Final Fantasy Legend III remake SaGa 3: Shadow or Light announced for DS by Square Enix

4 September 2010

Posted by:Josh

Saga 3: Shadow or Light is an upcoming DS remake of the Game Boy classic “Saga 3 – The Final Chapter – The Ruler of Time and Space”, otherwise better known by it’s American title of “Final Fantasy Legend III” for the original Game Boy, released in 1993 (’91 in Japan).

Back in the early 90′s, the Japanese SaGa titles, RPGs by Square Enix, got their start on the Game Boy but were released in America with the “Final Fantasy” branding (in this case, “Final Fantasy Legend 1, 2 and 3″), presumably to help sales by using an RPG name Americans were already familiar with.

You may know the Saga name in more recent times by the PS2 entry “Unlimited Saga” and the PS1 entries, “SaGa Frontier 1 and 2″.

The DS remake of the black and white Game Boy classic will be fully updated and recreated for modern hardware. And it follows in the footsteps of the SaGa 2/Final Fantasy Legend 2 DS remake released in Japan last year (which has yet to be released internationally. Hopefully it will come eventually).

As a remake, the game is getting a complete facelift with three-dimensional, cel-shaded graphics, all-new cutscenes, and presumably an all-new translation. There will also be updates to the gameplay systems in the game, though details are slim. We’ll likely learn more at the upcoming Tokyo Game Show 2010 in October.

The game will be released in Japan this Winter. Sadly there isn’t any word on whether the game will be released stateside. But RPGs, particularly portable RPGs, sell pretty well, so hopefully both games (SaGa 2 and 3 for DS) will get Western releases.

If I could add a little personal tidbit to this story, I am a proud owner of complete, boxed copies of Final Fantasy Legend 1, Final Fantasy Legend 2 and Final Fantasy Adventure (i.e.= the first game in the Mana series, called Seiken Densetsu in Japan). I don’t yet own Final Fantasy Adventure 3 and I haven’t played any of the games (I’m a videogame collector, you see) but I hope to one day track that elusive third game down to add it to my collection.