This is an excellent remake of the gameboy RPG Final Fantasy Legend II AKA SaGa 2. Adding tons of fun little side adventures while keeping the original core length of about 10-15 hours. I have a few gripes, but overall it does a good job remaining faithful to SaGa 2 while enhancing it's mechanics a bit.
The major mechanic change is the addition of the combo system, which is really fun and allows you to manipulate the turn order to make battles go by faster. It's especialyl fun with Espers and having massive nukes to go along these fights, wiping out half the field.
It also adds a sidequest with these goddesses, I don't really know what they're supposed to be but they can assist you in battle and you can even recruit one as a 5th slot party member, a nice mage to give you a hand when you have no one else. You could argue it's a bit of a crutch, but it always did feel satisfying when they hopped in to help.
More descriptions and just more expansive dialogue helps this game feel much more alive than it's original counterpart. Each world feels much more memorable with more varied aesthetics and better portrayed personality. Overall helps the feel of the game a lot, while also being one of the best looking DS games in my opinion.
My only major gripe that makes it a hard sell is how unbalanced it feels towards the end, I used a basic team of one of each race (Human, Esper, Robot, Monster) and I thought it was smooth until the end, where my Esper and Human very much started lagging behind, they'd basically get two-shot by most things and ina game without much easy healing, it was really rough to get them to contribute anything to later bosses. This made the final fight near impossible for me to finish, and it felt quite frustrating because grinding in SaGa is a nightmare. I overall think they should've added better armor for humans and espers right before the end to help accomodate for their lower HP, because it was a real struggle. If i ever played again I'd either do a 2 Robot 2 Monster team or a 2 Robot, 1 Monster, 1 Esper team. Humans felt especially useless.
Outside of that, I do think this version is a bit better than the original and worth checking out if you want a fun quick DS RPG! I'm hoping SaGa 3 does a good job, because I think the original version is quite mediocre and I hope to see this amount of quality here!
4 Black-marketed Bananas/5
The major mechanic change is the addition of the combo system, which is really fun and allows you to manipulate the turn order to make battles go by faster. It's especialyl fun with Espers and having massive nukes to go along these fights, wiping out half the field.
It also adds a sidequest with these goddesses, I don't really know what they're supposed to be but they can assist you in battle and you can even recruit one as a 5th slot party member, a nice mage to give you a hand when you have no one else. You could argue it's a bit of a crutch, but it always did feel satisfying when they hopped in to help.
More descriptions and just more expansive dialogue helps this game feel much more alive than it's original counterpart. Each world feels much more memorable with more varied aesthetics and better portrayed personality. Overall helps the feel of the game a lot, while also being one of the best looking DS games in my opinion.
My only major gripe that makes it a hard sell is how unbalanced it feels towards the end, I used a basic team of one of each race (Human, Esper, Robot, Monster) and I thought it was smooth until the end, where my Esper and Human very much started lagging behind, they'd basically get two-shot by most things and ina game without much easy healing, it was really rough to get them to contribute anything to later bosses. This made the final fight near impossible for me to finish, and it felt quite frustrating because grinding in SaGa is a nightmare. I overall think they should've added better armor for humans and espers right before the end to help accomodate for their lower HP, because it was a real struggle. If i ever played again I'd either do a 2 Robot 2 Monster team or a 2 Robot, 1 Monster, 1 Esper team. Humans felt especially useless.
Outside of that, I do think this version is a bit better than the original and worth checking out if you want a fun quick DS RPG! I'm hoping SaGa 3 does a good job, because I think the original version is quite mediocre and I hope to see this amount of quality here!
4 Black-marketed Bananas/5