I love Quest 64! As a fan of the original I was surprised at how faithful of a port this was. Except for dungeons, the 2D spaces actually match up closely to the 3D game, almost eerily so... it has big Demake energy. The art in this is also well-done, I liked the little GBC-arrangements of the music, and enjoyed seeing Quest 64's story fleshed out. E.g. Dondoran is a potter's town, but now people can't get their clay because of Solvaring.

That being said uhhhh the battle system felt a bit flat. Although you can move during enemy attacks, everything is undodgeable, so every fight comes down to who can out-damage first. During some early fights this means you need to grind HP and spells for a while. There's an interesting texture to this as different actions increase different stats. But ultimately every fight felt the same - use the right element spell, heal, etc. At least you can run from every fight!

Part of the issue is that in Quest 64 it was 3D so you had the charm of the game world, as well as the level geometry mattering a little during fights. But battles in this are instanced on empty screens, and since you can run from every fight you really only need to engage with fights in order to heal your MP or raise stats for a boss. Dungeons don't have much texture or narrative arc to them outside of being simple mazes where you keep running from fights.

Anyways, mainly worth checking out if you're a Quest 64 fan, otherwise I wouldn't recommend it unless you just want to see some nice town art in between the mazey dungeons/overworlds.

Oh man, U Saga... so immediately after finishing and loving RomaSaGa 1, I decided to just jump into the most contentious one. I was interested as a new saga fan, but perhaps more as a designer I wanted to see why this game was so divisive.

So let's start off: I understand the appeal of this game and why some people like it. It feels like a very long, single-player board game with separate storylines and enough randomness in the gameplay to shake things up or allow for challenge runs. The game is about slowly turning things in your favor so as to produce better outcomes from the wide variety of mechanics that are dice rolls: be this the items that pop up in shops (whose materials are needed to forge strong items), the chests you manage to open, the combos you pull off in battle, the skills you learn in battle, the upgrade panels you pull at the end of levels.

The texture of progressing in this game felt very similar to playing those competitive board games where everyone's scrambling and trading for resources. As you learn the ins and outs of the system, how to make micro-optimizations, choosing which adventures to go on, I could see this game becoming fun. It feels classically Romancing SaGa: you're preparing your party for the ridiculous final boss at the end. How will you get there and build your party?

Now here is the key difference: board games play out and end in an hour or two. It will take you at least 3-4 hours to learn the rules of Unlimited SaGa through FAQs/word of mouth, another 10-15 to fumble through a playthrough, and THEN you can start to perhaps play it as a game, making good decisions on your own.

On top of that, you still have to deal with a poorly organized UI, slow load times for what is just loading PNGs, etc. I only managed about 6-8 hours into a Mythe playthrough (I KNOW he's bad to start with, but I made sure I got far enough that I learned how viable party-building worked, getting good weapons, etc), with like 3-4 hours of research, before I decided to call it quits.

Why? Well, like I said, this is more like a single-player board game... many of those have interesting narrative conceits (or are learnable/fast enough to enjoy without much narrative involved). but... the narrative beats of Mythe felt more like a bonus in-between dungeons and party-optimization sections. The game's portrayal of the world through small illustrations and a board is an interesting limitation, and something I enjoyed, but I feel like it's missing the layer of evocative description that a dungeon master might provide. The result is that there's not much appealing from a narrative standpoint in the way Saga1 or romasaga1 were.

Assuming you don't mind that, and you can deal with the speed of the game, that just leaves the battle systems. Again the appeal of this game is being able to turn random chance into your favor. Battling the proper way to increase odds for a certain skill panel: picking the right adventures to obtain magic tablets. The game's battle system is dense at a glance, because it really puts the focus on future preparation. In other words, it's not a very reactive RPG, it's the kind that rewards familiarity with its components parts and levels. If you know you'll get access to a side quest with a hard, but optional boss in it, you can use that to try sparking certain skills, etc.

For me though... I couldn't really get into this battle system, although it has a lot of interesting ideas going for it. For one, it really tries to create a sense of physical reality. If you use a certain attack at the wrong distance, it takes longer to use, which allows enemies to get more attacks in, maybe comboing you. But in turn, that leaves the enemies tired...so you can combo them. Whereas, if you just spam attacks one after another, you'll probably hit the enemy head-on and combo each-other. Kind of like when two people in smash swing swords at each other at the same time.

There's a volleyball-like rhythm to it. You use a slasher to take out enemy HP, setting up your party for a piercer to come and have a higher chance of taking out enemy's LP and killing it. Winning is about working together. There's no health bars shown, so it's all based on intuition from your past encounters with the enemy. How fast do they act? How many times? Etc. As you build upon this knowledge, you gain an intuition for the combat which can almost feel like an action game.

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But despite these interesting gameplay textures, idk if it works all that well for me. There was something very strict-feeling about how success in fights worked, and very burdensome with also having to remember to keep your durability and HP topped up. As is, it feels like a so-so medium between a more traditional fight system and something extremely puzzly (which it seems Scarlet Grace/Emerald Beyond explore to great success). But, U Saga hides a lot of the info from you, so you have to intuit the puzzle.

Not to mention that you have to select five actions every turn, navigating a bunch of menus, THEN you still have to do the reel inputs while waiting for enemy turns. Even if it's a simple encounter...

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But yeah overall, hmm.. fascinating game, it just doesn't... really manage to make anything work all that well, for me at least. But the way the world is laid out, how the visuals work, the board game interface, the unique combat and way party-building works, how the reel system goes a step beyond mere dice rolls - I'm honestly all on-board for those kinds of ideas! Just, uh.. maybe in some other kind of combination. Sorry Kawazu...

Honestly an incredible game (played EN-patched SNES version). If you'd like to try, skip my review and see my notes at the bottom.

Short review: What if you could preemptively end a fetch quest chain by killing the quest-giver? What if the steps and exploration you have to take to accomplish this felt really narratively meaningful in a self-imagination way?

Longer review:
I think this game is worth writing a longer post on, but romasaga does this style of 'sorta guided but not too much' roleplaying really well. You recruit other heroes, sometimes you glimpse shards of their storylines, but ultimately you're crafting the story and arc of your chosen hero, making sense and imagining the strange details of the dungeons, the towns, the empty corners, why your character's theme (I chose Jamil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i6gAnOz0wE&list=OLAK5uy_ldnQBujO4m2dEuFWNPYNWcW9gNonE1ALs&index=6) plays in every moment possible..

I think that's really the fun of it, and the chaos of events happening out of nowhere really makes the game feel like the uncertainties of life itself. It's up to your imagination as to what you want to make possible...

There feels like a lot of intentionality, humor, crafted into most screens.. that even with almost no words, I had a lot of great moments with the game.

While you're free to do whatever, the game still has guardrails on that extent, compared to a game where you can kill everyone, etc. I think this works well - you still feel like you're playing a author-crafted story, just one that isn't being completely told or dictated.

It's a game that understands abstraction: in a game it should feel like anything is possible - but anything should not actually be possible. It's this balance between 'accurate realism' and 'total abstract numbers' that creates a great game!

Notes if you're gonna play:

- If you come into this game with a mindset that the Battle System Should Be Good or Quest Chains Should Be Clearly Communicated, you're not going to like it. I would adopt a different attitude and you'll have a good time.

- Don't worry, Buddy!! Just Be Okay with whatever happens.. a quest chain bugs out... a write your own canon as to why. Have Fun.

- There are frankly a ton of encounters in this game - I honestly wouldn't recommend playing the game unless you are Extremely Patient or have a hotkeyed speed-up option on your emulator. Basically speed-up turned my 50 hour file into probably a 8-10 hour playthrough and I don't feel I missed much

- The most important thing playing this game is to really, truly, roll with whatever happens, and only use a guide if you really are stuck, or for things like shop inventories/weapon skill descriptions/battle systems. But being stuck and doing something else - and going down that thread instead - is IMO the intended design of this game. The point of this game is less the tiny little skeletal stories you can find, but the story you craft yourself with the characters you choose and how that overlaps with all these designed narrative vignettes. The more you lean into that (rather than bringing expectations from single-story-driven RPGs) the more you can understand/enjoy romasaga 1!

- The hardest bits of the game might be opening hours until you get 3-4 members. Just run from fights that are clearly too hard, save scum, etc.

- Despite what you might hear about battle rank (the game getting harder as you kill more monsters), it is really hard to truly get softlocked in this game - short of saving at the end of a dungeon with zero resources, or abandoning all your party members. The workaround for that is to keep a save at a town.