Makai Toushi SaGa
Sep. 1st, 2010 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroReleased in the US as The Final Fantasy Legend, Makai Toushi Sa·Ga ("Warrior in the Tower of the Spirit World ~ Sa·Ga") was the first real Game Boy jrpg and one of the earliest jrpgs I ever played. (I remember being giddy when I beat Byak-ko for the first time. I think I was around 11.) Japan got a remake on the WonderSwan Color and later on mobile phones which never made it stateside.
I found the ROM a ways back, but don't understand enough Japanese to actually play it as-is. I found a fan translation recently at Tower Reversed. It's a rough translation; worse than the original Game Boy translation for most intents and purposes, but it's not intended to be Shakespeare, it's intended to make the game playable. And it does succeed on that front: Everything is understandable, and you can make use of the game's new features.
Supposedly Aeon Genesis is working on a real, high-quality translation. I'll likely play it when it comes out, whenever it comes out.
Improvements:
- Better graphics, basically later SNES-era quality. Very reminiscent of Final Fantasy Origins / Dawn of Souls. This includes actually palette-swapping the monsters in the same "family", which were identicle in the black-and-white original.
- Cutscenes: They added "title cards" to each main world, and added visual effects to a bunch of plot events, like combining the red and blue orbs or using the Spheres to open the Tower doors. A flock of birds flies by when King Armor's girlfriend thanks you for your help!
- Descriptive text: There's a line of description for every item, weapon, armor and skill. The armor pieces tell you their defense value. The skills tell you what they do. This is seriously a massive improvement over looking weapons/armor up on the "feelie" chart and guessing at skill effects. (Yet still, no one's quite sure what ESP does.)
- Monster preview and beastiary: When eating meat, you're given a preview of what monster you'll become, which is an improvement over the old "eat it and hope" system. (You still really need a chart to effectively track monster evolution, though.) The beastiary has entries for all of the monsters your party members have been, which creates a cute new minigame of trying to turn your party members into every possible monster.
- Mutant abilities: The game now tells you when your mutant (esper) party members increase stats or gain new abilities, rather than your having to check the menu after every battle to keep track of them. It also seems to be more generous with the better abilities than my Game Boy's RNG was, but that may just be the emulator's RNG at work.
- Three save slots, versus only one in the original. It retains the ability to save anywhere.(Particularly useful because WonderSwanCamp, the emulator I'm using, doesn't support save states or cheat codes. I suspect if there were any other WSC games I cared about playing, I'd find a better emulator.)
- The entire game is a bit faster, particularly battles, navigating the menus and buying/using items.
Detriments:
- Several of the original game's bugs were actually quite nice from a gameplay perspective. The "cap" on human Strength and Agility wasn't properly implemented, so while the game would only display up to 99, you could continue raising your stats to 255, just by continuing to chug potions. Indeed, this was one of the tricks that made the late-game particularly survivable. The remake properly implements the cap. I haven't gotten a SAW yet, but I suspect the bug that lets the SAW instant-kill any enemy stronger that you are (including the final boss) is gone as well. (Though I did notice a new glitch: If you inflict confusion on enemies, they'll still attack your party, but their normally single-target attacks will turn into hit-all attacks.)
- Mutant abilities are still random: FFL2 implemented a system where, after your mutant had four abilities, the one sorted to the bottom of the list would always be the one that was replaced. This gave you much more control over your mutant's development and much more security that you wouldn't suddenly lose a key ability mid-dungeon. This game kept the original system where the abilities are unsortable, randomly replaced, and not guarenteed to fill all the slots before they start replacing.
- The other new bonus is that you can play "original mode"; basically, the unmodified original game. This is kinda pointless--if you want to play the original, just get the US version of it.
Overall: Really, this game didn't age that well; I suspect that if it weren't for nostalgia value, I wouldn't be playing it now. The plot is fairly bare-bones for the length of the game and there's a lot of grinding, especially early on. Breakable weapons, randomly-changing abilities and the ability to save anywhere (but no teleport items or abilities until the very end) mean that it can easily become frustrating or even unwinnable. Beating it is really a matter of grinding efficiently for your first couple of hours of game play, exploiting glitches and game-breakers, and being patient. It was a good diversion for its era, but there are much better games now.
I found the ROM a ways back, but don't understand enough Japanese to actually play it as-is. I found a fan translation recently at Tower Reversed. It's a rough translation; worse than the original Game Boy translation for most intents and purposes, but it's not intended to be Shakespeare, it's intended to make the game playable. And it does succeed on that front: Everything is understandable, and you can make use of the game's new features.
Supposedly Aeon Genesis is working on a real, high-quality translation. I'll likely play it when it comes out, whenever it comes out.
Improvements:
- Better graphics, basically later SNES-era quality. Very reminiscent of Final Fantasy Origins / Dawn of Souls. This includes actually palette-swapping the monsters in the same "family", which were identicle in the black-and-white original.
- Cutscenes: They added "title cards" to each main world, and added visual effects to a bunch of plot events, like combining the red and blue orbs or using the Spheres to open the Tower doors. A flock of birds flies by when King Armor's girlfriend thanks you for your help!
- Descriptive text: There's a line of description for every item, weapon, armor and skill. The armor pieces tell you their defense value. The skills tell you what they do. This is seriously a massive improvement over looking weapons/armor up on the "feelie" chart and guessing at skill effects. (Yet still, no one's quite sure what ESP does.)
- Monster preview and beastiary: When eating meat, you're given a preview of what monster you'll become, which is an improvement over the old "eat it and hope" system. (You still really need a chart to effectively track monster evolution, though.) The beastiary has entries for all of the monsters your party members have been, which creates a cute new minigame of trying to turn your party members into every possible monster.
- Mutant abilities: The game now tells you when your mutant (esper) party members increase stats or gain new abilities, rather than your having to check the menu after every battle to keep track of them. It also seems to be more generous with the better abilities than my Game Boy's RNG was, but that may just be the emulator's RNG at work.
- Three save slots, versus only one in the original. It retains the ability to save anywhere.(Particularly useful because WonderSwanCamp, the emulator I'm using, doesn't support save states or cheat codes. I suspect if there were any other WSC games I cared about playing, I'd find a better emulator.)
- The entire game is a bit faster, particularly battles, navigating the menus and buying/using items.
Detriments:
- Several of the original game's bugs were actually quite nice from a gameplay perspective. The "cap" on human Strength and Agility wasn't properly implemented, so while the game would only display up to 99, you could continue raising your stats to 255, just by continuing to chug potions. Indeed, this was one of the tricks that made the late-game particularly survivable. The remake properly implements the cap. I haven't gotten a SAW yet, but I suspect the bug that lets the SAW instant-kill any enemy stronger that you are (including the final boss) is gone as well. (Though I did notice a new glitch: If you inflict confusion on enemies, they'll still attack your party, but their normally single-target attacks will turn into hit-all attacks.)
- Mutant abilities are still random: FFL2 implemented a system where, after your mutant had four abilities, the one sorted to the bottom of the list would always be the one that was replaced. This gave you much more control over your mutant's development and much more security that you wouldn't suddenly lose a key ability mid-dungeon. This game kept the original system where the abilities are unsortable, randomly replaced, and not guarenteed to fill all the slots before they start replacing.
- The other new bonus is that you can play "original mode"; basically, the unmodified original game. This is kinda pointless--if you want to play the original, just get the US version of it.
Overall: Really, this game didn't age that well; I suspect that if it weren't for nostalgia value, I wouldn't be playing it now. The plot is fairly bare-bones for the length of the game and there's a lot of grinding, especially early on. Breakable weapons, randomly-changing abilities and the ability to save anywhere (but no teleport items or abilities until the very end) mean that it can easily become frustrating or even unwinnable. Beating it is really a matter of grinding efficiently for your first couple of hours of game play, exploiting glitches and game-breakers, and being patient. It was a good diversion for its era, but there are much better games now.
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Date: 2010-09-02 12:58 pm (UTC)Sob.