For my money, it’s only worth playing if you have a historical curiosity or made the bizarre life decision to play every SaGa game like me. It’s a simpler and worse version of SaGa 2 all the way around – game structure, narrative, game mechanics, even music imho. It definitely feels like a prototype, given the gift of hindsight.
That said, it introduced one of my favorite race systems ever. You have humans who gain stats through buying potions, mutants who randomly gain stats and abilities (including losing abilities) after each battle, and monsters that change into enemies through eating their flesh. The most enjoyable part of this game was a 15 minute period where I lucked into a series of monster forms that took my monster from the weakest member of my party to the most powerful by a noticeable margin.
Other than that, you’re climbing a tower and going to different worlds with a fairly thin storyline tying everything together. Oh, and you can only hold 8 items, which is extremely annoying since you need items to cure status effects, you want to carry healing, and all of your weapons have durability that can never be repaired. Annoying, but manageable.
What’s not manageable is the absolutely atrocious late game section where you get attacked by an immortal phoenix every 1-3 steps while you try to figure out where to go. Running away seems to be a set 50/50 chance, so you get to spend a lot of time failing to run and having status effects dumped on your characters or just having them take massive damage. I was finding the game chill, if not particularly inspiring, up until that point. From that point on, though, I only finished out the game because I'm stubborn and my goal is to beat every game in the series.
Speeding through the final portion of the game left me with a very difficult final boss fight. That actually ended up being a good thing -- barely scraping by on my third try added some weight to the twist and the end and was actually a nice way to finish my time with the game.
While I love the human/mutant/monster system and appreciate the foundation Makai Toushi SaGa laid, I just can’t get past how miserable I found such a large chunk of the game. It’s the only game in the series I have absolutely no interest in returning to in the future.
That said, it introduced one of my favorite race systems ever. You have humans who gain stats through buying potions, mutants who randomly gain stats and abilities (including losing abilities) after each battle, and monsters that change into enemies through eating their flesh. The most enjoyable part of this game was a 15 minute period where I lucked into a series of monster forms that took my monster from the weakest member of my party to the most powerful by a noticeable margin.
Other than that, you’re climbing a tower and going to different worlds with a fairly thin storyline tying everything together. Oh, and you can only hold 8 items, which is extremely annoying since you need items to cure status effects, you want to carry healing, and all of your weapons have durability that can never be repaired. Annoying, but manageable.
What’s not manageable is the absolutely atrocious late game section where you get attacked by an immortal phoenix every 1-3 steps while you try to figure out where to go. Running away seems to be a set 50/50 chance, so you get to spend a lot of time failing to run and having status effects dumped on your characters or just having them take massive damage. I was finding the game chill, if not particularly inspiring, up until that point. From that point on, though, I only finished out the game because I'm stubborn and my goal is to beat every game in the series.
Speeding through the final portion of the game left me with a very difficult final boss fight. That actually ended up being a good thing -- barely scraping by on my third try added some weight to the twist and the end and was actually a nice way to finish my time with the game.
While I love the human/mutant/monster system and appreciate the foundation Makai Toushi SaGa laid, I just can’t get past how miserable I found such a large chunk of the game. It’s the only game in the series I have absolutely no interest in returning to in the future.