One must temper their expectations when they play a (remake of a) 35-year-old experimental handheld JRPG, but the novelty of playing the first SaGa game AND playing a Wonderswan game was just too enticing. Rest assured that the idea of playing this is a lot more fun than actually playing it, however.

Battles are repetitive, and are always either extremely easy or completely bullshit, no inbetween. Attempting any semblance of party composition or strategy is foolish, since humans are super expensive to power up early, mutant stats and abilities are completely random, and monsters suck until the end of the game. The world is a bit of a chore to explore, especially as random encounters are frequent and lose most of their value near the end of the game. My favorite part is the City world, where you are constantly accosted by an invincible random encounter boss that can one shot your party members, with a high failure rate for escaping. I don't appreciate how bosses near the end of the game started gaining immunity to every magic element either.

Thankfully it's a short game, clocking in at 6 hours. It's also a little charming, and seeing early forms of systems that would become series staples and expand and evolve is neat. Plus you can instantly kill God with a chainsaw.