This is not a full review, because I don’t think I’m in any position to actually review this. I only did 2 of the 8 stories, and I don’t feel like playing through more of it right now. That said, I still wanna talk about it. So I’m writing this as an impressions post, since I can’t review it.

I’ve been enjoying me some SaGa recently. The SaGa collection on Switch of the old Game Boy games is really fun (SaGa 2 being my favorite of that bunch), and I also semi-recently played through SaGa Scarlet Grace and I really enjoyed that game’s combat and overall weird mechanics.

Anyways, let’s talk about this one quickly.

Developer: Bullets (original PS1 version of the game was developed by Square Product Development Division 2)
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: April 15th 2021
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (Switch version played)
Genre: Console-style RPG

So this game is a pretty unique JRPG. If you’re familiar with SaGa in any way, you know it doesn’t generally function like other games in the genre do. It’s been like that since Final Fantasy 2 with its wacky leveling gameplay (and then that director went on to the SaGa series).

This game features 8 unique scenarios. One of them is one that wasn’t in the original PS1 release of the game (you need to finish at least one other scenario to unlock it). I’ve only played 2 of them, Emilia’s and T260G’s. The way the story is told is actually rather vague. In Emilia’s story she finds her husband dead (which is impossible, no spoilers but… yeaaaaaah), killed by Joker, but she’s accused of murder instead and sent to prison. She escapes prison and basically starts following Joker around with the help of a resistance group called Gradius, doing various missions for them. What’s weird about the story in this case is that Joker’s motivation is never made clear (it’s Cube, but you’re not really told what it is specifically, and it’s hardly mentioned, the first time it even comes up it’s just randomly mentioned by Emilia), and the ending is completely random… and there’s a big, gaping, impossible plot hole that just straight up can’t happen. T260G’s story is a bit simpler. He’s a robot, with a mission, and he wants to figure out what the mission is, and he does it… not too complex here, less broken at a fundamental level than Emilia’s. I’m sure if I played more of the stories I’d piece some of the elements together a bit better, and the new scenario, Fuse’s, apparently does a bit of that itself. But I think the issue is how everything is presented. Things are mentioned, or happen, without really any explanation. It’s pretty strange. Maybe some of the stories I didn’t play are a bit better about this, I may keep on playing more of them at some point.

The graphics are decent, I feel the characters would do well with having more animation to it. Weird how a PS1 game would have less expressive characters than, say, FF6 on SNES. There’s some scenes that would definitely be a bit nicer if characters didn’t remain completely stoic. The walking around is mostly fine, I did notice some places where it’s a bit hard to figure out if you can walk on them or not. Comparing the original to this remaster, sprites and environments are definitely way smoother, though their overall style changes very slightly from the original version. I’d say it’s an upgrade both technically and stylistically, though a bit of pixelization wouldn’t be bad. I will say the Switch port has some weird issues with occasional framerate drops, not sure why that would happen, I hear the PS4 version doesn’t run into those.

One weird thing about the game visually is the enemy choice. Say you’re in a cave which leads to some ancient ruins or something, there may be some kinds of enemies you’d expect. You know, bats, skeletons, rats, some beasts that made the ruins their home… or maybe clown monkeys on unicycles? Yeah that’s a weird thing, the enemy selection is occasionally senseless and way too varied, there’s rarely a unifying theme for the monsters in a single area. I find it funny, but consistency might just work better, you know.

So this game does a few things pretty uniquely. It doesn’t feature a world map. Instead there’s a bunch of areas, and for free you can take aircrafts to different places. A few of these places can only be accessed by first going to a specific area first…. and most require you to get back to Koorong first anyways which is a bit random. The game does kind of allow you to go pretty much anywhere (with some exceptions), where you can talk to people and possibly get them to join your party, or finding side quests and such. Most stories will require you to go to specific places to progress, which you can find in the story log most of the time (from what I’ve seen) just in case the dialogue wasn’t clear enough. Also different areas will have sellers for different kinds of magic, which you tend to first need to acquire something to get… I didn’t experience with magic much, for reasons I will go into soon. If I have any big issue, it’s the selling of items… it’s not something you can… do? There’s specific shops that will bujy only specific items, it’s really random and a weird system.

The other thing that’s pretty unique is how you level up. How you level up is actually different based on what race a character is. For humans it’s ranom, basically. Whenever you finish a battle, you seemingly have a random chance of a random stat going up. They generally start out weak and take a bit to build up compared to the other classes. Monsters don’t level up naturally. Instead, when you kill monsters, after battle you can feed the dead enemies to your monsters, who may then evolve into better monsters (you need a good understanding of the monster. From this they also learn skills from the eaten monster, replacing one of their current skills. Mystics can use their MysticSword, MysticBoots, and MysticGlove to absorb enemies, which will power them up and also make them learn a skill from that enemy (I hear absorbing 3 Suzaku enemies is enough to give a mystic endgame stats). Also Mystics have this weird element where lower-mystic enemies don’t deal as much damage to higher-mystics? And Robots don’t level, but instead power up based on equipment. They learn skills basically by killing robotic enemies and downloading skills from them. Robots have different body types with their own base stats (and some have preset skills), and they can learn more skills if you get intelligence power ups. I know T260 can change body type, I don’t think the others can. Also robots are mostly immune to status changes.

Humans also learn skills very differently from other classes. I already explained how Robots, Monsters and Mystics learn theirs (also there’s at least one half-mystic, that does both the mystic thing and the . Humans instead can equip any weapon type. In battle when they use an attack, they have a random chance of instead learning a new attack from that weapon’s attack pool. Say you have a sword, whenever you attack, you basically have a random chance to learn the best sword attack even the first time you attack with a sword. You do have a certain number of slots to equip skills (and magic also takes some of those slots) so if you want to learn a skill, be sure to have at least one free slot. Also some attacks have better chance of learning other specific attacks. There’s one attack that is learned differently, and it’s fucking stupid, and it’s also the best attack in the game by far. It’s called DSC (stands for “Dream Super Combo”), and how you learn this is by learning and equipping 4 specific Martial Art attacks: Slide, Suplex, Giant Swing and Collapse (using Tumble helps with learning some of these faster). DSC doesn’t take a skill slot, it just appears in battle under Martial Arts if you have those other 4 skills equipped. DSC does a random amount of hits, and can deal up to a ridiculous 20000 damage. It does take a lot of WP (like MP but for weapons), but it’s so strong it’s kinda not worth teaching humans anything else, at least when it comes to, say, big boss battles. For normal battles, it’s certainly worth playing with other weapons that have skills that use less WP, but for bosses, might as well go wild with DSC… unless the boss is immune to it, of course. Humans learning skills is referred to as Sparking, btw. In some other SaGa games it may be called Glimmer.

Battles are a bit closer to normal JRPG stuff but not quite. Because SaGa just can’t be normal. In the character’s equipment they have slots for armor and slots for weapons. The weapon slots is also where you can put useable items. Of course if you equip a healing item, that’s just one, so if you use it in battle, you have to remember to equip another one. There is a Backpack item which lets you use any item in your inventory, though generally you don’t get more than one (in my experience). Some skills and spells can also heal, but in some cases only one character on your team can be a full-time healer with the backpack (or maybe you have enginecar, who can only heal robots if it doesn’t have the backpack). So in battle you get to choose the moves for all your characters, then both you and your characters attack I think in order of speed. If you choose skills with more than one character, there’s a random chance skills will combine so the characters will act at the same time, and hit stronger as a group than they would with the same attacks individually. Some attacks have a better chance of comboing with each other, though sometimes you may not want to combo because you might be trying to use tumble to learn the attacks you need to learn DSC. So healing is weird and not something you end up doing all that much unless you have a good dedicated healer, but it’s not generally needed because you fully heal your HP in-between battles. Not WP or JP (JP is like WP but for magic) though, so you have to manage that part a bit better.

One thing about progression is new game+. Basically when you finish a story you can do new game+, but then you choose a different scenario than the one you beat (because there’s no good reason to do the same ones again unless you want to see the bad endings, because yes there’s bad endings). What new game+ does is start you with all the items and equipment you ended with, and characters are the same level they were when you last had them in your party (no matter how many scenarios ago that was). So if you finished T260’s story and find him in another, he’ll have all the skills he did when you left him in his story. A monster would be at his latest monster form with all the skills you left it with. A human would have all the stats and skills you grinded on them. And so on.

Overall

I found this game pretty enjoyable, but I’d say it’s not my favorite SaGa game (from what I’ve played, I need to dive into the series some more still).

I feel the combat isn’t exactly as good as it could be (compared to, say, Scarlet Grace which has a really fun combat system), and the move learning thing is very a bit more random than I’d expect, especially when some moves are hidden behind getting several other specific moves. Also the story is weird overall. It probably makes more sense if you do ALL the stories, which I haven’t. And one of the characters, Fuse, is a new story for the remaster, which might explain a bit more. Like, in Emilia’s story she randomly mentions Cube… it doesn’t come up before that point, and hardly comes up after that weird mention near the start of her story. It’s important though, I guess. Also her story has a HUGE impossible to explain plot hole. The writing should probably be refined, I wonder if other stories have such huge holes in them.

That said, the combat is fine, the leveling is interesting if you really want to figure that shit out, there’s lots of content and it’s fun to play around with different parties with different racial compositions. Though I do find humans to be pretty powerful because of DSC, despite mystics technically being better stat-wise without the grind required by humans.

I definitely recommend this game if you like weirdo JRPGs, though I’d recommend some of the other SaGa games on Switch before this one, specifically Scarlet Grace, and also the Collection of SaGa which is pretty hype. I don’t know about the Romancing SaGa games yet, they’re next on my SaGa journey.