The Pureland water entity appeared and flooded the world's present, past, and future. The water brought monsters, which hunted people day and night. Cities fell one by one, covered by the sea. However, a few individuals prepare for a journey that may determine the fate of the world.
Final Fantasy Legend III (SaGa 3: Jikuu no Hasha note ) is the third game in the Final Fantasy Legend series...as well as the Saga RPG series. While it's actually a SaGa game, the first three games in that series were rechristened as games in the appendix-burstingly popular "Final Fantasy" series for marketing purposes.
An enhanced remake for the Nintendo DS was released in 2011, titled SaGa 3: Jikuu no Hasha: Shadow or Light. As with the remake of SaGa 2, the chances of an official U.S. English release are slim to none due to the poor sales of other games in the series.
This game provides examples of:
- 11th-Hour Superpower: Borgin joins your party just in time to assault Mount Xagor, although he's pretty much a support character in the final battle.
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The Talon crew members act as shops, and charge you for their items despite being along on your mission to save the world.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: As was common for obscure Game Boy games.
- "I TRUST YOU."
- Likely due to space constraints, the word "The" is omitted frequently. So as a result, it sounds like they're talking about objects and locations as if they're actually people. They especially do this with the Talon. That makes sense towards the end of the game, when the male lead finds out his dad's brain was installed inside it.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: Lara is in this state when you first meet her in Dogra's cave, growling instead of talking, and then attacking you. Like many examples, she comes around after a sound thrashing.
- Cool Ship: The Talon. With all of its modules installed, it can fly, shield you from random encounters or blast the encounters with laser cannons, completely heal you (as if staying at an inn) for free, revert monster/robot transformations, and travel through time.
- Crutch Character: The Fifth party member is typically much stronger than the main characters, unless you do a lot of Level Grinding. Myron fits this trope the best since he could solo the mini boss.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: Monster characters can work quite well for most of the game, but in the late game, their inability to use the Mystic Swords makes them ineffective against bosses. However, with high magic evasion, immunity to status effects, automatic regeneration, cheap mass healing, revival magic, and some help from the guest party member, a party of Firefans can take down everything up to the penultimate boss
. - Degraded Boss:
- The Waterhags. One of them is the first boss you ever meet, but later you encounter a village full of people transformed into them by a magical plague. By that point, they're easy to beat, but you can also use Morph magic to turn into a Waterhag and talk to them peacefully.
- Jorgandr. He's your first taste of a boss with high resistance to everything except Mystic Swords. Later, in the Underworld Cave, you can occasionally find copies of him in the wild, but by then you have access to a greater selection of effective magic.
- Developer's Foresight: The game has a jumping feature which is often used to jump over holes. However, if you go under platforms and hit jump, your character will jump into it and say "Ow!" while the screen shakes.
- You can also examine fireplaces (normally a background thing) and get a textbox saying "Ow!"
- Difficult, but Awesome: Robots at the start of the game. note They're much more useful in the late game when you have plenty of money to buy upgrades for them — and you can transform into a robot at any time, so there isn't really a need to go through the Difficult phase.
- Dub Name Change: Almost every named character in the game had a different name in the original Japanese version. Three of the four mains, for example, originally had gratuitous French names.
- Eldritch Location: The Pureland/Another Dimension appeared in all times simultaneously, and time does not exist inside. (Which is why the Talon's time traveling capabilities have no effect once it warps inside. There is still cause and effect, though, and inns work the same as always.)
- Floating Continent: Floatland can be seen flying past the Talon's palace, over and over again, until you use a rocket to travel there and search for units.
- From a Single Cell: Dr Quacer has a machine that can regenerate someone from just a tissue sample. It's used to revive Dion after Maitreya kills him, then both Dion and Jupiah in the ending sequence.
- Future Badass: Dion is a child when you start the game, but when you warp to the future, he's a powerful warrior.
- Game-Breaking Bug: This is perhaps the least glitchy out of the first three SaGa games — perhaps helped that it doesn't use a lot of complex mechanics such as the Stat Grinding systems of its predecessors.
- Guest-Star Party Member: Myron, Lara, Dion, Faye, and Borgin — although Borgin actually stays in your party throughout the end of the game, surprisingly!
- Heroic Sacrifice: Dion dies for your party twice! The first time isn't really an intentional sacrifice, he just gets separated and goes ahead, and you find him once the boss has taken him out. But the second time, he deliberately blows himself up to remove the impenetrable barrier around another boss.
- La Résistance: In the Future, humans have begun a resistance movement against the Masters of Pureland.
- Magikarp Power: Robots. They have the worst stat reductions of any race. However, when money becomes excessive, they can just buy their way straight into becoming killbots.
- Oddball in the Series:
- It's the only game in the series to utilize a conventional levelling system, and it does away with many of the unusual game mechanics that made the first two games unique (such as breakable weapons and the ability to carry more of them at the cost of being able to carry less other equipment). It also features a number of rather... weird things that never appeared in any of the other games — even by the standards of SaGa's typical medieval/techno settings — the least of which was a sentient time-traveling battleship.
- An oddball no longer; the Nintendo DS remake uses the same gameplay systems as the SaGa 2 remake.
- It's also one of the oddballs in the game boy trilogy for the fact that it's actually the least glitchy of the three. The first one has items that are worthless or overpowered because of glitches and oversights (including the famous "One-Hit Kill the final boss with the saw" trick), the second game still had its share of glitches, whereas the third game doesn't really have any that let you solo the game with one character or sequence-break and finish the game very fast.
- Ominous Message from the Future: Children are sent from the Bad Future to the Present to save the world.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: Sort of. At one point in Pureland, you meet "Dad" from Final Fantasy Legend II along with his wife and a son. However, the son in question is far too young to have been the Player Character. Presumably their absence is to avoid answering what their canon Gender and Race were.
- Point of No Return:
- Once you warp to Pureland, all of the Talon's units malfunction except for basic travel, preventing you from returning to the "real" world. (Technically you do return, but only as part of the ending cutscene.)
- The DS version averts this and allows you to return once you get the second Talon.
- Reset Button: You can retry any battle that you lose.
- Shout-Out: There are quite a few references to H.P. Lovecraft, most notably in the design of The Masters. The Virus turning the people of Muu into Waterhags is a reference to Lovecraft's "The Deep Ones". The original Japanese version also had a good number of Japanese pop-culture references, most of which were understandably changed for the North America release.
- The Slow Path: Once the team time travels to the future, they meet an older Myron and Dion, who have aged accordingly.
- Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: In the future, you can buy Laser Blade swords and submachine guns. These are quickly outclassed by X-Space equipment.
- Stable Time Loop: The Elder warns you that a long time ago, he met people looking for the Talon Units. Not long after, your party encounters the Elder in the past and...asks him about the Units. It's possible the Elder in the present does recognize your party as the people who asked about Talon Units, and simply does not tell them for fear of altering their actions in the past.
- Sword of Plot Advancement: Along with a few magic spells and the nuke, which only has one use, only the mystic swords can seriously damage the final boss. The Xcalibr, strongest of the mystic swords, is particularly notable, because you can't pass through the Underworld and reach the final boss without it.
- Too Many Mouths: Several of the bosses have extra mouths, with the most excessive example being Guha who's nothing but mouths.
- What the Hell, Player?: The game makes fun of you for touching a lit fireplace ("Ouch!"), or attempting to jump while standing under a low doorway.
- You Are Who You Eat: Party members transform into Beasts and Monsters by eating meat from defeated foes, although the form they take is rarely that of the creature whose meat they just devoured. Similarly, they can install parts from defeated Cyborgs and Robots.
The remake provides examples of:
- Adaptation Expansion: Sidequests with multiple endings for one thing.
- Aerith and Bob: The main party's default names: Dune, Milfy, Shiryu and Polnareff.
- Balance Between Good and Evil: Explicitly between Sol and Xagor/Ragna. Which is why Wanderer needs them both killed at the exact same time.
- Breakable Weapons: As per the SaGa standard, although you can have them all recharged for a price. Weapons also have multiple attacks. You can use the basic attack which will take one use off the durability counter, or more powerful attacks which will take off 2, 3, or 4 uses.
- The Ending Changes Everything: The revelation that
Wanderer was playing both sides fills in a lot of the gaps in the original story. (He's Borgin, by the way.) - Evolving Attack: The multiple attacks mentioned above, gotten randomly by increasing your proficiency with a given weapon type.
- Grim Up North: The final dungeon sits on an icy northern continent in the Other Dimension.
- Literal Split Personality: This turns out to be the relationship between Sol and Xagor/Ragna. When they're together, they can even create worlds.
- Pre-existing Encounters: Instead of Random Encounters.
- Stat Grinding: Completely replaces the Character Level system used in the original GB version, again making this game more like a true SaGa series game. In addition to that, there are also proficiency levels for weapon types and magic and the Glimmer System for weapon skills.
- Stripperiffic: Milfie (Gloria)'s revised costume design. One suspects the "care for" tag is the biggest piece of material on the outfit.
- Theme Music Powerup: The Stethroth/Talon's theme music kicks in whenever you warp to another time period.
- Took a Level in Badass: Borgin is considered much more powerful in this version than in the original.
- Xanatos Speed Chess: To Wanderer's dismay, both sides move much more quickly than he expects, so he has to continually give the opposite side more aid to counter his last boost. Yet, the heroes don't even have reason to be suspicious of him until they've already completed his plan for him.
