Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song
May. 6th, 2014 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA millennium ago, the world of Mardias was saved from Saruin, worst of the three evil gods, by a hero bearing ten Fatestones. Now, the world is in turmoil as the portents of Saruin’s revival become more ominous. Can you become the new hero capable of defeating him?
The system is classic SaGa, as it were: Random stat gains, HP/LP split, breakable weapons, randomly sparking new battle techniques, lack of useful plot direction (but a restricted order in which you need to do everything defined by untrackable numbers and beef gates), and a zillion characters without well-defined personalities or stories (though admittedly, it’s better on that front than most games in the series). Romancing SaGa 3 followed this mold very well, as I noted when I played it a few years ago. You need to like the conventions of the series to like this game, or at least be prepared to circumvent them with a cheat device and/or online walkthrough.
I made the mistake of starting with Aisha's story and wandered around for quite a while, eventually getting into an area I definitely wasn't supposed to be in and getting my ass handed to me by a boss. Only then did I learn that I was supposed to die to get a second character to join me, but he was also killed by the same boss, so I got a Game Over instead.
I tried again playing as Grey, and made much better progress despite missing his official “quests” entirely in the first segment (and almost getting killed by mega-powerful dinosaurs a few times). I think my problem here is even less that there’s a wide open sandbox combined with the need to search high and low for the one event flag that will get everything moving—it’s that nothing really indicates that event flag exists unless you’re using a walkthrough. The game is really crappy at indicating to the player where or how to find quests, and gives absolutely no indication where you’re “supposed” to be at any given time. Basically, if the monsters demolish you, maybe you weren’t supposed to be there. (Or, maybe you are but suck at the game. Who knows?!)
The world is just so big and so open (once you figure out how to unlock each area, of course), but with event flags that are so small and easy to overlook. The fact that you need to find or ask for a map of EVERY area, including the towns, means you spend most of the game running around blindly searching, even if you’re using a walkthrough and know what you’re supposed to be looking for.
Oh, and since some quests are chained and many are “timed”, you can miss out on multiple quests that you have no reason to believe even exist because you weren’t there when they were or you missed a prerequisite. (The timing is actually an anti-grinding feature: The quest unlocks, random encounter strength, and store inventories are dependent on how many monsters you’ve killed. I kinda hate this sort of setup where everything scales with you, because it defeats the purpose of having rpg elements—you can never change the difficulty level of the game!)
I’m guessing that the designers intended for you to play as each character, stumbling around different parts of the map each time (and constantly revisiting the ones you found), finding a couple of quests here and there, dying periodically when you got in over your head, and with each run taking ~40 hours and generally being very hard. Oh, and taking copious notes on where you found quests, characters and items; possibly making a few of your own maps; etc. (Basically, the design ideology that drove classic crpgs, too.)
My approach, which meant that I had fun, was that I used an Action Replay to make dying less likely, and a FAQ/walkthrough so I could actually find and complete quests without frustration. Which also meant that I got sizeable chunks of the story pieces. (I completed 30 of the 50-ish quests, which isn’t a bad ratio. If I ever replay this, I need to play as Barbara and actually hit the Frontier quests, because the Jewel Beast had destroyed it before I got there.)
Did I note that there’s also a class system, a trading system, a blacksmithing system, combo magic, lots of optional dungeons…and very little documentation on any of it. If you wanted to put the time and effort into this game to take copious notes and try dozens of things, you could spend hundreds of hours tracking down all the quests, learning all the little tricks, and playing as every main and recruitable character. You’d have to be prepared to seriously put the time in, though.
I played a little of a partially-translated version of the SNES original, which looks like a less-pretty Final Fantasy 4 and plays more like the game boy games—there no LP and the weapons aren’t breakable, impressively. The breakdown of characters and their starting places seems to be similar, but I can’t comment on plot changes because very little of the dialogue was translated. (There doesn’t seem to be an extant full fan translation, surprisingly.) You still need to talk to people to unlock locations on the map, and Grey’s first quest still involves trying to dodge invulnerable dinosaurs that will kill you super-dead to steal things out of their caves. Except, if possible, it’s even harder than the PS2 version.
The ending includes different scenes based on which quests you completed. While I’m not sure the degree to which the sequence changes, I still think this is a nice and impressive thing to put in a game this open and with so much optional/missable content.
Overall: I like SaGa games, when I play them on my own terms, which are obviously not what the designers intended. I don’t like their crushing difficulty, aimless wandering, or undocumented game system quirks. I love exploring them from a tourist’s perspective, getting a large overview that is nonetheless “sanitized” rather than “fully accurate.” And I had fun doing that here.
The system is classic SaGa, as it were: Random stat gains, HP/LP split, breakable weapons, randomly sparking new battle techniques, lack of useful plot direction (but a restricted order in which you need to do everything defined by untrackable numbers and beef gates), and a zillion characters without well-defined personalities or stories (though admittedly, it’s better on that front than most games in the series). Romancing SaGa 3 followed this mold very well, as I noted when I played it a few years ago. You need to like the conventions of the series to like this game, or at least be prepared to circumvent them with a cheat device and/or online walkthrough.
I made the mistake of starting with Aisha's story and wandered around for quite a while, eventually getting into an area I definitely wasn't supposed to be in and getting my ass handed to me by a boss. Only then did I learn that I was supposed to die to get a second character to join me, but he was also killed by the same boss, so I got a Game Over instead.
I tried again playing as Grey, and made much better progress despite missing his official “quests” entirely in the first segment (and almost getting killed by mega-powerful dinosaurs a few times). I think my problem here is even less that there’s a wide open sandbox combined with the need to search high and low for the one event flag that will get everything moving—it’s that nothing really indicates that event flag exists unless you’re using a walkthrough. The game is really crappy at indicating to the player where or how to find quests, and gives absolutely no indication where you’re “supposed” to be at any given time. Basically, if the monsters demolish you, maybe you weren’t supposed to be there. (Or, maybe you are but suck at the game. Who knows?!)
The world is just so big and so open (once you figure out how to unlock each area, of course), but with event flags that are so small and easy to overlook. The fact that you need to find or ask for a map of EVERY area, including the towns, means you spend most of the game running around blindly searching, even if you’re using a walkthrough and know what you’re supposed to be looking for.
Oh, and since some quests are chained and many are “timed”, you can miss out on multiple quests that you have no reason to believe even exist because you weren’t there when they were or you missed a prerequisite. (The timing is actually an anti-grinding feature: The quest unlocks, random encounter strength, and store inventories are dependent on how many monsters you’ve killed. I kinda hate this sort of setup where everything scales with you, because it defeats the purpose of having rpg elements—you can never change the difficulty level of the game!)
I’m guessing that the designers intended for you to play as each character, stumbling around different parts of the map each time (and constantly revisiting the ones you found), finding a couple of quests here and there, dying periodically when you got in over your head, and with each run taking ~40 hours and generally being very hard. Oh, and taking copious notes on where you found quests, characters and items; possibly making a few of your own maps; etc. (Basically, the design ideology that drove classic crpgs, too.)
My approach, which meant that I had fun, was that I used an Action Replay to make dying less likely, and a FAQ/walkthrough so I could actually find and complete quests without frustration. Which also meant that I got sizeable chunks of the story pieces. (I completed 30 of the 50-ish quests, which isn’t a bad ratio. If I ever replay this, I need to play as Barbara and actually hit the Frontier quests, because the Jewel Beast had destroyed it before I got there.)
Did I note that there’s also a class system, a trading system, a blacksmithing system, combo magic, lots of optional dungeons…and very little documentation on any of it. If you wanted to put the time and effort into this game to take copious notes and try dozens of things, you could spend hundreds of hours tracking down all the quests, learning all the little tricks, and playing as every main and recruitable character. You’d have to be prepared to seriously put the time in, though.
I played a little of a partially-translated version of the SNES original, which looks like a less-pretty Final Fantasy 4 and plays more like the game boy games—there no LP and the weapons aren’t breakable, impressively. The breakdown of characters and their starting places seems to be similar, but I can’t comment on plot changes because very little of the dialogue was translated. (There doesn’t seem to be an extant full fan translation, surprisingly.) You still need to talk to people to unlock locations on the map, and Grey’s first quest still involves trying to dodge invulnerable dinosaurs that will kill you super-dead to steal things out of their caves. Except, if possible, it’s even harder than the PS2 version.
The ending includes different scenes based on which quests you completed. While I’m not sure the degree to which the sequence changes, I still think this is a nice and impressive thing to put in a game this open and with so much optional/missable content.
Overall: I like SaGa games, when I play them on my own terms, which are obviously not what the designers intended. I don’t like their crushing difficulty, aimless wandering, or undocumented game system quirks. I love exploring them from a tourist’s perspective, getting a large overview that is nonetheless “sanitized” rather than “fully accurate.” And I had fun doing that here.
