HC

- HC

The Romancing SaGa series is an interesting one- it feels at times more like a puzzle than an RPG; “here are your resources, here are your characters and the abilities they can learn; now put together a party that can finish the game!”. They are awfully hard and gameplay-driven rather than story-driven, which I think has been a big turnoff for many American players. The normal endgame of most of the SaGa games is as hard as the optional superbosses in most other RPGs.

SaGa Frontier is also a game that improves as you know more people who are into it- attacking it with a message board’s worth of backup back in the day was a lot of fun, and an interesting experience in community-building. Comparing notes every couple of days about this-or-that cool ability we’d found or the solution to such-and-so subquest was a lot of fun, and a great way to build a group of friends- but I digress…

It’s odd the you should mention the out-of-battle graphics as an issue with the game. My memory was that the out-of-battle scenes were mostly uniform mid-90s-era CG backdrops- occasionally busy or hard-to-parse, and certainly not as good as the ones in Resident Evil or Final Fantasy VII, but at least decent. I felt that it was really the battles where things fell apart and the game’s clashing styles became apparent, with hand-drawn monsters next to CG-rendered robots next to what appeared to be claymation, all on a low-res mess of a background. The spell and attack effects could be really eye-popping; it’s a shame everything else in battle was so awful.

The one major complaint I had with the game that you didn’t really touch on here was the overlap between the seven storylines- there are seven quests, but each one essentially boils down to “Do some introductory events, get Arcane and/or Rune magic, do some mid-game events, get Time and/or Space magic, do your quest’s last dungeon.” There are some exceptions (Red’s quest has a very long introduction, whereas Lute has essentially no plot or unique events save his ‘last dungeon’), but you’re still doing basically all the same things in each quest. Romancing SaGa and Romancing SaGa 3 both handled this significantly better- while there were a bunch of main characters who started at different places in the world, it was clear that these were eight people who were on the same quest, and there was very little ‘unique’ material per-character save each character’s introduction.

I do want to say, for the record, that I think Romancing SaGa 3 (originally Japan-only on the SNES; now available as a fanslation) is a better game overall in a number of ways- although you’ll definitely need to play with a FAQ in hand and there are a number of places you can screw yourself over, character growth feels smoother, you’ve got more options in terms of character ‘builds’, and the overall presentation is better (there are a number of really-cool-for-the-SNES ‘setpiece’ battles to check out, as well). You should check it out if you haven’t played.

- HC