I also happened to (finally) play through this game in the last couple years- I wasn’t that impressed overall, but there are a bunch of cool things about it. I thought the visuals were uniformly quite nice, though it’s true that interiors tend to repeat. There are a lot of very nifty-for-the-SNES “setpiece battles” that deserve mention, particularly in the second half of the game; the ‘battle one flying dragon from the back of another’ that you’ve included a picture of above was pretty cool, even if it went on too long. My favorite was probably the sequence wherein you climb a gigantic tower such that you can battle a Kaiju-scale werewolf with equal footing. This sort of battle, thinking back, has been something of a lesser-known trademark of the series- even the Game Boy original had you fighting a giant squid from a narrow rope bridge atop an abyss.

My main takeaway, unfortunately, was how clunky and slow the combat engine feels. Maybe it was just the emulator I was using, but I constantly felt like the controls just weren’t as responsive as they should have been for an action RPG- the final result being less action and more RPG. I don’t remember Secret of Mana having those issues, but maybe it’s been long enough that I’ve simply forgotten- still, SD3 doesn’t compare particularly well with- say- Illusion of Gaia. On the upside, I was glad to see that spell chaining had been done away with.

I recall one of the game’s major alleged selling point was that there was a lot of inter-party chatter which varied wildly depending on who you had in your party- I was kind of disappointed to learn that this turned out to essentially not be true at all. Maybe I’d confused SD3 with another one of the Japan-only RPGs of the day (Star Ocean?). Although the plot was pretty thin, it was okay for the most part- I did appreciate the villian backstab-a-thon near the middle of the game. :)

All that being said, I did enjoy playing through the game- I’ve been tempted to play through again with the three characters I didn’t use the first time around almost since I finished it the first time around. There are a lot of clever ideas and cool bits to it, and while it wasn’t quite the game I was hoping for, it was a lot of fun taken on it’s own- even if it isn’t the shining masterpiece we were all told it was in 1995.

- HC