"Back with an improved battle system, and a fantastic musical flair, Song of the Ocean is the best of the trilogy, and an amazing RPG."

The Legend of Heroes III: Song of the Ocean is a traditional turn-based RPG that plays much similar to the Lunar series. It is actually a remake of the second chronological story of the Gagharv series known in Japan as "The most poetic RPGs ever", and serves as a tie-in, featuring all the events that happened in-between the "A Tear of Vermillion" chapters and "Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch" chapters.

This quest starts you off playing as our protagonist Forte, his friend Una, and an older figure named McBain, which travel the world of Weltluna as the musical group called "The McBain Company" with McBain's loyal canine companion, Jan, as their mascot. McBain, in his old age wants to take one final adventure before he passes on, and decides it'd be the perfect opportunity to let you venture the world with him. So, after giving your goodbyes, you start an epic quest in pursuit of resonance stones that number over twenty in quantity, and combined, form a very legendary tune by a composer named Leone.

Featuring the same top-notch graphical quality as it's predecessors, and a simply fantastic new soundtrack that blows the other two out of the water, Legend of Heroes III offers much of the same, but this time, also introduces a significant number of new aspects to the gameplay system.

Forte, Una, McBain and Jan are quite a strange and goofy few, which makes for a seriously humorous adventure, especially paired with all the different kinds of party members you'll encounter throughout the game. What's simply amazing here is that this is pulled off while allowing the characters to be serious for many scenarios, and how well it's arranged. Of course, if you've played the other Legend of Heroes games up until Song of the Ocean, you're likely not to be surprised by the amount of detail that's put into the characters. For those who didn't particularly get into the novel-like feel of the second Legend of Heroes installment, this may have already sparked worries that this might be another read-fest with little to no action to redeem itself.

Luckily, Song of the Ocean's case is exactly the opposite. While delivering the same amount of character development of the other Legend of Heroes games, Song of the Ocean also caters to those who have missed the action-packed feeling of dungeon-crawling and being constantly tormented by bosses. A noticeable change is how much more detail is put into the dungeons in this installment. The dungeon design is infinitely better than anything offered in the other Legend of Heroes games, is full to the brim with puzzles, and now feature some out-of-battle techniques(such as McBain's Rock Smash) that add many levels of complexity and depth to otherwise mundane dungeon crawling.

With such a large focus on music, it's no surprise that Song of the Ocean's soundtrack is persistently wonderful, but now each person that joins you has their own artistic expertise and/or plays an instrument. All through the quest, you will be learning new songs, and increasing your worldwide popularity by training at public performance areas(conveniently located in each town) and performing in large events with character solos or group performances.

The most outstanding change lies in the battle system though. The battle system that was simple before has been upgraded in quite a lot of drastic levels, and become much more complex. You can now have up to six party members at once(as opposed to four), and can switch them out during battle. Instead of everyone having their own sets of spells, everyone just has their own personal skills, and spells are dictated by the Resonance stones equipped. For example, if you equip the Resonance stone of Lightning, whoever it is equipped to gains the single-range spell "Thunder Run" and the large-ranged spell "Thunder Shine".

In addition to this, there are now group "Ensemble" spells that can be executed by chaining the effects of single-ranged resonance attacks to form powerful spells, but consumes the turns and magic of two party members instead of one. As expected, these "Ensemble" techniques are a fair lot more dramatic than regular spells, and are much more powerful.

The special attacks in this game are also handled differently than in the previous installments. In the first two games, you'd reach the limit of a "tension" meter, and at 100%, could select and unleash an (often overpowered) special attack. Now, while out of battle, you can set a special move for each character, and in battle, the special will be executed by highlighting the character and tapping circle at the right time. This adds strategy to the battle system in the sense that, used effectively, this can cancel an enemy attack that could otherwise be devastating. Which is surprising in the sense that it's actually useful this time around.

If you've played the previous games, you know by now that Legend of Heroes and "Challenge" simply do not go together. While the game starts off just as painfully easy as Vermillion and Moonlight Witch, the game actually tries to pick up some challenge after the first few chapters.

The pet system is back, and just as annoying as it was in Moonlight Witch. For some odd reason, the creators of Song of the Ocean saw it fit to ditch the idea of the pet eating pet food, and now the pet can eat anything from Magic Potions to armor to any weapon you have. With all the effort that went into making so many sub-divisions of items, it feels weird that the pet food system has been so drastically changed.

Just like our old buddy, the pet system, the weirded-out translation team has also returned. They have gotten a lot better this time around, and have obviously taken some lessons in adding a poetic flair to their localizations, but there are some parts that are simply very lazily done in the translation. Again, not as big of an impact as it was in A Tear of Vermillion, but still edgy enough to keep this game one point away from being superb.

Since this is a tie-in, it should come as no surprise that you get to see the older versions of some of Vermillion's main cast, as well as younger versions of Moonlight Witch's cast, while encountering tons of small references to the other two.

As a great bonus to anyone who has completed Vermillion and Moonlight Witch, as well as kept their save file, there is an entire world of sidequesting opened up. At many points of Weltluna, you will see tuning forks that lead to an alternate world. In this world, you will encounter all the characters from the previous two games, and will be able to form your own custom party of any members from the trilogy, and go on quests to gain orbs and sonomemories, which adds a metric ton of replay value to Song of the Ocean.

Legend of Heroes III: Song of the Ocean makes a lot of drastic changes to the Legend of Heroes gameplay system, and in return is the most technologically advanced of the trilogy. This, combined with the fantastic soundtrack, character development and gameplay makes this the defining title of the trilogy.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/21/07