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chuckroSit upon the throne of the Varennes Empire and control several generations of rulers in a valiant battle against the Seven Heroes. This is the Android port/remaster of the SNES original which was one of the lost unlocalized games in that era, and the only one I haven’t played. (I played the fan-translation of RS3 and the PS2 port/remake of RS1.) I got it for $3 in a Play Store sale six years ago and decided it was finally time to get it off my backlog.
The first time I tried this it served as a proof-of-concept test for playing Android jrpgs on the Retroid Pocket 3, because I kinda hate onscreen buttons and they were generally my biggest frustration when playing jrpgs and especially action-rpgs on my tablet. (That then spiraled into me playing a dozen more KEMCO games and making a big thread of all of my KEMCO reviews on Talking Time.) That said, I ended up restarting on the Odin Pro because I had only played a little of this and lost the entire thread of the plot—not that there was much plot, really.
I read something noting that you should treat everything in this game as “emergent gameplay” and I think that’s actually pretty decent idea: If I know I’m not going to enjoy trying to optimize my experience and (this being a SaGa game) it’s definitely not going to hold my hand, I’m best off just trying things and pushing along until I get frustrated. Apparently also this is not as strongly anti-grinding as some of the other SaGa games (RS1 actively punishes you for fighting too many battles by speeding the plot along and making you miss events) so I could kill lots of monsters making multiple attempts at areas and (hopefully) that didn’t screw me over. I made it through the first big time-skip where you have to choose a successor, recruited thieves to take out the Canal Fortress, and had a bunch of options for places to go but crashed headlong into a particularly nasty boss. (It turns out that, like RS3, enemies scale with your characters but bosses don’t—so you can go places in any order but might have a bad time trying to clear them.)
I think my biggest issue is that this isn’t focused enough on any of the things that would keep it compelling for me. There’s shockingly little plot: You’re building up the Empire because the so-called “seven heroes” are actually monsters who need to be defeated; and there are a few simplistic sidequests (that sometimes have branching paths or options that vary the outcome slightly). The characters are all replaceable and indeed are replaced across the generations; they don’t matter. The dungeons generally don’t have anything special going for them: Monsters in a cave, monsters in a tower, monsters in a town. The “numbers go up” aspect isn’t actually that great either, because how fast you gain HP or spark techniques is obscured (and possibly random?) and it’s still very slow because you’re intended to get in over your head, die, and start another (stronger) generation. At least early on it’s more linear than the other games, but after that the number of directions you can explore expands greatly.
I haven’t been the biggest fan of the SaGa series past the three Game Boy installments (localized as the Final Fantasy Legend series). The PS2 remake of Romancing SaGa 1 was a mess of hidden quests and undocumented features, though I get the impression at least some of that was added from the original. (The original SNES Romancing SaGa 1 was never translated, either by fans or officially.) I had a good time playing that with cheats and a walkthrough to experience it on “tourist mode.” I think the last SaGa game that I did an official review of was SaGa Frontier, which turned into a rant about how the SaGa design ethos of “wander around and restart a dozen times or cling slavishly to a walkthrough” doesn’t work for me. That game was admittedly also hobbled by PS1-era design choices: Too long, too repetitive, muddy graphics, too many missable “secrets”. But Romancing SaGa 3 is the more important comparison here: It was even more of a wide-open sandbox and didn’t have the generational aspect, but otherwise took a lot from RS2, including being way too long for something so full of wandering and undocumented features. I made it 10 hours into the fan-translated SNES version (where cheats were available to me) but got tired of it well before reaching the end. And that’s also what happened here: I got about 5 hours in, but there just wasn’t enough to keep me.
Overall: It was fun to try this out and I got my original $3 worth, but it’s not great. I suspect that if you like the SaGa systems, the added plot to the full-3D remake version (“Revenge of the Seven”) will make this an overall fun experience for you, but I’m not going to bother with that.
The first time I tried this it served as a proof-of-concept test for playing Android jrpgs on the Retroid Pocket 3, because I kinda hate onscreen buttons and they were generally my biggest frustration when playing jrpgs and especially action-rpgs on my tablet. (That then spiraled into me playing a dozen more KEMCO games and making a big thread of all of my KEMCO reviews on Talking Time.) That said, I ended up restarting on the Odin Pro because I had only played a little of this and lost the entire thread of the plot—not that there was much plot, really.
I read something noting that you should treat everything in this game as “emergent gameplay” and I think that’s actually pretty decent idea: If I know I’m not going to enjoy trying to optimize my experience and (this being a SaGa game) it’s definitely not going to hold my hand, I’m best off just trying things and pushing along until I get frustrated. Apparently also this is not as strongly anti-grinding as some of the other SaGa games (RS1 actively punishes you for fighting too many battles by speeding the plot along and making you miss events) so I could kill lots of monsters making multiple attempts at areas and (hopefully) that didn’t screw me over. I made it through the first big time-skip where you have to choose a successor, recruited thieves to take out the Canal Fortress, and had a bunch of options for places to go but crashed headlong into a particularly nasty boss. (It turns out that, like RS3, enemies scale with your characters but bosses don’t—so you can go places in any order but might have a bad time trying to clear them.)
I think my biggest issue is that this isn’t focused enough on any of the things that would keep it compelling for me. There’s shockingly little plot: You’re building up the Empire because the so-called “seven heroes” are actually monsters who need to be defeated; and there are a few simplistic sidequests (that sometimes have branching paths or options that vary the outcome slightly). The characters are all replaceable and indeed are replaced across the generations; they don’t matter. The dungeons generally don’t have anything special going for them: Monsters in a cave, monsters in a tower, monsters in a town. The “numbers go up” aspect isn’t actually that great either, because how fast you gain HP or spark techniques is obscured (and possibly random?) and it’s still very slow because you’re intended to get in over your head, die, and start another (stronger) generation. At least early on it’s more linear than the other games, but after that the number of directions you can explore expands greatly.
I haven’t been the biggest fan of the SaGa series past the three Game Boy installments (localized as the Final Fantasy Legend series). The PS2 remake of Romancing SaGa 1 was a mess of hidden quests and undocumented features, though I get the impression at least some of that was added from the original. (The original SNES Romancing SaGa 1 was never translated, either by fans or officially.) I had a good time playing that with cheats and a walkthrough to experience it on “tourist mode.” I think the last SaGa game that I did an official review of was SaGa Frontier, which turned into a rant about how the SaGa design ethos of “wander around and restart a dozen times or cling slavishly to a walkthrough” doesn’t work for me. That game was admittedly also hobbled by PS1-era design choices: Too long, too repetitive, muddy graphics, too many missable “secrets”. But Romancing SaGa 3 is the more important comparison here: It was even more of a wide-open sandbox and didn’t have the generational aspect, but otherwise took a lot from RS2, including being way too long for something so full of wandering and undocumented features. I made it 10 hours into the fan-translated SNES version (where cheats were available to me) but got tired of it well before reaching the end. And that’s also what happened here: I got about 5 hours in, but there just wasn’t enough to keep me.
Overall: It was fun to try this out and I got my original $3 worth, but it’s not great. I suspect that if you like the SaGa systems, the added plot to the full-3D remake version (“Revenge of the Seven”) will make this an overall fun experience for you, but I’m not going to bother with that.
