Seiken Densetsu 3: Tricks of nostalgia

Seiken Densetsu 3. That game single-handedly encompasses the woes of non-localization. Its name alone evokes years of hope and frustration mingled, crowned by the most stinging disappointment and followed by an unexpected wave of relief. Is there any RPG that was more coveted, awaited and revered in advance in the West than the sequel to the immensely popular Secret of Mana? Seiken 3, or Secret of Mana 2 as some chose to call it, followed a very sinuous path indeed to reach our shores—probably more so than any other game of that localization-unfriendly era. 

Oh what an epopee

The story is stuff of legend and should sound familiar to most RPG aficionados: in 1995, Square released the sequel to Seiken Densetsu 2 for the Super Famicom. Aptly titled Seiken Densetsu 3, it refined the Seiken formula by introducing a batch of juicy innovations and was highly praised by gamers and critics alike. The West started awaiting a localization in eager anticipation: Seiken 2, localized a few years prior under the now legendary name Secret of Mana, had been a smashing success and had become one of the most-beloved RPGs of the decade in North-America and—even more so—in Europe. The game was expected to reach us a few months after its Japanese release; but to the dismay of all Western RPG aficionados, the months turned to years without any trace of the coveted Seiken 3 on the localization horizon. Square was being cagey and evasive about the matter, and after a couple of years, as the 32-bits systems were soaring in the gaming skies, it became blatantly and painfully obvious that Seiken 3 would never come to the West. 
 

It would never come through the official canals, that is. As the hope of seeing a Square-approved localization of Seiken 3 plummeted over the years, some dedicated teams of RPG aficionados started working diligently on home-made translations of Seiken 3. This was in the late 90’s, and the timing was perfectly ripe: the golden age of emulation had just started, allowing North-America and—even more so— Europe to catch up with Japan and play all these games that had infuriatingly avoided our shores during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. The first translation of Seiken 3 was made available on the budding emulation scene in 2000 and was welcomed with open arms and intense effusions of joy. The mere fact that this game was finally reaching us after so many years was nearly a miracle in itself, and Seiken 3 was celebrated, praised and instantly elevated to a cult classic status.

Indeed, Seiken 3 is quite a unique case in the history of gaming: this is a game that managed to avoid critique entirely due to the very special circumstances surrounding its arrival to our shores. When Seiken 3 first reached us through emulation, it was seen as the prodigal game, coming to our arms at last after so many years of anxious biding, and most of us were so overjoyed that we didn’t even think of having our critical eye opened when playing the game. We simply wanted to rejoice in the fact that we could play it at long last, and savour every single one of its hard-earned and well-deserved pixels. Then, as years went by, retro gaming made its grand entrance: the gamers who had been so prompt to ditch the 16-bit systems in their teens were suddenly looking back on that era with a wistful eye and using emulation to indulge in these brand-new bouts of nostalgia. The 16-bit era was soon hailed as the golden era of J-RPG, and Seiken 3 was lumped with other great games of the time and found shelter under the nostalgia umbrella, despite the fact that it was technically not played during the 16-bit era and discovered only later. 

I was smitten just as everyone else when I first discovered Seiken 3 in the mid-2000s. I was in a retro gaming frenzy and craving 16-bit RPGs back then, and this was just the most perfect treat ever. I cleared countless runs and spent hours experimenting with characters and trying to design the perfect party. I gazed in awe at the beautiful graphics and listened to the soundtrack just for sheer aural pleasure. Seiken 3 was granted a very high rank in my RPG hall of fame, and I saw it as totally perfect and devoid of any flaw.

But that was before—that is, before I cleared a run of Seiken 3 a couple of days ago, after four years spent without playing it, and finally saw the light. This game does have flaws after all, and very blatant ones at that. It may well be a cult classic, but it’s a vastly overrated one that doesn’t quite deserve the starry-eyed admiration that it elicited since it came to our shores—including from yours truly. Seiken 3 is not the ultimate incarnation of RPG perfection, but rather a very good RPG that has its fair share of flaws—just like any other RPG under the gaming sun. And now that I broke free from that game’s spell, I want to analyze it while keeping my critical eye open —instead of closing it to luxuriate in nostalgia as I did before. 

That undeniable brilliance

If I want to be critical, I have to be fair while doing so, and give Seiken 3 the praise that it rightfully deserves. Let’s start with the most blatant qualities: this game’s production values are sky-high, and simply the best that can be found in the 16-bit era. Seiken 3 is undeniably the most beautiful SNES RPG ever created, with gorgeous graphics, vibrant colours and incredibly detailed character models. And let’s not even mention the stellar Hiroki Kikuta soundtrack, with its dozens of tracks borrowing liberally from the whole musical spectrum and mixing boldly martial music and lounge jazz. Gee, what an ear candy! And of course, it also has the Mana charm in spades: that very special, unique and unmistakable atmosphere that no RPG series ever managed to emulate. It’s hard to describe in words, but it can be identified at a glance. The Mana charm is one of Square’s most brilliant creations and they certainly infused massive amounts of it into Seiken 3, to enchanting results. 

Visual and aural beauty is all well and good, but Action-RPGs live and die by their fighting systems. And once again, Seiken 3 hits the mark with gusto: its fighting system is quite excellent, blending elemental complementarities, tons of cleverly designed battle items and special attacks en masse. It is all the more brilliant as it manages to implement with great success the two trickiest features to implement in Action-RPGs: Magic and Allies, ladies and gentlemen. The magic system is a treat to use, with its gorgeous animations and its variable range allowing you to target either one or several enemies. As for the allies, not only can they take care of themselves and avoid getting killed, but they are also a real help in all fights, which is an occurrence so rare that it should be celebrated profusely. But the ally goodness does not stop here, for the game also allows you to switch between your characters at will. This is both incredibly useful and pleasurable, since it gives you the possibility to micromanage your team on the fly as well as the opportunity to indulge in different fighting styles. 

Character combination and progression is another feature that’s incredibly well-handled. It’s probably hardly a secret anymore that Seiken 3 lets you choose between no less than six characters, each one boasting their own personality and backstory. The paths of these six interconnect through the game in a wonderfully well-crafted way: the lucky ones belonging to your party will play a major part in events, and the three others will be featured in various cameos throughout the story. Square didn’t push the envelope as far as creating six distinct storylines for all six heroes, though: the characters somehow go by pairs, each pair sharing a similar unfolding of events and ending as well as a special bond that will lead to a lot of chatting together if they end up in the same party with one of them being the leader. (Incidentally, here are the pairs: Duran/Angela, Riesz/Hawk and Kevin/Charlotte.) But the combination galore does not stop here: Seiken 3 extends it to the progression system by giving you access to a staggering array of character classes that can be combined at will, allowing you to create the tailor-made party of your dreams. As you may imagine, each class has its own set of abilities as well as a general focus, ranging from pure damage dealers to healers, without forgetting the good ol’ buffers and debuffers. This is all fairly classic RPG fare, granted, but it remains efficient and pleasurable nonetheless, especially since Square went to great lengths to make all classes distinct and unique by allotting exclusive attacks and magic spells to each one. This gives the game an enormous replay value: no matter how many times you play it, you will always get a slightly—or radically—different experience thanks to that delicious plethora of character and class combinations.  

Last but not least is the game structure, which is quite unusual. Seiken 3 starts off in a fairly classic way, with the narrative gently pushing you from place to place in a display of linearity typical of the 16-bit era. The way is always clear and straightforward, there is a bit of backtracking here and there for good measure and the game slowly expands your horizons by granting you various travel means, first through the oceans and later through the airs. Typical 16-bit fare, indeed. But then, something weird happens: around the halfway mark, the narrative takes a huge step back and the game unexpectedly morphs into a pure dungeon-crawler. You’re presented with eight dungeons packed with enemies to scour and cleanse from the boss lurking in their depths, and the order in which you tackle them is left to your discretion. This a major rupture in the game and a very bold move: altering the pace and general feel of the game so dramatically after the first half was definitely a risky endeavour that could have alienated many a player—and probably did so to some extent. However, in an RPG landscape where blueprints and tropes are shamelessly reused until they’re torn and tattered, any variation is more than welcome, and kudos must be handed to Square for taking chances and experimenting with Seiken 3.  

Indeed, Seiken 3 is a massive experimental feast at its core. It’s pretty obvious that Square were bent on trying new things with that game: they introduced original features by the truckload and pushed the envelope as far as they could—or dared. On top of the features that I just mentioned, there is also the real-time day/night cycle, the weekly calendar that reinforces or weakens your elemental magic abilities, the presence of a whole range of items designed for buffing, debuffing and increasing your elemental strengths, and so on. And while most of these features are smoothly implemented and work like a charm, a couple of them come dangerously close to being epic failures. Let’s dwell on them now.

Seiken 3—exposed

As I mentioned earlier, the huge majority of Seiken 3 reviews are starry-eyed eulogies devoid of the slightest mention of a flaw—suspension of criticism is strong with this game, indeed. And yet, this game does have flaws, and very blatant ones at that: they may have been glossed over by Seiken aficionados, but they are here nonetheless. Square did indeed push the envelope a trifle too far in some departments, resulting in some cringing results. 

One minor yet annoying failure is the class change system. You can change your characters’ class twice throughout the game, respectively at the Lv.18 and Lv.38 mark. While the first class change at Lv.18 is easy to trigger and only require a small prayer in front of one of the Mana Stones littered through the game world, the second one is a whole trickier affair entirely. Not only is the prayer segment still mandatory, but the characters must also possess a special item in order to trigger the class change. This is already annoying enough, and becomes ten times more so when one discovers that the coveted item can only be dropped by a certain species of monsters present only in a single place in the game world. To add insult to injury, the drop rate of this special item is not quite 100% AND every class that can be accessed at the Lv. 38 mark has its own special triggering item, which forces you to kill heaps of monsters until you get the items you need to create the party of your dreams. As though all this annoyance were not enough, the game squeezes an extra step in the process: the monsters I just mentioned don’t actually drop the triggering item itself, but rather a seed that you need to plant in a special pot located in an inn. The item will pop up from the seed, and only then will you see if it is the one you need or not. If not, you guessed it—it’s back to the killing. This process is unnecessarily long and complicated and makes this second class change a complete chore instead of the celebratory moment that it should rightfully be. It sure is an original way to change classes, but it’s a trifle too original for its own good—and for the player’s own. This also leads me to wonder how much information about the different classes and their respective abilities was included in the Japanese booklet. The game itself doesn’t contain any kind of relevant information about the second class change process, let alone the attributes of each class, and I can only hope that the Japanese manual was comprehensive in that regard and didn’t let players fumble in the dark and figure out by themselves how to trigger the second class change, nor forced them to create their parties at random by withholding information about the different classes. This is all the more crucial as some party combinations can make the game much harder and put you in a serious bind. As you may have guessed already, I’m speaking from experience here. During my very first run, I chose my characters’ classes at random and, unbeknownst to me, created a monster: a party totally devoid of Healer. The consequences were stinging: I ended up being totally stuck in the latter stages of the game, dying over and over at the hands of a boss that I couldn’t beat because I always ran out of healing items before the end of the fight. Talk about frustration!

This incidentally leads us to the second minor failure, which is the way the leveling-up process is handled. Like many RPGs of the 8-bit and 16-bit era, Seiken 3 regularly and dutifully throws difficulty spikes at you. They usually take the form of a super-strong boss that will wipe out your party in thirty seconds, and as you’d expect, they can only be overcome by resorting to good ol’ level-grinding. This is all nice and fine traditional RPG fare, and I have absolutely no complaints about that. What I do complain about, however, is the fact that the leveling-up is constrained between arbitrary boundaries set by the game—namely the second class change, which can only be performed at a precise point in the storyline as I explained above. In other words, you have to level-grind like in any old-school 8-bit RPG, but you can’t do it to your heart’s content because the game decided to wallow in that irritating linearity so typical of the 16-bit era. Talk about getting the worst of two worlds! The most annoying part is that these limitations are not exactly obvious at first sight, which can lead one to discover them the hard way. You guessed it: once again, this happened to me back in the days. During one of my many runs of Seiken 3, I engaged into a crazy grinding marathon early in the game in order to reach that coveted Lv.38, totally convinced that the mandatory items for the second class change would start being dropped by monsters as soon as my party was ripe for evolution. Alas, this was not the case, and I had to face the crushing disappointment of having grinded to no avail, which I was not exactly pleased with. 

It’s now time to expose the biggest flaw of them all, the one that comes dangerously close to being a full-blown deal-breaker: and the mighty flaw, ladies and gentlemen, is the physics. More precisely, the fighting physics. Now, that may seem like a contradiction: didn’t I write earlier that the fighting system was brilliant? Well, I maintain that: the fighting system as a cohesive ensemble of mechanics is brilliant, clever and well-designed, but has the misfortune of being hampered by the lacklustre physics. And when I say “hampered”, I mean it quite literally, which leads us to Seiken 3’s first major failure in physics: for some unfathomable reason, Square decided to slow down the walking speed of the characters dramatically as soon as they encounter enemies on the field. This is irritating and clunky at best, and can lead your party to take unnecessary damage at worst. But there is much, much worse. In their hubris, Square decided to push the envelope as far as they could and to introduce a modicum of strategy in their fighting system by tinkering with the physics. This was a risky move if there ever was one: Action-RPGs are not exactly conducive to deep strategies to start with, and their physics can only tolerate so much alteration for the sake of strategy before the whole fighting system loses it edge and becomes cumbersome. Most Action-RPGs carefully introduce the strategy element by allotting different ranges to available weapons; and while this usually works well, it also systematically creates an imbalance between weapons, with some being more comfortable to use than others and thus preferred. Despite such warning signs, Square though they could go higher than every other developer without burning their wings, them fools, and decided to shoehorn strategy in their fighting system by tinkering not only with the weapon range, but also with the accuracy, the speed and the strength of the characters. Let’s see how this apocalyptic combo unfolds:

—The weapon range: Since there is neither bow nor hook in Seiken 3, all characters have a fairly close range when fighting with weapons, which forces you to be always quite close to the enemy—at the risk of getting chain-hit. However, this fairly close range boasts some subtle variations: Riesz has the longest range with her spears, while Hawk and Kevin have the shortest with their close-combat techniques. As for Duran, Angela and Charlotte, they hover around an uncomfortably imprecise middle range zone and are the most prone to missing hits due to bad positioning. And since I’m mentioning missed hits…

—The accuracy: Even delivered from the pitch-perfect distance, your characters’ blows can miss their mark for no good reason—except if you count the game’s caprices as a good reason. I already dislike the very concept of missed hits in Turn-based RPGs, but I loathe it with a passion in Action-RPGs. This is bound to steal away a good chunk of the fun that one rightfully expects from a real-time fighting system, and it’s an infuriating fixture in the Seiken series that should have been eradicated before it was even born. As you may expect, accuracy is not equally dispatched between characters: once again, Hawk, Riesz and Kevin get the best part of the cake, while the other three have to trudge through fights while suffering the loss of a good portion of their blows.    

—The speed: Characters are blessed—or cursed—with various speeds in the blow-delivering department. They range from the quicksilver reflexes of Hawk and Kevin, which allow them to deliver two hits in rapid succession, to the snail pace of Angela and Duran, who have to wait a good one or two second between each blow.

—The strength: Last but not least, characters are not equal when it comes to brute force, which makes the efficiency of their blows vary greatly. While Riesz, Kevin and Duran can pretty much wipe foes in two neat swings of their respective weapons, Hawk has to sweat at trifle more, while Charlotte and Angela have to deliver a million hits before enemies have the grace to die at their hands. 

At this point, a picture of major character imbalance should have emerged. Kevin and Hawk are clearly the most gifted of the bunch and definitely the more pleasant to fight with, while Charlotte and Angela are the absolute worst and can make all things fighting an absolute misery. Riesz and Duran lounge somewhere in the middle: they are not exactly a treat to use, but they can get the job done without too much hassle. This drastic imbalance is blatant and undeniable: you only need to pick up characters and play with them a couple of seconds to spot the very obvious differences between them. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s also a resounding failure. The intention was good, granted, but the execution was way too zealous and resulted in the creation of dramatically unbalanced characters with exacerbated flaws and qualities. The whole fighting system is altered and tainted by this endeavour, which would not have been the case if Square had tinkered a trifle less and made the Seiken 3 roster more carefully balanced. Of course, it could be argued that characters like Angela and Charlotte act as a hard mode of sorts for the game; however, such an approach is still vastly unsatisfying. This is nothing less than a classic case of fake difficulty due to technical problems: a game should be made difficult by virtue of all the compelling challenges it has in store for the player—insane boss fights, cut-throat dungeons and the like—not because of semi-broken physics that the said player must struggle to master. 

Strangely enough, I can’t remember the physics being a hindrance when I played Seiken 3 in the mid-2000s. On the contrary, I thought they were brilliant, to the point of praising them in my post about Sword of Mana. (For the record, I was so mortified by my misjudgment that I actually edited that post and excised the offending sentence.) However, there may be a very good reason for my incorrect assessment of Seiken 3’s physics: back in the days, I only played with Hawk, Riesz or Kevin, who are blessed with physics ranging from good to excellent and provided me with a lot of fun in all things fighting. On the other hand, I selected Angela for my recent run, which allowed me to witness the full extent of the physics’ misery. Fighting with Angela in close combat was actually so unbearable that I resorted to switching to Hawk as soon as combat kicked in, using Angela only to cast spells during boss fights.  

After rediscovering and reassessing Seiken 3, I’m not quite sure anymore that this game qualifies as a true cult classic. The circumstances of its arrival on our shores certainly elevated it to such a rank, but it’s a trifle too flawed to be a cult classic by sheer virtue of its actual content. I would rather describe Seiken 3 as vintage: this is a game that firmly encapsulates the spirit of a gaming era, a developer and a series, and it does so in a most charming and beguiling way. It has the graphical zest of the 16-bit era, all bright colours and soft shapes, as well as the kind of whimsical fantasy universe that was so popular in RPG-dom during that time. It also fully embodies Square’s constant hunger for experimentation and their desire to push boundaries, which was at its peak in the ’90. The results were not always inspired, as Seiken 3 proves it, but they were trying their hardest, and kudos must be handed to them for that. Last but not least, Seiken 3 is a dazzling piece of Mana charm, an exquisite treat for all aficionados of the series. I’m definitely one of them, and I still love Seiken 3; but I now love it in a wiser and more balanced way, and I’m able to acknowledge its flaws instead of putting it on a pedestal and gazing at it with eyes full of stars. It may not be a cult classic after all, but it’s definitely a vintage game, and an excellent one at that. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!