Unlimited SaGa
Jan. 31st, 2010 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe SaGa series includes the three Final Fantasy Legend game boy games (which were very strong for their era), the three Romancing SaGa SNES games (which never made it to the states, though one has a fan translation and one was remade for the PS2; both are on my backlog), the two SaGa Frontier games for PS1 (flawed, but very interesting) and this one, Unlimited SaGa. I really, really wanted to like this game. I even overcame some of my usual rpg prejudices for it (I hate breakable weapons, for one thing; and I'm not a huge fan of non-intuitive levelling systems). But there was just too much to overcome.
I really wanted to like a game that had 7 characters, each with their own story that interweaved the others, plus a slew of sidequests and interesting mythology behind it. Judy's story, for example, revolves around a young witch trying to rescue her family after a magical trap scatters them, and her first companion, Kurt, is one of the other characters and apparently has a cursed guantlet. I'm really curious about Kurt's story, but I'm never going to find out about it, because if the issues below.
I could handle the breakable weapons (you can do just fine with punches and kicks), the obtuse magic system (which is also unlimited once you get the hang of it), the lack of tutorial (man, it really needed one, too) and the levelling system (I needed a little time with gamefaqs and a few false starts, but I got a handle on that). The real killer was the "reel" system--in and out of battle, you need to hit a button to stop a spinning reel, similar to a slot machine, which determines if you use special attacks, if you avoid traps or unlock chests, if you successfully repair your weapons, all that. Thing is, unlike Shadow Hearts, where the ring is very much based on skill, the reels are really just a luck-based system. They're too fast, too long, and too random for you to actually accurately/consistantly do well with them. It's not that big a deal in battle--the special attacks aren't significantly stronger than normal attacks--but can be hugely annoying when you're trying to unlock a chest (and keep failing, even though there's no penalty for failing) or get up a windy road (and keep getting blown back down into random battles).
Add to that the HP/LP system. You have several hundred HP, which are easily lost and easily regained by resting or sitting out turns in battle. You get 10-20 LP, which are lost 1 or 2 at a time from enemies attacking (a) when you're out of HP, or (b) with annoying special attacks. Lose all your LP, you're out until the end of the mission, and if the main character loses all their LP, it's game over. There are no items at all, and no magic restores LP, which means that a particularly nasty random battle can screw you for the entire mission.
This was my big frustration on the very first sidequest (which apparently you're supposed to ignore until near the end of the game, not that anything tells you that--I was playing Judy's story, for reference), where you meet big groups of evil fish that have annoying LP-hitting attacks, and you probably don't have any of the game's very-few hit-all attacks by that point. After dying three times attempting it, I decided to skip most sidequests from then on, and the difficulty of the main quests were such that it didn't seem like a big deal. Then I got to the final dungeon, where you meet Birds of Heaven in random trap battles (which means that in theory you can avoid them via the reel system, but in practice that's bullshit). Birds of Heaven are like the fish, only they have many more HP and LP, so it takes forever to kill them. I spent an hour fighting three battles agains two, two and then four of these things, and severely depleted my party's LP in the process. Then I got into a random battle against SEVEN of the things. At which point I turned off my PS2 (because I couldn't win that battle, but it would take an hour to get to the game over screen), contemplated going back and doing half a dozen sidequests to try to survive this dungeon and the five boss battles at the end of it, and decided that my time would be better spent playing something else. I declared my time playing this game complete.
I recommend this game only if you have amazing superhuman vision/reflexes that lets you defeat slot machines. And I'll hope that someone will be nutty enough to do a Let's Play of it, because I'm really curious about the stories, I just can't handle the game they're attached to.
I really wanted to like a game that had 7 characters, each with their own story that interweaved the others, plus a slew of sidequests and interesting mythology behind it. Judy's story, for example, revolves around a young witch trying to rescue her family after a magical trap scatters them, and her first companion, Kurt, is one of the other characters and apparently has a cursed guantlet. I'm really curious about Kurt's story, but I'm never going to find out about it, because if the issues below.
I could handle the breakable weapons (you can do just fine with punches and kicks), the obtuse magic system (which is also unlimited once you get the hang of it), the lack of tutorial (man, it really needed one, too) and the levelling system (I needed a little time with gamefaqs and a few false starts, but I got a handle on that). The real killer was the "reel" system--in and out of battle, you need to hit a button to stop a spinning reel, similar to a slot machine, which determines if you use special attacks, if you avoid traps or unlock chests, if you successfully repair your weapons, all that. Thing is, unlike Shadow Hearts, where the ring is very much based on skill, the reels are really just a luck-based system. They're too fast, too long, and too random for you to actually accurately/consistantly do well with them. It's not that big a deal in battle--the special attacks aren't significantly stronger than normal attacks--but can be hugely annoying when you're trying to unlock a chest (and keep failing, even though there's no penalty for failing) or get up a windy road (and keep getting blown back down into random battles).
Add to that the HP/LP system. You have several hundred HP, which are easily lost and easily regained by resting or sitting out turns in battle. You get 10-20 LP, which are lost 1 or 2 at a time from enemies attacking (a) when you're out of HP, or (b) with annoying special attacks. Lose all your LP, you're out until the end of the mission, and if the main character loses all their LP, it's game over. There are no items at all, and no magic restores LP, which means that a particularly nasty random battle can screw you for the entire mission.
This was my big frustration on the very first sidequest (which apparently you're supposed to ignore until near the end of the game, not that anything tells you that--I was playing Judy's story, for reference), where you meet big groups of evil fish that have annoying LP-hitting attacks, and you probably don't have any of the game's very-few hit-all attacks by that point. After dying three times attempting it, I decided to skip most sidequests from then on, and the difficulty of the main quests were such that it didn't seem like a big deal. Then I got to the final dungeon, where you meet Birds of Heaven in random trap battles (which means that in theory you can avoid them via the reel system, but in practice that's bullshit). Birds of Heaven are like the fish, only they have many more HP and LP, so it takes forever to kill them. I spent an hour fighting three battles agains two, two and then four of these things, and severely depleted my party's LP in the process. Then I got into a random battle against SEVEN of the things. At which point I turned off my PS2 (because I couldn't win that battle, but it would take an hour to get to the game over screen), contemplated going back and doing half a dozen sidequests to try to survive this dungeon and the five boss battles at the end of it, and decided that my time would be better spent playing something else. I declared my time playing this game complete.
I recommend this game only if you have amazing superhuman vision/reflexes that lets you defeat slot machines. And I'll hope that someone will be nutty enough to do a Let's Play of it, because I'm really curious about the stories, I just can't handle the game they're attached to.
