Silva Saga is one of the most “fine” RPGs I’ve played in my life. What’s crazy is despite releasing in 1992, this game feels outdated. It’s like the developers only resource for RPGs was games like Mother and especially Dragon Quest II. There isn’t really too much to hate here but the game’s difficulty is so easy that I get bored doing random battles. So much of my playthrough was using speedup and 99% of the time not being punished for being lazy.

My only real gripe was trying to find places using the boat as it feels hard to find late areas. This game also loves to use the day and night system for late areas and it doesn’t really add much to the game. There’s a whole mechanic of adding mercenaries to be part of a separate party following you that have wages for each day and I never once hired one because the game is so easy. There’s even idols that also can help you out as a separate party. You can even combine them and level them up but again I just couldn’t care to use them since the game uses so little strategy.

Another weird thing is how party members work. You have the one you name and one that’s all about attack power and one that does more magic than you. The game will constantly have you replacing the two with look-alikes for the sake of passing roadblocks and it feels so unnecessary. There’s only one time a replacement has a different sprite and she stays in the team for like five minutes. So you really only have three but you’ll just see different names and portraits if you look at the Data section. They also for the most part have barely any character.

You do at least not have to worry about grinding because this game gives you a lot of EXP and money for you to savor when beating the enemies. You might have to grind a small bit for money for armor but it’s so easy to get it that it’ll take you like three minutes. It feels like a polar opposite to the usual tropes of a Famicom RPG. You even move pretty fast and the game even refills chests that I’m still unsure if this is a bug with the fan translation or not since I did have one bug where the main character went invisible twice when getting an item.

The game looks nothing impressive for 1992 as it feels the usual for an RPG on the Famicom. Though I will give it one huge compliment. The big sprites for many enemies and bosses are pretty impressive. So impressive that I’d argue they’d be in the top 10 for enemy sprites for the system. It’s weird to praise this of all things but it is how it is. The music is hit or miss as some songs are pretty decent but a lot of them are forgettable or so repetitive it gets annoying after a while. There’s not even a single good battle theme which is a shame.

I can’t in good faith recommend Silva Saga. Sure it is easy so it wouldn’t take long to beat but you have much better options out there nowadays. It isn’t bad but something like this made in 1992 feels a little disappointing. Like I said, it’s fine. I hope whenever I get to Silva Saga II, I’ll enjoy that one more or even the previous game Minelvaton Saga which I didn’t realize was related to this one until an oomf pointed it out to me. Crazy thing is I was considering playing it this year too. Honestly I’m wondering how long it’ll take till I forget about this game, I’d give it a month.