the day though if you can not tell from my score for Seiken 3 and general comments through out the review I still think its an amazing game, just an amazing game that falls short of reaching its little brothers Godly status ;)