SaGa Frontier
Dec. 14th, 2016 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroDespite owning a copy of this game since 2001-ish, I've never beaten it or actually made real headway into it. As at this point I've managed to play (and often enjoy) most other entries in the SaGa series, I decided to try to play enough of this to at least write up my thoughts.
One of the biggest problems with the SNES Romancing SaGa games was the weakness of the plot: The characters weren't particularly differentiated, and any character could do pretty much any quest right off the bat, so the story was modular (at best) and felt generic. And there wasn't that much point in having all the different characters with their separate scenarios, because whoever you chose was the big hero and everyone else just kinda...hung around.
SaGa Frontier attempts to address that by actually giving each character a distinct story, and causing those stories to overlap and intersect at various points. This creates a better illusion of a large world with a lot going on, and also creates more real replayability because you're actually getting more material by playing different characters.
That said, most of the characters have relatively short stories and rely on the sidequests and grinding for game length. I started a game as Lute, wandered around for an hour looking for plot, eventually found an event that led to a dungeon...and only after getting absolutely murdered by the boss did I turn to a FAQ and learn that I was in Lute's FINAL dungeon. Absolutely nothing told me this. And because of the way encounters scale, I could fight the random enemies without trouble, but didn't have hope against bosses.
If that story setup wasn't built into the SaGa framework of high difficulty, random stat ups, random skill gains, HP/LP shenanigans, limited-use weapons, problematic event flags and distinct lack of useful tutorials; I probably would think it was awesomesauce, even if it was a bit short. (When I played Treasure of the Rudras, which had a much more straightforward inventive system and a more reasonable difficulty level, I loved the scenario system. Live-A-Live, too.)
But the fact that this game wants you to wander off and grind and find sidequests, but gives you absolutely no indication of how to find them or what general "strength level" you can do things at makes it an exercise in frustration. I visited eight towns as Lute and explored fairly thoroughly before happening on plot; I found one companion and two places to fight (with no apparently purpose for doing so) in all that time. I'm not saying plot-bearing NPCs need a star over their heads, but if you talk to everyone in a town (when there are only two dozen locations total), you should be pointed towards at least one sidequest.
Oh, and the fact that PS1-era games tended toward certain design flaws (and this was no exception) didn't help. While the area graphics are all very pretty, they're muddy enough that it's often hard to tell where you can and cannot walk and what is and isn't a door. The dungeons tend to use not just the same tilesets, but the same screens over and over, which makes getting lost very easy and makes getting through the dungeons boring. Entering a door might result in your facing the opposite way on the next screen and accidentally walking back out, only to have to contend with loading times again.
Overall: This game is an excellent example of the fact that no matter how much I admire the concept, I can't get past the execution. Ah, well.
One of the biggest problems with the SNES Romancing SaGa games was the weakness of the plot: The characters weren't particularly differentiated, and any character could do pretty much any quest right off the bat, so the story was modular (at best) and felt generic. And there wasn't that much point in having all the different characters with their separate scenarios, because whoever you chose was the big hero and everyone else just kinda...hung around.
SaGa Frontier attempts to address that by actually giving each character a distinct story, and causing those stories to overlap and intersect at various points. This creates a better illusion of a large world with a lot going on, and also creates more real replayability because you're actually getting more material by playing different characters.
That said, most of the characters have relatively short stories and rely on the sidequests and grinding for game length. I started a game as Lute, wandered around for an hour looking for plot, eventually found an event that led to a dungeon...and only after getting absolutely murdered by the boss did I turn to a FAQ and learn that I was in Lute's FINAL dungeon. Absolutely nothing told me this. And because of the way encounters scale, I could fight the random enemies without trouble, but didn't have hope against bosses.
If that story setup wasn't built into the SaGa framework of high difficulty, random stat ups, random skill gains, HP/LP shenanigans, limited-use weapons, problematic event flags and distinct lack of useful tutorials; I probably would think it was awesomesauce, even if it was a bit short. (When I played Treasure of the Rudras, which had a much more straightforward inventive system and a more reasonable difficulty level, I loved the scenario system. Live-A-Live, too.)
But the fact that this game wants you to wander off and grind and find sidequests, but gives you absolutely no indication of how to find them or what general "strength level" you can do things at makes it an exercise in frustration. I visited eight towns as Lute and explored fairly thoroughly before happening on plot; I found one companion and two places to fight (with no apparently purpose for doing so) in all that time. I'm not saying plot-bearing NPCs need a star over their heads, but if you talk to everyone in a town (when there are only two dozen locations total), you should be pointed towards at least one sidequest.
Oh, and the fact that PS1-era games tended toward certain design flaws (and this was no exception) didn't help. While the area graphics are all very pretty, they're muddy enough that it's often hard to tell where you can and cannot walk and what is and isn't a door. The dungeons tend to use not just the same tilesets, but the same screens over and over, which makes getting lost very easy and makes getting through the dungeons boring. Entering a door might result in your facing the opposite way on the next screen and accidentally walking back out, only to have to contend with loading times again.
Overall: This game is an excellent example of the fact that no matter how much I admire the concept, I can't get past the execution. Ah, well.
