/vr/ - Retro Games

Thoughts on Seiken Densetsu 3?

What's the best version to go with this game?
The 2000 fan-translation or the official collection of mana one

So I've been playing this game recently. I picked Duran-Riesz-Angela.
Gameplay is better and worse than SoM at the same time. While the hit detection is better the gameplay feels much slower and your cooldown period is not as specific as well as it's harder to avoid enemies.

The readability of the graphics is worse than SoM imo, I've lost count how many times I lost track of where Duran is in the screen...it's annoying.

The menus are laggy as fuck and the game in general has lag in many transitions(I can understand Secret of Mana having some lag because of its troubled development cycle but there's no excuse here).
Magic casting is so fucking slow in this game, I guess they did this to prevent you from chaincasting like you could in SoM

The AI customization from SoM(and SoE) is pretty much gone, replace with this weird ass nonsensical chess board shit.

The storyline is weird and complicated so far. The tone is very urgent but I really haven't found a reason to care about any of the characters so far.
SoM and SoE had meh stories too but at least they didn't bombard with so much story like SD3 is doing.