(This is the 63rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
The 'SaGa' series started in 1989 with 'The Final Fantasy Legend', as it is known by in the West, and was a Game Boy series for its first three titles until Romancing SaGa brought it to the SNES on January 28, 1992. Well, at least in Japan it did, as the game did not get a release in the West. The SNES actually never did, in fact, but a PS2 remake called 'Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song' did release in North America in 2005, though the 'Mistrel Song' subtitle would only be included in Japanese versions.
'Romancing SaGa' did pretty well, with over a million sales recorded for its SNES version. The game was developed by Square, who had released their first SNES game in 1991 called 'Final Fantasy IV', you may know it. The alliance of both games with Square is immediately notable, but Romancing SaGa , and SaGa games overall, are different in many ways from their Final Fantasy counterpart that makes the SaGa games stand out as their own, distinctive series.
Personally, I think it differs positively in many ways, but negatively in at least just as many. I go over everything in my review for 'Romancing SaGa'.
(I was able to play the SNES version with fan translations. If you are interested in this game, I would recommend the PS2 version for both its official translation and the many QoL and overall graphical improvements you will find with it.)
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10
You play Albert, heir to a noble lord in Rosalia. No wait, you play Sif, a warrior from Valhalland. Or do you play Jamil, a thief in Estamir? Wait, what?
Off the bat, you will find out why the SaGa series is very different from your run-of-the-mill JRPG in terms of its story set-up. You have eight unique characters to choose from. Not eight different classes (though they do all differ in class), but eight (!) unique (!) characters, each with their own name and background and, most importantly, their own journey. Their journey all lead to the same destination, but you'll be surprised with the amount of freedom in play here. This is not Cyberpunk 2077, where a few intros play out differently and all culminate in the same outcome an hour into the game.
For example, I chose Albert. In his introduction, he and his sister clear a cave near the castle that is their home. Upon return, the castle is attacked by monsters, and they are to flee and report the incident to a nearby kingdom. Diana, his sister, pushes Albert off a cliff to save him from strong enemies that have surrounded them (why she doesn't jump after him, I don't know). She dies trying to fend off the attackers, while Albert wakes up later in the home of a caretaker. From here, Albert finds himself in Loban. From there, he is to take a ship to Yeoville that runs into a storm and washes up near Valhalland, where he meets Sif.
Sif's story starts in Valhalland and she finds Albert knocked out on the ship wreck, so there is some crossover at times.
Then there is Claudia's story, who is an orphan raised by the witch of the forest in Mazewood. She goes to clear a cave from monsters as well, finds a Knight called Gian getting attacked, helps him and then proceeds to leave the Mazewood later on in her introduction. She takes a totally different route, explore different areas and meets other potential companions than Albert or Sif, either meeting them much earlier or doing so at all, such as a bear and a wolf-like creature that lived with her in Mazewood.
The locations you explore are not only relevant in the companions you can fight for battles, of which there are dozens, but also in the quests you find and can pursue. These quests often don't go beyond simple set-ups to explore nearby caves and exterminate the monsters within, but it adds to the replayability and the unique structure of each character's playthrough.
So overall, it's not just eight different intros, but many different journeys altogether. This unfortunately does come with its many concessions and makes tying things together for the main story, which does exist, much more difficult. The execution in the end is lackluster, both from experience and, mainly, from reading up on it, as I couldn't justify playing the game more than I did (a little over 5 hours), which I will mainly explain in the 'Gameplay' section.
Let's start with the main story. The game is set in Mardias, where three gods called 'Death', 'Saruin' and 'Schirach' waged war against the lord of all gods, 'Elore'. At the end, Death and Schirach lost and were stripped of their powers. Saruin, who was not willing to accept defeat and the same punishment, was instead imprisoned within ten fatestones by a hero who would perish in that battle and be turned into a god by Elore as thanks. Now, a millennium later, all Fatestones are scattered throughout Mardias and evil powers festered bent on releasing Saruin, with eight heroes fighting back to make sure that this doesn't happen.
It's an OK setup for a main story of its time. How does it happen that the Fatestones are scattered? If Saruin is imprisoned in them, how can you not take care of even one of the stones? Well, we shouldn't try to look for too much logic here. The game treats the main story as an afterthought, which is OK for what it is going for, but so should we in that case.
Unfortunately, 'afterthought' is an understatement, because the main story doesn't really get any mention apart from certain main story quests that trigger for mid-game and end-game portions. I found two conflicting notes on this online, one saying that the amount of quests you finish trigger these 'jumps' and another saying that the amount of encounters you had does the trick. I'm finding number of quests to be likelier, but either way, you're not going through a linear path of quests to unlock those main quests. And only in those main quests do you learn more about the main story, which, overall, is very little for an RPG. Is that a bad thing? That's for you to decide. The non-linearity is a positive for some, a negative for others. Personally, I'd be more of a fan if the execution wasn't like this.
Because here is the issue for me. The game will take you 30-40 hours to beat just once. You can complete it with all eight characters (and get a secret ending), but those 30-40 hours are brutal in terms of the content that fills them. A good 90% of your time is spent in caves fighting near endless waves of enemies in, 90% of the time, battles that can be described as cakewalks. Of the remaining 10%, I'd guesstimate that 8% is walking around in same-looking towns to collect gear and quests, and 2% is actual story dialogue.
The combat does not have nearly the amount of depth necessary to pull the majority of players through, at least not in a fun way. In my opinion, there needs to be plenty of balance between lengthy 'dungeon-crawling' and story bits in RPGs. Final Fantasy IV did a good job in achieving this a year earlier. With Romancing SaGa, that is not the case, and I couldn't put myself through the monotony for dozens of hours, both because I don't consider it to be fun (maybe I would have if I was 8 again and didn't have many other games to choose from) and because I can put the time into the other games in this challenge which have more varied and, most importantly, rewarding experiences.
Overall, the game employs a "Free Scenario System" that shows a lot of potential. Spiritual successors such as The Octopath Traveler exist. Sequels in the SaGa series exist. This challenge will be exploring those sequels, but in Romancing SaGa, there is not enough in the side-quests and pretty much nothing in the main storyline to push one through the brutally repetitive combat system. The SNES cartridge space will not have done the developers any favors, so future generations should help out there, but I also think that improved balance in the next SNES iterations could help the potential be reached sooner than later. We shall see.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
Gameplay is not as unique as the "Free Scenario System" we went over at length above, but there are certain elements to Romancing SaGa that make it stand out over other JRPGs of the time as well. Let's start with the similarities.
Just like Final Fantasy, you explore many different locations as you visit their towns and dungeons. You go into many battle encounters with turn-based combat. You purchase healing items, magic items, weapons and armor to equip your party members.
There are many differences though. First, let's go over exploration. Instead of traveling the overworld to find the towns and their nearby dungeons, you select a location from the map and fast-travel there. There is no exploration to be done in between.
Towns have their shops and inns positioned slightly differently, but inherently are all the same. You got an inn, a weapons store, a magic store and a pub to look at quest notices and find companions. There are few, if any, other houses that specific characters own. There are nearly no characters roaming in these towns in general, perhaps 3 or 4 apart from the shopkeepers. Nearby, there is emptiness that fills the space between a town and the dungeon you're supposed to enter once you get the quest. There also is going to be a path that allows you to open up the map and travel elsewhere.
There are barely any, if any, secret paths to take. Nearly all chests, if not all, simply contain gold. I haven't found anything else in 5 hours. Items to buy with the gold usually seem overpriced, though perhaps later locations give you a lot more to make up for that.
The biggest difference you will find however is encounters. Instead of walking around and randomly being thrown into a battle, you find all enemies running around in the overworld. There are a lot, and I mean A LOT, of them running around in the same area and you can defeat them one by one to reduce their number to zero, at least until you leave the area and re-enter it, which makes them respawn. It makes encounters more predictable, but my god does it not help you avoid them whatsoever. These enemies will rush after you once they spot you, and most of them are faster than you, so they will catch up. They also mirror your path, so if you try to walk left, they will walk left as well until they catch up to you and engage. If they engage you from the side, it throws your party formation into disarray and leaves you in a tougher spot, though I'll go over that in a little bit. The worst part though is when you try to flee from a battle.
In Final Fantasy, when you escape, the encounter is simply over and you keep moving. In Romancing SaGa, GET THIS: The enemy remains right where they were when they engaged you. So guess what? You are immediately thrown into battle against them again. WTF? You have a split second to react and try to run away, but by the time you process which way to go (usually at least two directions are blocked off by enemies), the enemy re-engages and you enter the battle again. Hilariously terrible and makes escapes pretty much useless.
OK, so let's go over the battle system. It is a turn-based system (doesn't have a 'real-time' component like FFIV, which I don't mind) and uses a 3x3 grid, meaning you can choose to line up 3 party members on three rows. The front row is most susceptible to be attacked, but can use melee weapons. The second and third rows are less likely to be attacked, but can't reach with melee weapons. Spears, bows, magic skills and special limited-use attacks for melee weapons (a slash on swords for example) do reach first, second and possibly third rows of the enemies. I did not get the impression that the row has a damage output penalty like in Final Fantasy games.
Unlike many other RPGs, you don't have a 'level' that you increase. Instead, you have a number of stats that get increased after each encounter, like Speed, Vitality and Charisma, which increase hit points and damage output for specific attacks. That's the game's specific oddity but not a bad one. Here is an oddity that IS bad however. As you use weapons more and more, you get upgrades to those weapons, like a slashing attack for a melee weapon that lets you hit the second row. This experience needs to be gained for every weapon that is in the game. If you don't like a weapon and decide to switch back, guess what? All your experience for the weapon has reset. Why? Who knows, maybe a developmental oversight.
The UI for combat also makes matters worse. In Final Fantasy, you select whether you want to attack, guard or use an item on one screen. In this game, you need to cycle from left to right to find the screen you are looking for, and there is a screen for each weapon and skill you have equipped. With the thousands of encounters you will have in this game, all the cycling can become really tiresome. The game saves the screen you were on last time, which means you can spam A to do quick attacks when the cycle is pre-selected. But as mentioned, side-engagements by the enemy throws your formation into disarray, so the same characters will find themselves in the second and third row all of a sudden, unable to attack. You can either let them "defend" (which doesn't really do anything like 'Guard' does) or have them move forward/backward a row, but this means cycling through the menus. Next time, you need to cycle back when you had a frontal engagement. So you're not spared all the cycling. I didn't sign up for Tour de France, man. So all the grindy fights where you simply would just spam a basic attack, you have all these extra steps involved, and things move at a snails pace. Before the screen pops up, you first need to press a key. Why? Who knows. But this means instead of two key-presses (attack, enemy select), you do three (empty press, attack, enemy select).
To conclude, it's an interesting system but slowed down to a horrible degree. There is a fast-forward feature on the emulator I am using, and I did an experiment through a dungeon to show you how horrible it is. Even if you fast-forward, the in-game counter doesn't know it, so it updates as if you did everything in regular time. In real-time, I went through a dungeon in five minutes using the fast-forward key. In game time, and in would-be real time without the fast forward, it took 40 (!) minutes. And none of the fights required a drop of strategy, so you literally are spending 35 of 40 minutes pressing the same button and waiting for it to play out the same way. Yeesh. That's literally 30-34 of 40 hours it takes to beat the game. I understand that most gameplay in RPGs is spent like this, but it's not nearly this much and it's also not in a game where there is no strategy involved for the majority of battles.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting. The sound design is average, but the one thing I noticed was how your strikes in combat didn't have the satisfying ferocity that they had in Final Fantasy. The soundtrack has good and bad parts. The main theme sounds like your prototypical Square NES/SNES main theme to the point that it is indistinguishable. The unique part about the soundrack, which isn't overly long, is that each character has their own unique theme. The bad part about it is that it plays endlessly in a loop, unless you are in a story set piece or in a dungeon. After 5 hours, Albert's theme makes a shiver run down my spine. The battle theme is the same as well, but that's typical for most RPGs and this one actually sounds pretty good, even after 5 hours. Overall, it's a soundtrack that sounds solidly average, one that you will remember fondly, if nostalgia is involved and one that is mostly forgettable, apart from the battle and character themes that you end up listening to for 30-40 hours.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Graphically this gives the impression of mid-budget early SNES game. That's to say that it certainly makes use of the jump to 16-bit, especially for a game that was Game Boy exclusive up to this point, but there is a lot of potential left to reach still. One thing I like the most about the game graphically is the sprite work and design for the companions, which look pretty good and distinct. Battles play out in terrain that you engaged the enemy in, which is a nice touch that will become more common on the SNES. Enemy sprites look OK but the lower resolution look compared to the characters is slighty off-putting. Sprites are also not animated as they await their turn, similarly to FFIV, which would have been nice but is not the norm yet.
One note worth making is on the menu UI, both in battle (which I commented on in 'Gameplay' -> sucks) and in your inventory, which is worse than in Final Fantasy. Stacking items isn't possible, so I was stuck having two slots occupied by 'Balm' from the start for some reason and equipping stuff requires you to go through many more clicks.
Overall, the game looks like a small upgrade to 8-bit RPGs. The first sentence in this section above pretty much describes it simply.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 6/10
I really like how you can choose one character and then meet the other starting characters in the areas where you would be had you chosen them. This gives the game world a sort of realistic feel that you simply visit from the perspective of one of the available options. Enemies being visible in the overworld is also a nice touch, at least atmospherically, as it doesn't necessarily equate to a more enjoyable experience based on execution. I also like the world map that covers a number of different kingdoms, and these points are pretty much the most notable things as it pertains to immersion. The game doesn't accomplish anything else specifically, but it isn't as good a look to have all towns be pretty much copies of each other and be mostly barren of life.
CONTENT | 5/10
There are plenty of dungeons to fight enemies in, thousands of encounters to go through, dozens of companions to recruit, lots of locations to travel and quests to find, but one of those points proves why quantity is never better than quality, especially if you don't have much quality in that department to begin with. Thousands of encounters that play out the same way to bloat the play time way beyond where it needs to be. Final Fantasy IV isn't this long, and it includes a ton of story elements as well. This game barely has story and lasts 30-40 hours. It's just way too much.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
I do like the amount of freedom on offer here, from choosing the character to play, to being let go in the world, but I definitely expected more from what I heard. "Open world" and "non-linear" are attached to this series a lot, but for those 5 hours I played, the path was certainly as linear as it gets, it simply was a unique path to Albert (and presumably Sif). Going from one location to the next also necessitates fast travel, with no way to organically go there, which eliminates open world as well, especially since each individual location usually comes with the same few features like towns and dungeons, with basically no motivation to explore in between. Then you look at it more closely and you're expected to go through dungeons with a solid 50-100 encounters per dungeon, the majority of which require next to no strategy, and I can't say I'm too positive on the design here for the most part.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The "Free Scenario System" certainly is unique. The 3x3 grid used for the combat is not bad as well, nor is the fact that you can see the enemies in the overworld instead of being thrown in random encounters. Unfortunately, innovation comes with growing pains, and that's certainly the case here, as all of these features have more negatives than positives attached to them in this particular game in my opinion.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
There is genuine replayability here. The only reason I'm not giving it a perfect score here is because replaying it means another few thousand encounters to go through, which will not be a lot of fun unless you're a massive sucker for turn-based combat that doesn't have much depth. But to be able to go through eight charaters and have most of them go through pretty different journeys is definitely a very nice feature, if we don't consider the concessions that were made to make it happen. There is no character development and very little personality in characters to make these unique routes stand out as much as they should as well, but for its time, having this much 'freedom' was unheard of, at least when it comes to Japanese RPGs.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 57/100
I'd like to summarize the game as follows: Romancing SaGa introduces many unique ideas to the JRPG genre, but its innovation comes with very apparent growing pains. Had this been as clean as it gets for a first iteration of a formula (A Link To The Past), you would have definitely heard of it by now and would have had this game release in the West way before its 2005 PS2 port, so my opinion isn't a unique one. Future games in the series will definitely do a better job to appeal to more players, and I'm excited to find out, but as it stands, I'd recommend to skip to those for newcomers or to play a spiritual successor like "The Octopath Traveler".
The 'SaGa' series started in 1989 with 'The Final Fantasy Legend', as it is known by in the West, and was a Game Boy series for its first three titles until Romancing SaGa brought it to the SNES on January 28, 1992. Well, at least in Japan it did, as the game did not get a release in the West. The SNES actually never did, in fact, but a PS2 remake called 'Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song' did release in North America in 2005, though the 'Mistrel Song' subtitle would only be included in Japanese versions.
'Romancing SaGa' did pretty well, with over a million sales recorded for its SNES version. The game was developed by Square, who had released their first SNES game in 1991 called 'Final Fantasy IV', you may know it. The alliance of both games with Square is immediately notable, but Romancing SaGa , and SaGa games overall, are different in many ways from their Final Fantasy counterpart that makes the SaGa games stand out as their own, distinctive series.
Personally, I think it differs positively in many ways, but negatively in at least just as many. I go over everything in my review for 'Romancing SaGa'.
(I was able to play the SNES version with fan translations. If you are interested in this game, I would recommend the PS2 version for both its official translation and the many QoL and overall graphical improvements you will find with it.)
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10
You play Albert, heir to a noble lord in Rosalia. No wait, you play Sif, a warrior from Valhalland. Or do you play Jamil, a thief in Estamir? Wait, what?
Off the bat, you will find out why the SaGa series is very different from your run-of-the-mill JRPG in terms of its story set-up. You have eight unique characters to choose from. Not eight different classes (though they do all differ in class), but eight (!) unique (!) characters, each with their own name and background and, most importantly, their own journey. Their journey all lead to the same destination, but you'll be surprised with the amount of freedom in play here. This is not Cyberpunk 2077, where a few intros play out differently and all culminate in the same outcome an hour into the game.
For example, I chose Albert. In his introduction, he and his sister clear a cave near the castle that is their home. Upon return, the castle is attacked by monsters, and they are to flee and report the incident to a nearby kingdom. Diana, his sister, pushes Albert off a cliff to save him from strong enemies that have surrounded them (why she doesn't jump after him, I don't know). She dies trying to fend off the attackers, while Albert wakes up later in the home of a caretaker. From here, Albert finds himself in Loban. From there, he is to take a ship to Yeoville that runs into a storm and washes up near Valhalland, where he meets Sif.
Sif's story starts in Valhalland and she finds Albert knocked out on the ship wreck, so there is some crossover at times.
Then there is Claudia's story, who is an orphan raised by the witch of the forest in Mazewood. She goes to clear a cave from monsters as well, finds a Knight called Gian getting attacked, helps him and then proceeds to leave the Mazewood later on in her introduction. She takes a totally different route, explore different areas and meets other potential companions than Albert or Sif, either meeting them much earlier or doing so at all, such as a bear and a wolf-like creature that lived with her in Mazewood.
The locations you explore are not only relevant in the companions you can fight for battles, of which there are dozens, but also in the quests you find and can pursue. These quests often don't go beyond simple set-ups to explore nearby caves and exterminate the monsters within, but it adds to the replayability and the unique structure of each character's playthrough.
So overall, it's not just eight different intros, but many different journeys altogether. This unfortunately does come with its many concessions and makes tying things together for the main story, which does exist, much more difficult. The execution in the end is lackluster, both from experience and, mainly, from reading up on it, as I couldn't justify playing the game more than I did (a little over 5 hours), which I will mainly explain in the 'Gameplay' section.
Let's start with the main story. The game is set in Mardias, where three gods called 'Death', 'Saruin' and 'Schirach' waged war against the lord of all gods, 'Elore'. At the end, Death and Schirach lost and were stripped of their powers. Saruin, who was not willing to accept defeat and the same punishment, was instead imprisoned within ten fatestones by a hero who would perish in that battle and be turned into a god by Elore as thanks. Now, a millennium later, all Fatestones are scattered throughout Mardias and evil powers festered bent on releasing Saruin, with eight heroes fighting back to make sure that this doesn't happen.
It's an OK setup for a main story of its time. How does it happen that the Fatestones are scattered? If Saruin is imprisoned in them, how can you not take care of even one of the stones? Well, we shouldn't try to look for too much logic here. The game treats the main story as an afterthought, which is OK for what it is going for, but so should we in that case.
Unfortunately, 'afterthought' is an understatement, because the main story doesn't really get any mention apart from certain main story quests that trigger for mid-game and end-game portions. I found two conflicting notes on this online, one saying that the amount of quests you finish trigger these 'jumps' and another saying that the amount of encounters you had does the trick. I'm finding number of quests to be likelier, but either way, you're not going through a linear path of quests to unlock those main quests. And only in those main quests do you learn more about the main story, which, overall, is very little for an RPG. Is that a bad thing? That's for you to decide. The non-linearity is a positive for some, a negative for others. Personally, I'd be more of a fan if the execution wasn't like this.
Because here is the issue for me. The game will take you 30-40 hours to beat just once. You can complete it with all eight characters (and get a secret ending), but those 30-40 hours are brutal in terms of the content that fills them. A good 90% of your time is spent in caves fighting near endless waves of enemies in, 90% of the time, battles that can be described as cakewalks. Of the remaining 10%, I'd guesstimate that 8% is walking around in same-looking towns to collect gear and quests, and 2% is actual story dialogue.
The combat does not have nearly the amount of depth necessary to pull the majority of players through, at least not in a fun way. In my opinion, there needs to be plenty of balance between lengthy 'dungeon-crawling' and story bits in RPGs. Final Fantasy IV did a good job in achieving this a year earlier. With Romancing SaGa, that is not the case, and I couldn't put myself through the monotony for dozens of hours, both because I don't consider it to be fun (maybe I would have if I was 8 again and didn't have many other games to choose from) and because I can put the time into the other games in this challenge which have more varied and, most importantly, rewarding experiences.
Overall, the game employs a "Free Scenario System" that shows a lot of potential. Spiritual successors such as The Octopath Traveler exist. Sequels in the SaGa series exist. This challenge will be exploring those sequels, but in Romancing SaGa, there is not enough in the side-quests and pretty much nothing in the main storyline to push one through the brutally repetitive combat system. The SNES cartridge space will not have done the developers any favors, so future generations should help out there, but I also think that improved balance in the next SNES iterations could help the potential be reached sooner than later. We shall see.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
Gameplay is not as unique as the "Free Scenario System" we went over at length above, but there are certain elements to Romancing SaGa that make it stand out over other JRPGs of the time as well. Let's start with the similarities.
Just like Final Fantasy, you explore many different locations as you visit their towns and dungeons. You go into many battle encounters with turn-based combat. You purchase healing items, magic items, weapons and armor to equip your party members.
There are many differences though. First, let's go over exploration. Instead of traveling the overworld to find the towns and their nearby dungeons, you select a location from the map and fast-travel there. There is no exploration to be done in between.
Towns have their shops and inns positioned slightly differently, but inherently are all the same. You got an inn, a weapons store, a magic store and a pub to look at quest notices and find companions. There are few, if any, other houses that specific characters own. There are nearly no characters roaming in these towns in general, perhaps 3 or 4 apart from the shopkeepers. Nearby, there is emptiness that fills the space between a town and the dungeon you're supposed to enter once you get the quest. There also is going to be a path that allows you to open up the map and travel elsewhere.
There are barely any, if any, secret paths to take. Nearly all chests, if not all, simply contain gold. I haven't found anything else in 5 hours. Items to buy with the gold usually seem overpriced, though perhaps later locations give you a lot more to make up for that.
The biggest difference you will find however is encounters. Instead of walking around and randomly being thrown into a battle, you find all enemies running around in the overworld. There are a lot, and I mean A LOT, of them running around in the same area and you can defeat them one by one to reduce their number to zero, at least until you leave the area and re-enter it, which makes them respawn. It makes encounters more predictable, but my god does it not help you avoid them whatsoever. These enemies will rush after you once they spot you, and most of them are faster than you, so they will catch up. They also mirror your path, so if you try to walk left, they will walk left as well until they catch up to you and engage. If they engage you from the side, it throws your party formation into disarray and leaves you in a tougher spot, though I'll go over that in a little bit. The worst part though is when you try to flee from a battle.
In Final Fantasy, when you escape, the encounter is simply over and you keep moving. In Romancing SaGa, GET THIS: The enemy remains right where they were when they engaged you. So guess what? You are immediately thrown into battle against them again. WTF? You have a split second to react and try to run away, but by the time you process which way to go (usually at least two directions are blocked off by enemies), the enemy re-engages and you enter the battle again. Hilariously terrible and makes escapes pretty much useless.
OK, so let's go over the battle system. It is a turn-based system (doesn't have a 'real-time' component like FFIV, which I don't mind) and uses a 3x3 grid, meaning you can choose to line up 3 party members on three rows. The front row is most susceptible to be attacked, but can use melee weapons. The second and third rows are less likely to be attacked, but can't reach with melee weapons. Spears, bows, magic skills and special limited-use attacks for melee weapons (a slash on swords for example) do reach first, second and possibly third rows of the enemies. I did not get the impression that the row has a damage output penalty like in Final Fantasy games.
Unlike many other RPGs, you don't have a 'level' that you increase. Instead, you have a number of stats that get increased after each encounter, like Speed, Vitality and Charisma, which increase hit points and damage output for specific attacks. That's the game's specific oddity but not a bad one. Here is an oddity that IS bad however. As you use weapons more and more, you get upgrades to those weapons, like a slashing attack for a melee weapon that lets you hit the second row. This experience needs to be gained for every weapon that is in the game. If you don't like a weapon and decide to switch back, guess what? All your experience for the weapon has reset. Why? Who knows, maybe a developmental oversight.
The UI for combat also makes matters worse. In Final Fantasy, you select whether you want to attack, guard or use an item on one screen. In this game, you need to cycle from left to right to find the screen you are looking for, and there is a screen for each weapon and skill you have equipped. With the thousands of encounters you will have in this game, all the cycling can become really tiresome. The game saves the screen you were on last time, which means you can spam A to do quick attacks when the cycle is pre-selected. But as mentioned, side-engagements by the enemy throws your formation into disarray, so the same characters will find themselves in the second and third row all of a sudden, unable to attack. You can either let them "defend" (which doesn't really do anything like 'Guard' does) or have them move forward/backward a row, but this means cycling through the menus. Next time, you need to cycle back when you had a frontal engagement. So you're not spared all the cycling. I didn't sign up for Tour de France, man. So all the grindy fights where you simply would just spam a basic attack, you have all these extra steps involved, and things move at a snails pace. Before the screen pops up, you first need to press a key. Why? Who knows. But this means instead of two key-presses (attack, enemy select), you do three (empty press, attack, enemy select).
To conclude, it's an interesting system but slowed down to a horrible degree. There is a fast-forward feature on the emulator I am using, and I did an experiment through a dungeon to show you how horrible it is. Even if you fast-forward, the in-game counter doesn't know it, so it updates as if you did everything in regular time. In real-time, I went through a dungeon in five minutes using the fast-forward key. In game time, and in would-be real time without the fast forward, it took 40 (!) minutes. And none of the fights required a drop of strategy, so you literally are spending 35 of 40 minutes pressing the same button and waiting for it to play out the same way. Yeesh. That's literally 30-34 of 40 hours it takes to beat the game. I understand that most gameplay in RPGs is spent like this, but it's not nearly this much and it's also not in a game where there is no strategy involved for the majority of battles.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting. The sound design is average, but the one thing I noticed was how your strikes in combat didn't have the satisfying ferocity that they had in Final Fantasy. The soundtrack has good and bad parts. The main theme sounds like your prototypical Square NES/SNES main theme to the point that it is indistinguishable. The unique part about the soundrack, which isn't overly long, is that each character has their own unique theme. The bad part about it is that it plays endlessly in a loop, unless you are in a story set piece or in a dungeon. After 5 hours, Albert's theme makes a shiver run down my spine. The battle theme is the same as well, but that's typical for most RPGs and this one actually sounds pretty good, even after 5 hours. Overall, it's a soundtrack that sounds solidly average, one that you will remember fondly, if nostalgia is involved and one that is mostly forgettable, apart from the battle and character themes that you end up listening to for 30-40 hours.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Graphically this gives the impression of mid-budget early SNES game. That's to say that it certainly makes use of the jump to 16-bit, especially for a game that was Game Boy exclusive up to this point, but there is a lot of potential left to reach still. One thing I like the most about the game graphically is the sprite work and design for the companions, which look pretty good and distinct. Battles play out in terrain that you engaged the enemy in, which is a nice touch that will become more common on the SNES. Enemy sprites look OK but the lower resolution look compared to the characters is slighty off-putting. Sprites are also not animated as they await their turn, similarly to FFIV, which would have been nice but is not the norm yet.
One note worth making is on the menu UI, both in battle (which I commented on in 'Gameplay' -> sucks) and in your inventory, which is worse than in Final Fantasy. Stacking items isn't possible, so I was stuck having two slots occupied by 'Balm' from the start for some reason and equipping stuff requires you to go through many more clicks.
Overall, the game looks like a small upgrade to 8-bit RPGs. The first sentence in this section above pretty much describes it simply.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 6/10
I really like how you can choose one character and then meet the other starting characters in the areas where you would be had you chosen them. This gives the game world a sort of realistic feel that you simply visit from the perspective of one of the available options. Enemies being visible in the overworld is also a nice touch, at least atmospherically, as it doesn't necessarily equate to a more enjoyable experience based on execution. I also like the world map that covers a number of different kingdoms, and these points are pretty much the most notable things as it pertains to immersion. The game doesn't accomplish anything else specifically, but it isn't as good a look to have all towns be pretty much copies of each other and be mostly barren of life.
CONTENT | 5/10
There are plenty of dungeons to fight enemies in, thousands of encounters to go through, dozens of companions to recruit, lots of locations to travel and quests to find, but one of those points proves why quantity is never better than quality, especially if you don't have much quality in that department to begin with. Thousands of encounters that play out the same way to bloat the play time way beyond where it needs to be. Final Fantasy IV isn't this long, and it includes a ton of story elements as well. This game barely has story and lasts 30-40 hours. It's just way too much.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
I do like the amount of freedom on offer here, from choosing the character to play, to being let go in the world, but I definitely expected more from what I heard. "Open world" and "non-linear" are attached to this series a lot, but for those 5 hours I played, the path was certainly as linear as it gets, it simply was a unique path to Albert (and presumably Sif). Going from one location to the next also necessitates fast travel, with no way to organically go there, which eliminates open world as well, especially since each individual location usually comes with the same few features like towns and dungeons, with basically no motivation to explore in between. Then you look at it more closely and you're expected to go through dungeons with a solid 50-100 encounters per dungeon, the majority of which require next to no strategy, and I can't say I'm too positive on the design here for the most part.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The "Free Scenario System" certainly is unique. The 3x3 grid used for the combat is not bad as well, nor is the fact that you can see the enemies in the overworld instead of being thrown in random encounters. Unfortunately, innovation comes with growing pains, and that's certainly the case here, as all of these features have more negatives than positives attached to them in this particular game in my opinion.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
There is genuine replayability here. The only reason I'm not giving it a perfect score here is because replaying it means another few thousand encounters to go through, which will not be a lot of fun unless you're a massive sucker for turn-based combat that doesn't have much depth. But to be able to go through eight charaters and have most of them go through pretty different journeys is definitely a very nice feature, if we don't consider the concessions that were made to make it happen. There is no character development and very little personality in characters to make these unique routes stand out as much as they should as well, but for its time, having this much 'freedom' was unheard of, at least when it comes to Japanese RPGs.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 57/100
I'd like to summarize the game as follows: Romancing SaGa introduces many unique ideas to the JRPG genre, but its innovation comes with very apparent growing pains. Had this been as clean as it gets for a first iteration of a formula (A Link To The Past), you would have definitely heard of it by now and would have had this game release in the West way before its 2005 PS2 port, so my opinion isn't a unique one. Future games in the series will definitely do a better job to appeal to more players, and I'm excited to find out, but as it stands, I'd recommend to skip to those for newcomers or to play a spiritual successor like "The Octopath Traveler".