The Black Rabite & Seiken Densetsu 3

Duran, Angela, and Lise finally slay the dark beast

It's apparently nostalgia week here at That American Sadness - I'm revisiting a number of my old favorites.  Nonetheless, I couldn't NOT post this - though very few people will get it.  That 16-bit image up there is a screenshot from the little-seen and less-played 1995 Japanese RPG Seiken Densetsu 3, aka Secret of Mana 3 (or 2, depending on how you count.  Don't ask, it's weird).  Moreover, it's a screenshot of me defeating the Black Rabite, a bonus boss and the single most challenging battle in the game.  In short, it's me finally accomplishing everything there is to accomplish in SD3.  And yet right after that screen I immediately rebooted the emulator on my phone and started up another game.  Why, you ask?  That's simple.  It's probably my favorite game of all time.





A lot of that has to do with circumstance.  I first came into contact with SD3 when I was still in elementary school.  We had short days on Wednesdays, and since my mother was a teacher and took meetings all afternoon, I'd usually spend the rest of the day at my best friend Ben's house.  Being 8-9 year old boys of the generally nerdy persuasion, video games were at the top of our list, though admittedly this one seems like an odd choice.  SD3 was never released in the United States; moreover, it was never officially translated.  Rather, an emulated, fan-translated copy made the rounds on the internet in the early 2000s.  What caught our eye about it, though, was that it was a multi-player RPG, unlike so many others at the time.  The game is an action RPG, with hack-and-slash gameplay that feels surprisingly modern and a party of three characters, chosen from a pool of 6.  Naturally, the main player took the role of the protagonist, but you could hook up a second controller and play with a friend controlling one of the additional party members.

The game is quite long as well, but we ended up playing it every week, exploring its depths and figuring out the quirks and mechanics as we went along.  It's important to remember this was in the truly early days of the internet - information didn't get around quite so easily back then.  As such, many of the game's finer systems (and things that contribute to its massive replay value) completely alluded us when we first started.  Class changing - one of its greatest hallmarks and most enjoyable systems - took us totally by surprise.  Even rudimentary stuff like MAGIC came out of left field - we originally chose an all-male party that didn't get any spells until well into the late game, and as such assumed it was just a purely hack-and-slash system.  When our main character, the swordsman Duran, finally learned to cast Flame Saber, it COMPLETELY BLEW OUR MINDS.  Needless to say we spent the next hour doing nothing but toying with spells.

There's a lot of reasons why I love this game, and why I keep coming back to it.  As I alluded to above, it has a massive amount of replay value - 3 separate storylines and endings, 6 characters from which you build a party of 3, and 4 final jobs for each of those characters, for a total of 24 unique characters with their own strengths and weaknesses.  But there's a greater component - an emotional one.  I joke about the concept a lot, but this game truly makes me feel nostalgic, in that painful way that Don Draper so eloquently captures.  I played it for over a year with the man that I still call my best friend, and though I've played it many times since I don't think I've ever enjoyed it quite so much as I did that first time.