Minstrel Song is an old skool rpg where you get into lots of fights with monsters to level up and learn techniques for your characters weapons as well as entirely new game mechanics, killing monsters is also the only way to advance the in game timer, the monsters will be replaced with stronger monsters at a rate faster than you will improve, on top that it will cause quests to time out, and new quests to become available, so actually you want to avoid combat as much as possible to keep the timer from moving forward and instead to focus on quests for character progression, only carefully incrementing it when you run out of things to do but monsters in the overworld spawn in huge numbers and are highly aggressive, so you can't totally avoid combat, but if you get into a fight you can just retreat to avoid advancing the timer, but retreating costs crucial resources so actually you need to run around like scooby doo with a trail of monsters chasing you while trying to progress quests, but the locations where you can find new quests are unmarked, and where you need to go to progress quests is unstated, so you need to run around the overworld getting chased by monsters like scooby doo so you can find quests to level up because there's no main quest, and you don't even know if you've done everything you can do before making the call to kill some monsters to advance the game clock, eventually you'll do this enough to get multiple quests that specifically tell you to go out and kill shitloads of monsters and they're really important so to do the most important quests you need to ignore everything you've learned about playing the game and potentially time out dozens of quests that you don't know how to do because they don't tell you where to go or what to do never mind the quests that you don't know about because they could be handed out by any of the dozens of NPCs who had nothing to say to you an hour ago, who are potentially in locations you haven't discovered because the only way to discover locations is either to talk to people or to recruit new party members, but you can only have a limited party size so to see if a new party member will give you a location (which they may not) you need to kick out an existing party member first if you are full, the removed party member will later reappear in potentially any one of the many pubs, one per city, scattered around the dozens of cities in the game, including ones you haven't discovered, after doing all that for a while the final boss shows up and you are probably not strong enough to kill him even with all that effort. This anti-lesson on game design could only be enjoyed by criminally deranged perverts.

This is a bit unfortunate, as I found myself really enjoying the game's combat. Feels a bit more stilted than contemporary JRPGs, but it's fluid enough to be engaging moment-to-moment. The strange statistical progression returns, as characters will grow based on what feels like random variables. You're essentially left to your own devices to go wherever you want, which is neat at first, but becomes a bit overwhelming due to how little feedback you actually get in terms of moving the plot forward. Since the script is almost entirely a 1:1 recreation of a 1992 game, the plot is already scarce enough. It appears most of this game's momentum comes from sidequests, which lead you to different storylines and rewards. However, because I was engaging the combat so heavily, I was inadvertently locking myself out of large chunks of content. Apparently there's a timer set on availability of these quests, and that timer is depleted as you continue getting into battles. I am not sure if this is explained in the game anywhere. Walkthroughs I decided to peek at, while I was stuck, emphasized avoiding combat encounters so that you could participate in a number of quests. Further strategies I saw in discussion boards recommended devoting resources to leveling up some stealth skill I had never even touched, as a means to get into as little combat as possible. The philosophy behind this feels strange, and I'm starting to think the SaGa series is one I will never be able to enjoy as much as others. I did play a bit of the original via emulation with a translation patch, but quit early on because the menu interface was somehow worse than the Gameboy games made before it... 3/6