For some reason, I thought that the water dragon was supposed to be a special enemy since it uses the regular battle bgm. I haven't played this game in a long time( I didn't get too far), but I know that some of the enemies with the regular battle bgm are more difficult in some instances that the "designated bosses" like in Romancing Saga 2 where you have this gelatin slime boss early in the game that regens 80 HP per turn, and was pretty hard since you needed a mage to get through the battle without anyone dying. At least that wasn't as bad as the Hive Queen who has a ton of nasty attacks long with status conditions( i got stuck around that part because the garbled text in the terrible English text makes it near impossible to advance scenarios in the designated order w/o a guide.)
Maybe boss wasn't the right term...more like sub-boss? Mid-boss? Something like that. But, since the SaGa games are usually on the more difficult side, I was ready to accept a crushing defeat. Just knowing that he recovered 999 HP per turn was enough to make do a little bit of extra grinding.
I haven't tried Romancing SaGa 2. I hear that's the best one of the three, but the translation patch is shoddy at best.
Yeah, I think they're just sub-bosses. I'm not sure how far the water dragon is into SaGa 3, but 999 HP regn is pretty beastly. Grinding can really help for some of those bosses, as well as strategy so those two are probably the biggest factors to beating those baddies.
Romancing SaGa 2 has a pretty good story, especially compared to its predecessor. There's this whole thing with these seven heroes getting called back, but they come back instead as demons( not entirely sure), and you've got this generational system, where as your main character is ruler of the land. As you progress through the game, certain events trigger a generational jump, and that means the new ruler will inherit the stats and skills of the previous ruler. Being the ruler also lets you get taxes from the area that are under your rule, which can be used to build new facilities and recruit new characters, etc.
From what I've played of Romancing Saga 2, the translation patch translates all the text for battles, characters, and the intro with the bard. Everything else besides that has this garbled text that looks ugly and broken( apparently the problem stems from no translation for the rest of the script, and other font+ dictation problems). This means that although the battles are easy enough, you will need a guide to figure out where to go next, since its near impossible to discern what to do at certain points due to the text issue. I really liked the game, but the text problem ended up hurting me in the long run, and I wasn't able to recover my team from that. Hopefully, someone( or something) will translate the game, because I think it deserves to be played, especially for just the final boss alone.