SaGa 4: Masters of the Demon World (PC)
Mar. 17th, 2021 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe SaGa games (known in the US as Final Fantasy Legend) were some of the earliest available jrpgs for a western audience and certainly the first on a handheld device. This is a fan-created fourth entry in that series. Searching for explorers from your hometown, you pass through the mysterious gate in the town of Hero and it leads you into a multi-story tower that connects different worlds.
It’s directly based on the Game Boy SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend games and feels like a romhack of the first one. The graphics are all lifted from the three games (primarily the first), including characters, map sprites, monsters and items. (The only thing noticeable different is the treasure chest sprite, and I don’t know why.)
This adds FFL2 robots and adds quality-of-life options for mutants (you’re given options of which stat to raise or if you want an ability) but otherwise plays like FFL1. Oh, and they split the STRONG and AGILITY potions for humans into “STR24,” “STR48,” and “STR99” variants that only work up to a certain point, creating caps for human development in each world. There’s no chart of weapon strength, but they are labeled in-game with tiers, so you can tell with ones will generally be more powerful and more useful to robots. Like FFL2 you get extra 5th characters to join your party temporarily, but you can’t change their equipment and they don’t appear to improve (even if they’re mutants). You can collect elemental stones (which go in a separate inventory—the tiny inventory of the first two games otherwise carries through, as well) and use them in the endgame to craft high-level weapons and magic. That honestly works less well than it did in FFL3, because those items still have limited uses.
I had not quite realized how much I lean on things like premade maps, monster evolution tables, weapon tables and the like in the original games. As it stood, I suspect I spent too much time grinding, but I was constantly worried about weakening my monster by eating the wrong meat or spending an hour getting through an area only to get killed. Also, the difficulty is about on par with the original game, but it’s much longer—there are six full worlds, each with their own set of dungeons, and full playtime is closer to 15 hours. They actually flattened the difficulty curve to account for this—the enemies in the fifth world don’t give nearly as much gold as they should given the prices of things you can grind for. I got tired of the grind midway through the 5th world and watched the remainder on Youtube on fast-forward. Except for cashing in the magical stones, there’s nothing particularly new to the gameplay in the last world.
The first world involves hunting down four artifacts (they couldn’t decide if they wanted them to be magical or tech, so they split the difference, calling the same water-breathing item both an “airseed” and “scuba”) in a sequence of quests. The second world is divided into followers of the Wolf and the Worm (who are secretly Masters from the Babel tower working together) and reveals that the missing Jonas and Janine joined an organization trying to stop the masters. Most of that world is also spit up by mountain tunnels you spend a lot of time mapping and exploring for treasure. The third world is technologically advanced and features trying to help the rebels before the local master enacts his plan to enter the Babel Tower. Then the fourth world is actually a return to the first after the masters invade and make a mess of it. The fifth is an irradiated post-Apocalyptic world which requires you to collect the pieces of a mystic sword. Then when you beat the final master, the head of the Brotherhood (who were trying to stop the Masters) is actually trying to get the power of Babel for himself, so he kills Jonas and goes through the opened seal. The sixth world is the final world, with four big dungeons themed around the FFL1 fiends and a final battle against the wannabe Master. The ending is a brief set of stills and truncated credits that I don’t feel too bad about not pushing through to.
Overall: This is the masterful romhack of Final Fantasy Legend that I didn’t know I wanted. If you want a fresh story and improved gameplay from that series that doesn’t veer off into sparking abilities and scaling boss levels (with a healthy dose of nostalgia from the reused sprites), this is for you.
It’s directly based on the Game Boy SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend games and feels like a romhack of the first one. The graphics are all lifted from the three games (primarily the first), including characters, map sprites, monsters and items. (The only thing noticeable different is the treasure chest sprite, and I don’t know why.)
This adds FFL2 robots and adds quality-of-life options for mutants (you’re given options of which stat to raise or if you want an ability) but otherwise plays like FFL1. Oh, and they split the STRONG and AGILITY potions for humans into “STR24,” “STR48,” and “STR99” variants that only work up to a certain point, creating caps for human development in each world. There’s no chart of weapon strength, but they are labeled in-game with tiers, so you can tell with ones will generally be more powerful and more useful to robots. Like FFL2 you get extra 5th characters to join your party temporarily, but you can’t change their equipment and they don’t appear to improve (even if they’re mutants). You can collect elemental stones (which go in a separate inventory—the tiny inventory of the first two games otherwise carries through, as well) and use them in the endgame to craft high-level weapons and magic. That honestly works less well than it did in FFL3, because those items still have limited uses.
I had not quite realized how much I lean on things like premade maps, monster evolution tables, weapon tables and the like in the original games. As it stood, I suspect I spent too much time grinding, but I was constantly worried about weakening my monster by eating the wrong meat or spending an hour getting through an area only to get killed. Also, the difficulty is about on par with the original game, but it’s much longer—there are six full worlds, each with their own set of dungeons, and full playtime is closer to 15 hours. They actually flattened the difficulty curve to account for this—the enemies in the fifth world don’t give nearly as much gold as they should given the prices of things you can grind for. I got tired of the grind midway through the 5th world and watched the remainder on Youtube on fast-forward. Except for cashing in the magical stones, there’s nothing particularly new to the gameplay in the last world.
The first world involves hunting down four artifacts (they couldn’t decide if they wanted them to be magical or tech, so they split the difference, calling the same water-breathing item both an “airseed” and “scuba”) in a sequence of quests. The second world is divided into followers of the Wolf and the Worm (who are secretly Masters from the Babel tower working together) and reveals that the missing Jonas and Janine joined an organization trying to stop the masters. Most of that world is also spit up by mountain tunnels you spend a lot of time mapping and exploring for treasure. The third world is technologically advanced and features trying to help the rebels before the local master enacts his plan to enter the Babel Tower. Then the fourth world is actually a return to the first after the masters invade and make a mess of it. The fifth is an irradiated post-Apocalyptic world which requires you to collect the pieces of a mystic sword. Then when you beat the final master, the head of the Brotherhood (who were trying to stop the Masters) is actually trying to get the power of Babel for himself, so he kills Jonas and goes through the opened seal. The sixth world is the final world, with four big dungeons themed around the FFL1 fiends and a final battle against the wannabe Master. The ending is a brief set of stills and truncated credits that I don’t feel too bad about not pushing through to.
Overall: This is the masterful romhack of Final Fantasy Legend that I didn’t know I wanted. If you want a fresh story and improved gameplay from that series that doesn’t veer off into sparking abilities and scaling boss levels (with a healthy dose of nostalgia from the reused sprites), this is for you.
