One of the first games out there that focused on truly experimental storytelling. At least, outside of text adventures, point and click adventures, and visual novels. Shame it doesn't stick the landing, but I think reading it against its contemporaries in the action/adventure space really makes you appreciate this game for how revolutionary it was at the time. It seems to me a clear inspiration for games like 999.

Dark Savior is a game you shouldn't go into with spoilers - ideally even mechanical ones. It is one that you should play as blindly as possible, allowing the different threads to fall where they may until you reach the true ending.

Man that cart section sucks though. And you have to do another one if you want to see everything!

Intriguing story, interesting genre mishmash, great music, cool level design, good graphics, story choices in 1996, strong atmosphere--all these traits of Dark Savior are rendered almost moot by the horrific experience of wrestling with the awkward isometric platforming controls.

Rather than being able to move in 8 directions, you are locked to moving in four diagonal directions. The camera lets you rotate in such a manner that you can use the D-pad to control the game in the four cardinal directions, but doesn't let you lock into that position (and the character sprites don't make sense with that perspective anyway). Holding the controller at an angle isn't as comfortable a solution as you'd think. Even still, I could get used to the diagonal controls if not for the fact that turning seems to just not work--unlike seemingly EVERY other game I've ever played, if you change which direction you're pushing on the D-pad, Garian instead continues walking in the direction you were originally pushing as long as you're pressing the D-pad, so to change direction you have to stop pushing the D-pad at all then push the new direction you want to go. The sense of momentum feels a little off as well, which is an issue when the platforms can be quite small. Blatant awkwardness like this is a big problem since the punishment for failing platforming sections is more than a small progress or HP loss---in the game's first major area I found that falling caused me to have to repeat minutes of exploration during a mission that had a timed penalty. In the second area, I found that falling down a pit caused me to lose 20 "points" every time (500 of these points are needed to level up your character, and an NPC in the area offers you 100 points in exchange for 5 weak healing items which you could also be using to upgrade your attack power).

Another annoyance I had is that the unorthodox combat system was explained to me by an optional NPC after my second major battle (battles are not super frequent in this game compared to most games in its style), so I didn't know that you could capture enemies' powers or use cool finishing moves which would've increased my point count immensely and made it much more feasible for me to level up sooner. That all sounds really awesome and the fighting system already felt good before I knew that, but I feel like I must've missed an explanation. If it was in the manual, my bad I guess. (Except not really, having to read the manual to understand the game was quite passé by 1996.)

The ingredients of a great and interesting game are all here so it's just a real shame this game is so annoying to control and has some poorly explained aspects. I feel like if it were a little more accessible I would've really enjoyed it. Some more patient people who read up on the game's systems and are used to these controls in whatever other games they appear in would probably call this a great game. It's certainly a standout in the Sega Saturn's library, but I found myself getting too annoyed playing it to continue, even knowing the game is less than 10 hours long.