Phantasy Star III (Mega Drive)

Escapipe
This must be one of most known curiosities about PS 3 and certainly an interesting one. It happens right at the beginning of the game, when you must take your character Rhys to marry Maia. Before you enter the castle and meet your future wife, you can take Rhys to the items shop and sell the Boots he’s wearing. You earn 50 mesetas and you can buy an Escapipe.
Now you can take Rhys to Maia and the ceremony will start. Of course, the dragon will appear and take Maia away, and your father will send you to the dungeons to cool off.
The next move here would be to pick up the items and talk to Lena, which would help Rhys to escape from the dungeon. But remember… you have an Escapipe. What if you used it right now?
When you use the Escapipe, you leave the cell and you’re taken back to the entrance of the dungeon, where two soldiers are keeping guard. The stairs are right above and you’re back to the castle! However, this is all you can do. The way out is blocked, and the soldiers still say that you should go marry Maia.
If you talk to the king (your father) he’ll look surprised that you discovered the Escapipe trick, but he’ll say that the game cannot go on, and you must press the Reset button on your Genesis to start again.
However there is a way to go on, and Yoz showed it. After being arrested and taking the items from the dungeon, get close to Lena, but not very close. As distant as possible for Rhys to talk to her.
After she says “I’m Lena. I’ll help you escape. Follow me.”, you can command Rhys for a short moment while the dungeon door opens. Move Rhys up. Thus, instead following Lena, he’ll stay in prison and the girl will leave, following the script. That way you can search the dungeon, but you’ll only find restoration items.
When the Escapipe fails
Richard Labbé and Peloquin told me about other curiosities related to the use of Escapipe, which lead me to discover many others! They all look like a bug of the game. The curiosity works when you reach the end of a generation and you have an Escapipe.
When the next generation begins (and only at that moment), you can use the Escapipe. It can be on the satellites, inside the castles…
… it can even be in the middle of Aridia’s desert, where Sean begins, right after the destruction of the Satellite.
What happens is that you return to the entrance of the dungeon that the previous generation fought the last enemy. On certain cases, it’s no big deal. Look what happens to Ayn, for example…
If you use the Escapipe right at the beginning of Ayn’s quest, the group returns to the entrance by the fountains of castle Cille.
However, if you use the Escapipe with Cris…
… the group is taken back to Techna! The game can’t go on because no longer there are rockets to Satellite.
And you can’t leave the island either, because you don’t have Wren’s Aqua Parts or Aero Parts.
Perhaps the craziest thing is what happens to Nial…
Using the Escapipe, Nial immediately returns to Cille!
As you know, that part of the spaceship isn’t available to Nial’s generation. The Monitor shows you floating in space.
That part of the spaceship is frozen again, and once again you can’t leave Cille’s island.
However, if you return to the castle, you can enter the dungeon and find the king of Cille, still trapping Maia (that now has brown colors, instead of blue).
If you fight him, at the end he’ll say again that you must choose between Maia and Lena (it’s a bit weird someone asking you if you prefer a woman or your own mother). However, when the choices of wife appear, surprise! You can already choose between Laya and Alair.
That’s a nice way to skip the whole second generation. However, it doesn’t matter with whom you marry, the Laya’s Pendant that your character has simply won’t work. You need to return to castle Mystoke and get a real one. If you marry Laya and have Adam and Gwyn as children, they won’t have the Mystery Star that opens the cave to Frigidia, where Mystoke castle is. Thus, you can’t proceed on the game. But if you marry Alair and play with Aron, then you can reach Mystoke and finish the game skipping the second generation.
Forced to get married
This curiosity mixes a bit of the Escapipe bug with something funny. It happens at the end of Rhys’s generation, when the group fights the king of Cille.
As soon as the fight ends and before the king starts to speak, quickly press button C. That’ll bring the options menu before the king speaks.
Use the Escapipe and Rhys will be taken back to the entrance of the dungeon. However, the king starts to speak anyway.
And the marriage happens as always…
Boosting Kara ou Laya
On GameFAQs there’s a post about a bug that can help those who want to boost one of the final characters. It works on Kara or Laya (or Gwyn, if she’s Aron and Laya’s daughter). On this example, we’ll use Kara. After gathering all legendary weapons, you go to Skyhaven. Before talking to the elders, remover all the character’s items.
Then, talk to the elders. When you get the Nei weapons, screen colors will change and the characters’ sprites will get weird. That get a little better once you leave Skyhaven.
The characters’ names also get weird.
Equip the items back to that character. You’ll see her attack and defense points raise to more than 60,000! Wow!
Easy money and experience
Another one from Yoz. This is a bug that results in an easy way to earn mesetas and experience points. For that, have a character (who can use techniques during fights) with TP 0.
This hint only works in fights that the party surprises the enemy.
Go to that character’s techniques and try to use one. You’ll see the message that you don’t have enough TP.
Immediately, you’ll see the message that the party won the fight, and you’ll receive the money and experience points.
Dark Force
Now the following curiosity makes the game a bit more difficult, because we’re talking about going to the final battle against Dark Force with only four characters, not five. This is only possible when you play with Nial (son of Rhys and Lena) on second generation.
In case you never noticed, before the final fights of each generation, you can remove the items from all characters and give them to Mieu and Wren. So, when the next generation starts, they still have those items. And that’s what you must do here. You can give the Laya’s Bow to one of the cyborgs.
When you get to choose a wife to Nial, pick Alair. Aron will be born, and you can go on playing normally.
As you know, you must collect the 5 legendary weapons, which are Orakio Sword, Miun’s Claw, Siren Shot, Laya’s Bow and Lune Slicer. Kara already has the Lune Slicer; you get the Orakio Sword, Miun’s Claw and Siren Shot during your journeys around. What about the Laya’s Bow? You would get this weapon waking Laya up in Aridia, which went back to sleep after Nial married Alair. But you already have the Laya’s Bow. It’s with Mieu or Wren. Which means that you have all legendary weapons without having Laya in your group!
After changing the legendary weapons into Nei weapons with the council in Skyhaven, you are ready to fight Rulakir and Dark Force.
And you can go to the final battle without Laya.
So…?
During the game, sometimes it happens that the characters say something, but another thing happens. One such situation, well known, happens when you play with Ayn in second generation.
Following Lyle’s advice, you go to the Cape Dragon Spine and there you find a dragon, the one that kidnapped Maia on the beginning of the game.
The dragon helps the group to reach Techna, and there you find out that the dragon was Lyle. According to the text, Lyle bids farewell to his daughter Thea and dies.
However, when that generation ends, if you marry Thea, the text says that Lyle and Rhys gave their blessings to the wedding. How’s that, if Lyle died?
Another similar situation is when you gather all legendary weapons. When you talk to the elders in the cave of the Sage Isle, they say that Rulakir turned into a fiend.
But if you go to Lashute, you’ll see that Rulakir is still good. He only turns evil after you change the legendary weapons to Nei weapons.
Canonical, huh?
Some people claim that games released by Sega are canonical, which means that the differences between japanese names and english names wouldn’t be translation errors, but different “universes” of Phantasy Star. Thus, that rule includes Tec Toy, Sega’s official representative in Brazil. Let’s see what Tec Toy made with PS 3 portuguese version… Just like Phantasy Star 2, some enemies got a new name (and you thought you had enough trouble with Noah/Lutz, now try to figure out what was on their mind to give the monsters new names!).
Really weird phrases were added to the people of Cille, when you’re still playing with Rhys. Those people alert you not to try leaving Cille from the right, or else you’ll be trapped forever. However, nothing unusual happens when you leave Cille from the right.
So far things are odd, but Tec Toy seemed to pay very few attention to the translation (ok, I know that MY english isn’t so nice, but if I was responsible for Phantasy Star 3’s translation, I’d certainly be more careful). Item’s names got so funny. Because there’s no cedilla mark, the Hunting weapons became Caca (instead caça), and “caca” means feces in portuguese. It seems that they couldn’t find a translation to what the heck is Emel, either.
Many blunders happen on the game. For exemple, the translation of “Sapphire glows and you’re inside” became something like “Sapphire, you, and the glows are inside”. What happened? Did they translate “Sapphire, glows and you” as three subjects? Shame on you, Tec Toy!
The “tear” part of the name Moon Tear was translated as verb “to tear”, not as noun “tear” (they’re totally different words in portuguese, with very different meanings). Later they tanslated Dragon’s Tear correctly.
What about this one? When Rhys marries Maia, he says that he renounces Claim’s throne. Claim? Where’s Claim? Didn’t he come from Landen? When you read the original sentence in english, “I renounce my claim to Landen’s throne”, two things may come to your mind: either Tec Toy’s translators are very lousy, either there really is a “parallel universe” in brazilian version and there is another not-yet-discovered kingdom, called Claim.
Strange stuff happen at the end of the game in brazilian version, too. On two endings, messages from Aerone and Earth aren’t shown. On the ending that they reach Earth, another strange thing happens… ship Alisa III seems to be carrying the black hole in which it fell (I brightened the screen so you can see it). Is it just a bug? What Stephen Hawking would think about that?
At last, there are small translation errors and even gramatical errors, too numerous to list here. Errors like: ⇒ translate “at last” as “at least” ⇒ make Alair’s phrases as male ⇒ portuguese gramatical errors, and so son.
Weird text at the side of Landen Castle
After starting the game, folowing the left trail outside of the Landen Castle, when we press “A” at the palce shown in the picture, we can see that Rhys ended up being speechless.
However, in the Japanese version of the game we find the text おまえにはとなりのくにのひめとけっこんさせようとおもっておったが that can be read as: “I though they had wanted to marry you with the neighbor kingdom's princess…”. Possibly a memory of somethign said by the father of Rhys. For a more detailed analysis, take a look at the post of the Bizarre Week of Phantasy Star III: http://gazetadealgol.com.br/blog/?p=1140
Enemies that only appear in the Japanese version and in the GBA one
Sometimes censorship of one or other thing happens in a game and Phantasy Star III is not an exception. In this case, they left out this party of three enemies (absent in the American version and, because of that, also in the Brazilian one).
They can be found in the Crys' generation (one of the last ones) and more precisely in Mystoke Castle's underground.
The enemies themselves and their attack are bizarre. You can see for yourselves by browsing the Phantasy Star III Sprite Section at Gazeta de Algol: http://gazetadealgol.com.br/diversos/sprites/ps3 Just look for Twistbot, Swivlbot and Rotabot.

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