Like many first attempts at putting an NES genre on the Game Boy, this game feels held back compared to its NES counterparts (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest). That being said, this game offers several new and experimental features, such as weapon durability, more explicitly level/stage based progression, and three very unique leveling systems.
That being said, these systems are often held back by other features of the game that exist as a result of the hardware restrictions it was under, the most notable of these being the frustratingly small inventory. Otherwise, the game is as you'd expect from an 80s JRPG, full of abrupt difficulty spikes and a necessity for grinding. That being said, if you are returning to this game in the current year, you're obviously comfortable with such genre conventions
Overall I enjoyed most of my time with this game, but a few issues with the difficulty and the inventory system, as well as just being smaller in scope than other games in its era make it less desirable to replay than Square's offerings on the NES,
That being said, these systems are often held back by other features of the game that exist as a result of the hardware restrictions it was under, the most notable of these being the frustratingly small inventory. Otherwise, the game is as you'd expect from an 80s JRPG, full of abrupt difficulty spikes and a necessity for grinding. That being said, if you are returning to this game in the current year, you're obviously comfortable with such genre conventions
Overall I enjoyed most of my time with this game, but a few issues with the difficulty and the inventory system, as well as just being smaller in scope than other games in its era make it less desirable to replay than Square's offerings on the NES,
the combination of gameboy lean design and kawazu mechanics sandbox makes a strong debut for the first handheld rpg. this is a game that kept me in the "learning how it works" phase almost the whole way through, which is always my favorite part of a game. i even did the whole first world solo because i didn't know how to add party members. that worked out very well for my mutant, who got a lot of big stat boosts early as a reward for her trials.
the limited inventory and weapon durability makes this a game of very careful resource management. there's not much to the combat, even the final boss is beaten just by hitting him hard and fast, but the joy comes from preparing as smartly as you can for the long journey ahead, and using your items judiciously along the way.
the humans are the class that most rewards "preparation", but they're also the most annoying to level up. there's no aesthetic benefit to having to buy their level ups individually and apply them individually, it's just tedious. and since i easily had enough money to max them out by midgame, and since the late game is balanced around them being maxed out, there's no choice but to do the busywork.
mutant is a lot more fun to play, and she was just as good of a warrior as she was a mage. i might run two or even three mutants if i ever replay this. i recommend against trying to micromanage their mutations and just go with the flow. it added a nice spice of randomness to my careful preparations. sometimes the mutations were a welcome boon, sometimes they were a problem that was fun to work around.
the monster adds similarly fun complications, since i didn't look up the transformation mechanics and just tried to feel it out. is it worth it for me to risk eating meat and getting a worse monster? was that last monster strong enough that the transformation might be better? oh, my monster is low on health and durability anyway, maybe i should just go for it... this species kinda sucks anyway, i want to see what a new one is like... all of these were interesting questions to consider. usually the monster was the weakest member of my party, but they would come in clutch just often enough that i appreciated their presence.
i mentioned the tedious human leveling, but there are a couple other annoyances that bring the game down. the text speed is very slow, but for some reason the text speed in cutscenes is way faster. so if i raise the text speed in the menu, cutscenes whiz by way too fast to appreciate what's happening. i couldn't find a comfortable middle ground, but 3 was the closest. the encounter rate is also all over the place. sometimes i would explore a whole floor without a fight, other times i couldn't even get up the stairs without five fights. i don't feel like the overall average encounter rate is excessive, but the way it's distributed doesn't feel great. it's really noticeable during the su-zaku sequence, which initially feels like a fun simulation of a "chase enemy" in the framework of a turn-based rpg, but quickly loses appeal when he attacks you six times in ten steps.
maybe the biggest surprise of this game is how much i loved the setting. a mysterious tower with impossible geography linking together worlds of eclectic genre. every world has mutants, monsters, swords, and guns, but they each have unique framings for these common elements.
overall, a great next step into the kawazu zone. very interesting in playing more saga.
the limited inventory and weapon durability makes this a game of very careful resource management. there's not much to the combat, even the final boss is beaten just by hitting him hard and fast, but the joy comes from preparing as smartly as you can for the long journey ahead, and using your items judiciously along the way.
the humans are the class that most rewards "preparation", but they're also the most annoying to level up. there's no aesthetic benefit to having to buy their level ups individually and apply them individually, it's just tedious. and since i easily had enough money to max them out by midgame, and since the late game is balanced around them being maxed out, there's no choice but to do the busywork.
mutant is a lot more fun to play, and she was just as good of a warrior as she was a mage. i might run two or even three mutants if i ever replay this. i recommend against trying to micromanage their mutations and just go with the flow. it added a nice spice of randomness to my careful preparations. sometimes the mutations were a welcome boon, sometimes they were a problem that was fun to work around.
the monster adds similarly fun complications, since i didn't look up the transformation mechanics and just tried to feel it out. is it worth it for me to risk eating meat and getting a worse monster? was that last monster strong enough that the transformation might be better? oh, my monster is low on health and durability anyway, maybe i should just go for it... this species kinda sucks anyway, i want to see what a new one is like... all of these were interesting questions to consider. usually the monster was the weakest member of my party, but they would come in clutch just often enough that i appreciated their presence.
i mentioned the tedious human leveling, but there are a couple other annoyances that bring the game down. the text speed is very slow, but for some reason the text speed in cutscenes is way faster. so if i raise the text speed in the menu, cutscenes whiz by way too fast to appreciate what's happening. i couldn't find a comfortable middle ground, but 3 was the closest. the encounter rate is also all over the place. sometimes i would explore a whole floor without a fight, other times i couldn't even get up the stairs without five fights. i don't feel like the overall average encounter rate is excessive, but the way it's distributed doesn't feel great. it's really noticeable during the su-zaku sequence, which initially feels like a fun simulation of a "chase enemy" in the framework of a turn-based rpg, but quickly loses appeal when he attacks you six times in ten steps.
maybe the biggest surprise of this game is how much i loved the setting. a mysterious tower with impossible geography linking together worlds of eclectic genre. every world has mutants, monsters, swords, and guns, but they each have unique framings for these common elements.
overall, a great next step into the kawazu zone. very interesting in playing more saga.
Very interesting game gameplay-wise. I love how it switches up from the classic JRPG formula of the time to give you an unique experience. It's horribly balanced though. It's starts real rough but after and hour you're unstoppable. Managed to up all my human character stats to 99 bu the halfway point and it simply felt too easy to engage with the rest of the mechanics. Then it takes a deep dive again and becomes incredibly hard for the last stretch. Normal encounters simply wrecks you, you have very limited space in your inventory and even 15 elixirs aren't enough to arrive at the top with remaining healing before the final boss. Monster character are absolutely useless the entire way through, and while mutant are better at the start, the random selection of spell you get every time you gain a "level" are absolutely horrendous, then it takes spells away from you for some reason..... you effectively never use those spells a single time and end up with just 4 useable slots. Couldn't beat the final boss with my team comp and you can't trace your steps back to a shop, so you're just stuck here.
Still, I enjoyed most of the experience and the plot twist at the end was surprising for a '89 rpg. I'm looking forward to play other SaGa games in the future, hopefully with better balancing.
Still, I enjoyed most of the experience and the plot twist at the end was surprising for a '89 rpg. I'm looking forward to play other SaGa games in the future, hopefully with better balancing.
I love this weird little game.
it's pretty fun tbh. suffers a bit just from being the fist game and age but overall i did still enjoy my time more than not
ASI COMENZO TODO
The medium in which games are experienced should dictate how they're made. What you want out of a game when you're willing to spend two hours on the couch is different than the sort of game you'd want to play for 15-30 min on a lunch break. SaGa 1 (which I'll be referring to the game as from this point on) succeeds because, in a time before handheld game design had a standard to follow at all, the staff that worked on this game understood their assignment. They got with the program.
This is a game you can spend half a hour in and make significant progress, while not compromising on the sort of experience you could expect from a JRPG around this time. The pacing is excellent. The overworld(s) that you visit are large enough to create interesting exploration, but small enough to where even if you're totally lost, you can reliably exhaust every nook and cranny the game will let you in and probably get on the right track. Fights are quick and reward enough XP to where grinding sessions, if they need to happen, wouldn't last more than a single bus trip. The story is sparse, but there's enough worldbuilding to make the journey engaging.
All of that said, the game is still the first SaGa game. The franchise has been willing to experiment with JRPG mechanics through most of their entries, and this game manages to balance experimentation and accessibility. The different party combinations allow for replayability that goes beyond what Final Fantasy 1 offered, but there aren't a ton of wrong choices. The monster transformation system of eating meat rewards players who are willing to break the system over their knee, but the way that meat is tiered doesn't punish players for rolling the dice blindly. As long as you're progressing the plot, you'll be given what you need to clear the game. This game has permadeath that matters, but if you're willing to spend the time to gather enough cash, you can buy your way out of having to actually worry about it. None of the fights take more than that sweet fifteen minutes mark, but still require the player to optimize their party to the best of their ability.
It's such a unique RPG, especially for the time it was released, but it also makes total sense as to why this was the second "Final Fantasy" game that Square brought over. For years, the only real competition this game had on the Gameboy were the other SaGa games, and neither of them managed to be as concise as this game. God is a tiny amish man in the gameboy screen, and I don't think it was unreasonable at all to ask the RPG luddites who owned a Gameboy for Tetris to walk up a bunch of stairs and saw him in half.
This is a game you can spend half a hour in and make significant progress, while not compromising on the sort of experience you could expect from a JRPG around this time. The pacing is excellent. The overworld(s) that you visit are large enough to create interesting exploration, but small enough to where even if you're totally lost, you can reliably exhaust every nook and cranny the game will let you in and probably get on the right track. Fights are quick and reward enough XP to where grinding sessions, if they need to happen, wouldn't last more than a single bus trip. The story is sparse, but there's enough worldbuilding to make the journey engaging.
All of that said, the game is still the first SaGa game. The franchise has been willing to experiment with JRPG mechanics through most of their entries, and this game manages to balance experimentation and accessibility. The different party combinations allow for replayability that goes beyond what Final Fantasy 1 offered, but there aren't a ton of wrong choices. The monster transformation system of eating meat rewards players who are willing to break the system over their knee, but the way that meat is tiered doesn't punish players for rolling the dice blindly. As long as you're progressing the plot, you'll be given what you need to clear the game. This game has permadeath that matters, but if you're willing to spend the time to gather enough cash, you can buy your way out of having to actually worry about it. None of the fights take more than that sweet fifteen minutes mark, but still require the player to optimize their party to the best of their ability.
It's such a unique RPG, especially for the time it was released, but it also makes total sense as to why this was the second "Final Fantasy" game that Square brought over. For years, the only real competition this game had on the Gameboy were the other SaGa games, and neither of them managed to be as concise as this game. God is a tiny amish man in the gameboy screen, and I don't think it was unreasonable at all to ask the RPG luddites who owned a Gameboy for Tetris to walk up a bunch of stairs and saw him in half.
no replay just was explaining this game to my brother and remembering how it's basically everything i could ever love in an RPG. many will tell you to skip it and play its sequel but i'm here to tell those people to fuck off, that game is a bloated overlong disaster. SaGa 1 is perfect, concise, dreamlike, perplexing, mesmerizing
This review contains spoilers
This RPG is clinically insane. Deranged. Every aspect of its design hates you. The first hour of the game is a complete and total drag. Leveling up makes zero sense, it'll either happen or it won't. But there's also ways to easily exploit leveling up. But be careful not to level up too much, because the game has nothing to prevent overflow bugs happening, so your stats may just reset all the way back to 0. Permanent party member death is a thing, so is weapon durability, so is a room full of dead children, because why not!
... And yet, despite just how absolutely fucking jank this thing is, I feel like everybody owes themselves at least one playthrough of Final Fantasy Legend, otherwisely known as the first (or second, if you count FF2) game in the SaGa series. It's chaotic, actively punishing, and yet at times completely broken and in your favor. And that's part of what makes it special, what makes it unlike any other RPG series you'll play.
If you're anything like me, you'll touch the first 30 minutes of the game, go "ugh," and put it down. But then, a day later, as you give it a second chance and figure out what the hell it's trying to do... you'll start warming up to its odd yet unique concepts. It's certainly far from a perfect game, but one worth playing at least once.
... And yet, despite just how absolutely fucking jank this thing is, I feel like everybody owes themselves at least one playthrough of Final Fantasy Legend, otherwisely known as the first (or second, if you count FF2) game in the SaGa series. It's chaotic, actively punishing, and yet at times completely broken and in your favor. And that's part of what makes it special, what makes it unlike any other RPG series you'll play.
If you're anything like me, you'll touch the first 30 minutes of the game, go "ugh," and put it down. But then, a day later, as you give it a second chance and figure out what the hell it's trying to do... you'll start warming up to its odd yet unique concepts. It's certainly far from a perfect game, but one worth playing at least once.
I fully admit that I've always been hesitant to try out the SaGa series because of just how much I dislike Final Fantasy II. However, on a whim I decided to try this out because I wanted to play a bite sized simple JRPG, and I gotta say, it's pretty damn good. For this game to not only be the first SaGa game, but also the first RPG on the Gameboy, but also be such an early example of a JRPG (coming out only 3 years after the original Dragon Quest), and also be a follow up to one of my least favorite JRPGS, this is extremely impressive! This is a perfect example of a game where I had so many preconceived biases that I expected to absolutely despise it, and yet I'm walking away having had a pretty great time.
The setting here is very interesting, I always have a huge soft spot for games that meld fantasy and reality, but I also love world designs that just make no sense if you're thinking about them on a purely physical level. The idea of this massive tower at the center of the fantasy world you start out in that deposits you into worlds with completely different vibes seemingly all stacked upon one another in a geometrical nightmare just really gets my gears turning. Add to that the fact that your gear gets progressively more unhinged leading to a point where you can literally have Excalibur and an atomic bomb equipped at the same time and it's just a really exciting setting to wrap your head around. I think the hardware limitations help a lot in this aspect, just letting you fill in the gaps with your own fantastical assertions is something you couldn't do on anything other than a dinky little Gameboy in a game with not much dialogue and a shaky translation.
I did have my fair share of problems with the gameplay systems here. The character progression is extremely arcane and because I chose a really bad party at the beginning (2 monsters) it led to a lot of instances of feeling like I could only progress if the RNG didn't absolutely fuck me. I do think that each type of character having a completely different progression path is a cool idea I just think I had a particularly rough go of it. There were a few times where I felt as though I had been soft-locked, because I was deep into a dungeon with no way out but forward and I could not figure out how to progress with the party composition and items I had at that point. Add to that the astronomically high encounter rate as was the style at the time and I definitely had my fair share of frustration. There also doesn't seem to be anywhere in the game that explains what your items and abilities do, at least not that I found, so that led to a lot of trial and error and just buying the absolute most expensive thing at every store hoping it was the best option only for it to sometimes seem kinda useless. Honestly some of my gripes here might've been remedied if I had the instruction manual the game came with which I'm sure was the intention of the designers.
Overall I think this game is a really cool piece of JRPG history, just doing everything it can to go against established genre conventions this early on in the life of the genre is something I admire a lot. As a modern JRPG enjoyer who has become accustomed to said conventions after playing 3 decades of games following The Rules set forth by the original Dragon Quest I do think the friction this game provides can be a little unappealing at times, but I'm glad I gave it a shot because it's a truly singular experience. Possibly the earliest example of Punk Rock Game Design that I've played.
The setting here is very interesting, I always have a huge soft spot for games that meld fantasy and reality, but I also love world designs that just make no sense if you're thinking about them on a purely physical level. The idea of this massive tower at the center of the fantasy world you start out in that deposits you into worlds with completely different vibes seemingly all stacked upon one another in a geometrical nightmare just really gets my gears turning. Add to that the fact that your gear gets progressively more unhinged leading to a point where you can literally have Excalibur and an atomic bomb equipped at the same time and it's just a really exciting setting to wrap your head around. I think the hardware limitations help a lot in this aspect, just letting you fill in the gaps with your own fantastical assertions is something you couldn't do on anything other than a dinky little Gameboy in a game with not much dialogue and a shaky translation.
I did have my fair share of problems with the gameplay systems here. The character progression is extremely arcane and because I chose a really bad party at the beginning (2 monsters) it led to a lot of instances of feeling like I could only progress if the RNG didn't absolutely fuck me. I do think that each type of character having a completely different progression path is a cool idea I just think I had a particularly rough go of it. There were a few times where I felt as though I had been soft-locked, because I was deep into a dungeon with no way out but forward and I could not figure out how to progress with the party composition and items I had at that point. Add to that the astronomically high encounter rate as was the style at the time and I definitely had my fair share of frustration. There also doesn't seem to be anywhere in the game that explains what your items and abilities do, at least not that I found, so that led to a lot of trial and error and just buying the absolute most expensive thing at every store hoping it was the best option only for it to sometimes seem kinda useless. Honestly some of my gripes here might've been remedied if I had the instruction manual the game came with which I'm sure was the intention of the designers.
Overall I think this game is a really cool piece of JRPG history, just doing everything it can to go against established genre conventions this early on in the life of the genre is something I admire a lot. As a modern JRPG enjoyer who has become accustomed to said conventions after playing 3 decades of games following The Rules set forth by the original Dragon Quest I do think the friction this game provides can be a little unappealing at times, but I'm glad I gave it a shot because it's a truly singular experience. Possibly the earliest example of Punk Rock Game Design that I've played.
This game isn't exactly good, but c'mon it was the first rpg on the Gameboy. There's something really pure about it. I just think it's neat.
Might be interesting to play it for historical purpose, but it really doesnt hold nowadays by any chance.
La primera entrega de la SaGa, a la que le impusieron el nombre de otra saga más sobrevalorada para comercializarla por aquí.
Es una cosa rara de cuidao, carente de absoluto sentido o un mínimo de decoro por crear una aventura consistente a las expectativas que crea en el jugador. Vale, era 1989 y la recién sacada al mercado Game Boy se conformaba con ofrecer cualquier cosa que pudiese catalogarse de videojuego, por muy pequeña o simple que fuese. En ese sentido, 'Makai Toushi SaGa' es un título ambicioso que trata de presentar una aventura mucho más longeva de lo habitual por entonces (dura entorno a 10 horas), pero al mismo tiempo, no es un RPG al uso. Posee un sistema de progresión muuuuuu raro, en el que cada clase de personaje mejora sus atributos de una manera diferente. Los humanos necesitan comprar objetos en las tiendas para mejorar su vitalidad, ataque y agilidad. Los mutantes suben stats aleatoriamente tras vencer un combate... a veces. Y los monstruos pueden devorar trozos de carne de otros monstruos tras ser derrotados, que los transformarán en otros monstruos diferentes (no necesariamente mejores). La progresión pues, viene marcada por distintos factores que pueden ser explotados a ultratumba... o bien pueden hacer los combates absolutamente redundantes según qué momentos, especialmente al final. Aunque la idea suena genial, tiene muy poco recorrido, hasta el punto que puedes tener los stats maximizados a mitad aventura y no tener incentivo por combatir a menudo. Además, teniendo armas que se rompen... [se escuchan alaridos de gente pallá que detesta Breath of the Wild]
Es inútil hablar del planteamiento o la puesta en escena, siendo las limitaciones enormes para sacar adelante un juego para un sistema tan diminuto. Aun así, no hay nada a lo que agarrarse. La lógica que siguen sus pequeñas historias es de niño, un "lo hizo un mago" para cualquier justificación que no implique conexiones neuronales. Y al final del cuento, no hay gratificación alguna por completarlo, porque eres consciente de que el juego te ha usado como excusa para prolongar la partida durante esas ~10 horas, que podían haber sido muchas menos de tener un mínimo de sentido común. Pero quizá ese sea el encanto de esta SaGa: que no tenga sentido. Por algo se empieza, supongo...
Es una cosa rara de cuidao, carente de absoluto sentido o un mínimo de decoro por crear una aventura consistente a las expectativas que crea en el jugador. Vale, era 1989 y la recién sacada al mercado Game Boy se conformaba con ofrecer cualquier cosa que pudiese catalogarse de videojuego, por muy pequeña o simple que fuese. En ese sentido, 'Makai Toushi SaGa' es un título ambicioso que trata de presentar una aventura mucho más longeva de lo habitual por entonces (dura entorno a 10 horas), pero al mismo tiempo, no es un RPG al uso. Posee un sistema de progresión muuuuuu raro, en el que cada clase de personaje mejora sus atributos de una manera diferente. Los humanos necesitan comprar objetos en las tiendas para mejorar su vitalidad, ataque y agilidad. Los mutantes suben stats aleatoriamente tras vencer un combate... a veces. Y los monstruos pueden devorar trozos de carne de otros monstruos tras ser derrotados, que los transformarán en otros monstruos diferentes (no necesariamente mejores). La progresión pues, viene marcada por distintos factores que pueden ser explotados a ultratumba... o bien pueden hacer los combates absolutamente redundantes según qué momentos, especialmente al final. Aunque la idea suena genial, tiene muy poco recorrido, hasta el punto que puedes tener los stats maximizados a mitad aventura y no tener incentivo por combatir a menudo. Además, teniendo armas que se rompen... [se escuchan alaridos de gente pallá que detesta Breath of the Wild]
Es inútil hablar del planteamiento o la puesta en escena, siendo las limitaciones enormes para sacar adelante un juego para un sistema tan diminuto. Aun así, no hay nada a lo que agarrarse. La lógica que siguen sus pequeñas historias es de niño, un "lo hizo un mago" para cualquier justificación que no implique conexiones neuronales. Y al final del cuento, no hay gratificación alguna por completarlo, porque eres consciente de que el juego te ha usado como excusa para prolongar la partida durante esas ~10 horas, que podían haber sido muchas menos de tener un mínimo de sentido común. Pero quizá ese sea el encanto de esta SaGa: que no tenga sentido. Por algo se empieza, supongo...
I love this broke-ass game. That you can exploit the mechanics and one punch man your way through the most difficult battles is a strength, not a weakness. I love how each class has its own growth mechanics. I love all the bizarre effects your equipment can have.
Uematsu is in fine form, wringing out memorable melodies from the GB sound chip. The art design is strong. Everything reads really clearly and the enemies have fun, cute designs.
Overall it's a really impressive release for year one of the Game Boy. Mechanically I like this better than Final Fantasy I and II. Kawazu is a mad genius.
Uematsu is in fine form, wringing out memorable melodies from the GB sound chip. The art design is strong. Everything reads really clearly and the enemies have fun, cute designs.
Overall it's a really impressive release for year one of the Game Boy. Mechanically I like this better than Final Fantasy I and II. Kawazu is a mad genius.
The first SaGa game, one of my first JRPGs, and for my money, a total masterpiece.
Mechanically simple compared to where the series would go, this is still a genuine odd-ball to play, leveling an skills and equipment all twisted to be recognizable but not quite right; the first hour or two a head-scratching puzzle of "why is this happening? what is that? why can't I beat this?". I think this, in itself, is one of the beautiful things about this game. The journey to figuring it all out, coming to grips with out there systems, is a pleasure (and also the most difficult thing about the game) and once you do understand, you are encouraged to rip the game apart and bend those once confusing systems to your will. It's simple and quick and feels great.
Of course, while half of SaGa's joy comes from its mechanical uniqueness, the other half is thanks to Kawazu's elegant, simple writing. The first game in the series here has one of my favorite game worlds there is--multiple universes imagined as different floors in a giant tower--one responsible for several of the greatest moments I think exist in the genre (finding the first gun, arriving at the second world, the ending). But it isn't just grand moments and evocative ideas; miniature stories populate the game told in only a few sentences each, each one providing just enough for the imagination to run wild. It is a game that produces daydreams.
Bonus note about that ending: how awesome and wild is it that this little gameboy RPG from 89 goes so gleefully meta. It's smart, it's funny, it's sooo ahead of time, and it opens the simple storytelling of the game up in fascinating ways without weighing things down an inch.
SaGa 2 might outclass its predecessor in basically every respect (the jump in presentation and scope made in only a year is mind-boggling), but the simple, weirdo pleasures of this, the start of one of JRPG's greatest series, might reign supreme for me.
Mechanically simple compared to where the series would go, this is still a genuine odd-ball to play, leveling an skills and equipment all twisted to be recognizable but not quite right; the first hour or two a head-scratching puzzle of "why is this happening? what is that? why can't I beat this?". I think this, in itself, is one of the beautiful things about this game. The journey to figuring it all out, coming to grips with out there systems, is a pleasure (and also the most difficult thing about the game) and once you do understand, you are encouraged to rip the game apart and bend those once confusing systems to your will. It's simple and quick and feels great.
Of course, while half of SaGa's joy comes from its mechanical uniqueness, the other half is thanks to Kawazu's elegant, simple writing. The first game in the series here has one of my favorite game worlds there is--multiple universes imagined as different floors in a giant tower--one responsible for several of the greatest moments I think exist in the genre (finding the first gun, arriving at the second world, the ending). But it isn't just grand moments and evocative ideas; miniature stories populate the game told in only a few sentences each, each one providing just enough for the imagination to run wild. It is a game that produces daydreams.
Bonus note about that ending: how awesome and wild is it that this little gameboy RPG from 89 goes so gleefully meta. It's smart, it's funny, it's sooo ahead of time, and it opens the simple storytelling of the game up in fascinating ways without weighing things down an inch.
SaGa 2 might outclass its predecessor in basically every respect (the jump in presentation and scope made in only a year is mind-boggling), but the simple, weirdo pleasures of this, the start of one of JRPG's greatest series, might reign supreme for me.
Better known in English as Final Fantasy Legends, I bought the Switch trilogy of the original SaGa games years ago back on my last GameBoy RPG kick, but then bounced off of SaGa 1 pretty quick in the end. Now that I’m back on another GB game kick, and now that I have my Super Famicom (and a couple cheap copies of the Romancing SaGa games to play eventually as well), I figured it was high time I pushed forth and played through these classics of handheld RPGs. It took me around 15 hours or so to play through the game on Switch in Japanese not using the included speed-up function at all.
Being a game put together in like eight or seven months after the release of the GameBoy and released that very same year, the story of SaGa is pretty simple. At the center of the world, there’s a big tower. Many have tried to make their way up this tower, but not have succeeded. You are one such adventuring party who dare to try and make your way to the top! Along the way, you’ll find yourself in four realms connected to different bits of the tower, and you’ll need to find your way through the quests in those places to acquire the crystal you need to break the seals on the tower’s doors in order to complete your tower-related quest. It’s a very piecemeal story, but it’s presented quite charmingly. Your characters are all created by you, so they don’t really have character to them, per se, but in a very Final Fantasy 3-like move, they’ll chip in to dialogue with quips here and there, which is fun. Granted, all the character dialogue is written with the assumption that your party is all male, which can result in some unintendedly very queer dialogue if your party had a lot of women in it like mine, which made me giggle to no end x3. The whole game has this sorta campy fantasy OVA quality to it in its dialogue, and it makes for a fun and short-ish adventure that I quite liked, even if it’s hardly the most impressive thing in the world.
The gameplay of SaGa is both quite simple and immensely fucked, and it’s also not difficult to believe coming from the guys who had just made Final Fantasy 2. There is money, but there is no experience point or leveling system to advance in power in SaGa 1. Instead, each of the game’s 3 playable races have differently strange methods of advancing in power, though aside from some minor starting gear and stat differences, male and female characters have no difference between them, which is nice. I played through with a party of a female and a male human as well as a female and a male esper, as that was the party Popo recommended I use (and the one I’d generally recommend myself as well).
First, you have the humans. For humans, money is power. They never gain or lose stats from battle. Instead, you can buy items from shops that will permanently increase their max HP, strength, and speed respectively. Though the displayed stats cap out at 99, that’s actually not true. Even though that’s the intended cap (and the enforced one in later remakes), it actually internally caps at 255 for strength and speed before wrapping back to 0, so with some clever math and purchasing, humans can easily be the strongest characters in the game. They also have 8 inventory slots to populate with usable items, weapons (which have durability, so they’ll eventually break), and armor (which mercifully does not break, although a guide to tell you what armor gives what benefits is highly recommended by your author). Humans are the peak of stability, and at least in this version of the game, easily the most powerful characters in the late game.
Next you have espers, which are called “mutants” in the English version (but I’m gonna call espers here, so :b). As their English name implies, where humans are the peak of stability, espers are the peak of instability. At the end of every battle, an esper’s stats have a random chance of raising or lowering (though they always trend upwards, so the lowering doesn’t matter so much). They also have four of their eight inventory slots taken up by reserved spaces for the skills and spells they can learn (and no MP system here. We’re still using old-fashioned spell charges!). These can range from offensive elemental magic, to status and element immunities, to general passives, buff/debuff spells, and even totally useless spells and elemental weaknesses. And if that weren’t enough, the game also doesn’t tell you when they gain or lose skills/spells, so if you have espers in your party, you’ll be checking their stats after EVERY battle, and that includes boss fights. If they get a good skill or keep what they have, you save your game right then and there (with the game’s merciful save anywhere system). Because if they replace a valuable skill with a crap one, then it’s time to soft-reset by pressing all the buttons at once, because you’re REALLY going to want them to be powerful. Just what a bastard espers are to use is easily the biggest weakness of the first SaGa game, as even though the game isn’t super hard, it’s far from easy enough that doing an ironman run where you never load saves for better skills is reasonable at all.
Then lastly you have the monsters. Monsters are in the middle of humans and espers, in a sense, as even though they can learn spells/skills like espers, they’re very static like humans. When you defeat an enemy monster, you’ll often find they’ve dropped some meat. Humans or espers eating this meat does nothing, but feeding it to a monster will have that monster become that monster. From its stats to its skills, your monster is now that monster. Even bosses can drop meat! However, this raises several problems. First of all is that, since your monsters can become bosses, bosses trend towards being quite weak, as otherwise you’d be getting absurd powerhouses on your team. Only the final boss is any real challenge, and even then if you raise your humans past 99 stats, he’ll probably be a pushover too. The other issue is that monsters have much harder ceilings on their power. Where humans can just get more money to get stronger and espers can just fight more battles to have their stats rise, you must find stronger monsters to eat if you want your monsters to gain power. This ends up making monsters by far the weakest of the game’s playable races, and it’s really difficult to recommend using them for anything outside of a challenge run.
The presentation of the game is certainly simple, but it’s also quite impressive for what was one of the first couple dozen GB games to be released. Monsters sprites are well detailed and impressive even though the worlds you’re in are often populated with quite simple or highly repeated tile textures. The music especially is very good, in keeping with my general experience of the simple GB soundchip putting out some truly excellent tunes in its RPGs.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you’re a BIG RPG fan, and you really want to get a taste of the GameBoy’s first RPG, then this is a curiosity you’ll likely find something worthwhile in delving into. If you’re not a pretty hardcore retro RPG fan, though, you’ll more than likely only find frustration and boredom in SaGa. It’s a very old game with a lot of strange and unintuitive and incredibly annoying systems, and that’s as much part of its charm as much as it is a good reason to stay far, far away from SaGa XD.
Being a game put together in like eight or seven months after the release of the GameBoy and released that very same year, the story of SaGa is pretty simple. At the center of the world, there’s a big tower. Many have tried to make their way up this tower, but not have succeeded. You are one such adventuring party who dare to try and make your way to the top! Along the way, you’ll find yourself in four realms connected to different bits of the tower, and you’ll need to find your way through the quests in those places to acquire the crystal you need to break the seals on the tower’s doors in order to complete your tower-related quest. It’s a very piecemeal story, but it’s presented quite charmingly. Your characters are all created by you, so they don’t really have character to them, per se, but in a very Final Fantasy 3-like move, they’ll chip in to dialogue with quips here and there, which is fun. Granted, all the character dialogue is written with the assumption that your party is all male, which can result in some unintendedly very queer dialogue if your party had a lot of women in it like mine, which made me giggle to no end x3. The whole game has this sorta campy fantasy OVA quality to it in its dialogue, and it makes for a fun and short-ish adventure that I quite liked, even if it’s hardly the most impressive thing in the world.
The gameplay of SaGa is both quite simple and immensely fucked, and it’s also not difficult to believe coming from the guys who had just made Final Fantasy 2. There is money, but there is no experience point or leveling system to advance in power in SaGa 1. Instead, each of the game’s 3 playable races have differently strange methods of advancing in power, though aside from some minor starting gear and stat differences, male and female characters have no difference between them, which is nice. I played through with a party of a female and a male human as well as a female and a male esper, as that was the party Popo recommended I use (and the one I’d generally recommend myself as well).
First, you have the humans. For humans, money is power. They never gain or lose stats from battle. Instead, you can buy items from shops that will permanently increase their max HP, strength, and speed respectively. Though the displayed stats cap out at 99, that’s actually not true. Even though that’s the intended cap (and the enforced one in later remakes), it actually internally caps at 255 for strength and speed before wrapping back to 0, so with some clever math and purchasing, humans can easily be the strongest characters in the game. They also have 8 inventory slots to populate with usable items, weapons (which have durability, so they’ll eventually break), and armor (which mercifully does not break, although a guide to tell you what armor gives what benefits is highly recommended by your author). Humans are the peak of stability, and at least in this version of the game, easily the most powerful characters in the late game.
Next you have espers, which are called “mutants” in the English version (but I’m gonna call espers here, so :b). As their English name implies, where humans are the peak of stability, espers are the peak of instability. At the end of every battle, an esper’s stats have a random chance of raising or lowering (though they always trend upwards, so the lowering doesn’t matter so much). They also have four of their eight inventory slots taken up by reserved spaces for the skills and spells they can learn (and no MP system here. We’re still using old-fashioned spell charges!). These can range from offensive elemental magic, to status and element immunities, to general passives, buff/debuff spells, and even totally useless spells and elemental weaknesses. And if that weren’t enough, the game also doesn’t tell you when they gain or lose skills/spells, so if you have espers in your party, you’ll be checking their stats after EVERY battle, and that includes boss fights. If they get a good skill or keep what they have, you save your game right then and there (with the game’s merciful save anywhere system). Because if they replace a valuable skill with a crap one, then it’s time to soft-reset by pressing all the buttons at once, because you’re REALLY going to want them to be powerful. Just what a bastard espers are to use is easily the biggest weakness of the first SaGa game, as even though the game isn’t super hard, it’s far from easy enough that doing an ironman run where you never load saves for better skills is reasonable at all.
Then lastly you have the monsters. Monsters are in the middle of humans and espers, in a sense, as even though they can learn spells/skills like espers, they’re very static like humans. When you defeat an enemy monster, you’ll often find they’ve dropped some meat. Humans or espers eating this meat does nothing, but feeding it to a monster will have that monster become that monster. From its stats to its skills, your monster is now that monster. Even bosses can drop meat! However, this raises several problems. First of all is that, since your monsters can become bosses, bosses trend towards being quite weak, as otherwise you’d be getting absurd powerhouses on your team. Only the final boss is any real challenge, and even then if you raise your humans past 99 stats, he’ll probably be a pushover too. The other issue is that monsters have much harder ceilings on their power. Where humans can just get more money to get stronger and espers can just fight more battles to have their stats rise, you must find stronger monsters to eat if you want your monsters to gain power. This ends up making monsters by far the weakest of the game’s playable races, and it’s really difficult to recommend using them for anything outside of a challenge run.
The presentation of the game is certainly simple, but it’s also quite impressive for what was one of the first couple dozen GB games to be released. Monsters sprites are well detailed and impressive even though the worlds you’re in are often populated with quite simple or highly repeated tile textures. The music especially is very good, in keeping with my general experience of the simple GB soundchip putting out some truly excellent tunes in its RPGs.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you’re a BIG RPG fan, and you really want to get a taste of the GameBoy’s first RPG, then this is a curiosity you’ll likely find something worthwhile in delving into. If you’re not a pretty hardcore retro RPG fan, though, you’ll more than likely only find frustration and boredom in SaGa. It’s a very old game with a lot of strange and unintuitive and incredibly annoying systems, and that’s as much part of its charm as much as it is a good reason to stay far, far away from SaGa XD.
Didn't finish this because it got just too fiddly damn it. It's a cool idea to have level ups based on items you buy, but when you can't buy in bulk and only have limited inventory slots... pain.
Dug this though! The basic concept of dungeon crawl but with new worlds on every 5 or so levels of the tower is evocative. Each of the worlds is distinct, if gestural, and it has that existential quality I really like in FF1 and its ilk. It's also neat that it ratchets up in narrative complexity from floor to floor. Perfect road trip game.
Dug this though! The basic concept of dungeon crawl but with new worlds on every 5 or so levels of the tower is evocative. Each of the worlds is distinct, if gestural, and it has that existential quality I really like in FF1 and its ilk. It's also neat that it ratchets up in narrative complexity from floor to floor. Perfect road trip game.
When you get stat gains bi weekly
Ehhhhh I would be miserable if I couldn't save anywhere.
The gameplay's pretty relatively simple but effective, and the story, though quite minimalistic, manages to feel esoteric and big.
Oh, a reminder that without this game Pokemon as we know it wouldn't exist.
Oh, a reminder that without this game Pokemon as we know it wouldn't exist.
YO! the final fantasy legend aka makai toushi sa•ga is my fucking jam! after being uninterested in this game from not knowing its vibe (and really shouldn't i at least try to understand final fantasy's vibe first?), I obligate myself to play it as part of my Game Boy Journey and I fucking love it!
so yes, it is obtuse. sure, it is difficult at times. but it's obtuseness gives it mystique, not aimlessness. its difficulty can be solved by Just Thinking For A Second and Saving Often. and by sticking with it one gets in return a really weird adventure with really rude characters in a really bonkers setting that whips from medieval to literally Akira in the course of 10 hours.
the JRPG of it is wonderful too. its combat is kept simple, complicating itself only in interesting ways like breakable items or elemental resistances and weaknesses. the leveling systems are cool too: humans level up only by buying stat boosts and equipment, monsters and mutants level up by Fuck Around and Find Out.
some things aren't perfect: I think the balance between random encounter and boss battle is all out of wack by the last dungeon.
stillFFL is an odd, eerie, and refreshing classic jrpg and I recommend it to anyone freak who has access to it.
so yes, it is obtuse. sure, it is difficult at times. but it's obtuseness gives it mystique, not aimlessness. its difficulty can be solved by Just Thinking For A Second and Saving Often. and by sticking with it one gets in return a really weird adventure with really rude characters in a really bonkers setting that whips from medieval to literally Akira in the course of 10 hours.
the JRPG of it is wonderful too. its combat is kept simple, complicating itself only in interesting ways like breakable items or elemental resistances and weaknesses. the leveling systems are cool too: humans level up only by buying stat boosts and equipment, monsters and mutants level up by Fuck Around and Find Out.
some things aren't perfect: I think the balance between random encounter and boss battle is all out of wack by the last dungeon.
stillFFL is an odd, eerie, and refreshing classic jrpg and I recommend it to anyone freak who has access to it.
The original Saga game. It was confusing as a kid, not much has changed as an adult.
in a perfect world jackie kashian's comedy central presents bit on this game would be properly recognized as a watershed moment in nerd comedy
A very mediocre JRPG which doesn't resemble the Final Fantasy series outside of the job system.
I interrupted playing Final Fantasy 2 to do this with a randomly selected party as part of <a href="https://www.fourjobfiesta.com/saga/> da april fiesta </a> and I will someday get to reviewing that FF2 once I finish, but I can't easily separate my feelings on both games because of them sharing a director and it being very obviously clear that they did. My party was two mutants, an esper and a monster, which as it turns out is exactly what I would have wanted to pick for a first playthrough.
So here's the thing! FF2 is good and neat despite being a bit of a second-game-in-the-series-on-NES black sheep. The haters simply cannot touch it. When I loaded up SaGa here and read up on the character types, I saw that mutants/espers were kinda doing the same thing as FF2. OR SO I THOUGHT.
FF2 is a game where using stats and abilities causes them to increase. That makes sense, right? Mutants almost do that, but so much more randomly. Plus their abilities come and go at random too. On paper it may look similar, but the actual feel of it, the way you have to interact with those characters in your play, is so different. I'm not designating one of these mutants as a magic guy and one as an attacker guy. That's pointless, I have no idea if that fireball is going to last another battle unless I do some loser save scumming shit. In one sense, both of my mutants are jacks of all trades. In another sense, they have differing roles depending on luck and context. Human characters just get stronger as you jam drugs into them, and monsters are also extremely cool and random but in a way that's still very manageable, plus they require almost no upkeep.
The mutants are my favorites as a result, even if my human ends up with the best overall stats. They are the most emblematic of the game: completely off-kilter. The most normal area in the game still has fucked up monster townspeople, because that's just normal in this world. As you climb the tower to heaven, the first habitable space you find is just an open area with free healing and some folk who hang out all day without having to work or care about things. Paradise, basically. The further you climb, the more unexpected things get. The more convoluted the stories. The more tragic and oppressive, eventually culminating in a shelter full of child corpses and an ancient example of the skeleton with a diary detailing it's last moments. Also there's an A-Bomb there you get to take with you.
Like a lot of older RPGs, combat is simple enough and the game is mostly a battle of attrition, which fits well with all the random bullshit being tossed on your characters and the weapon degradation and the limited lives. You'll never actually be in danger of being softlocked, technically, so it's mostly vibes, and the vibes are immaculate. Everything is weird and experimental and this is gaming. This is what gaming is. What could be better than this?
Additional credit for sick enemy sprites. Love a gunslinging skeleton guy
So here's the thing! FF2 is good and neat despite being a bit of a second-game-in-the-series-on-NES black sheep. The haters simply cannot touch it. When I loaded up SaGa here and read up on the character types, I saw that mutants/espers were kinda doing the same thing as FF2. OR SO I THOUGHT.
FF2 is a game where using stats and abilities causes them to increase. That makes sense, right? Mutants almost do that, but so much more randomly. Plus their abilities come and go at random too. On paper it may look similar, but the actual feel of it, the way you have to interact with those characters in your play, is so different. I'm not designating one of these mutants as a magic guy and one as an attacker guy. That's pointless, I have no idea if that fireball is going to last another battle unless I do some loser save scumming shit. In one sense, both of my mutants are jacks of all trades. In another sense, they have differing roles depending on luck and context. Human characters just get stronger as you jam drugs into them, and monsters are also extremely cool and random but in a way that's still very manageable, plus they require almost no upkeep.
The mutants are my favorites as a result, even if my human ends up with the best overall stats. They are the most emblematic of the game: completely off-kilter. The most normal area in the game still has fucked up monster townspeople, because that's just normal in this world. As you climb the tower to heaven, the first habitable space you find is just an open area with free healing and some folk who hang out all day without having to work or care about things. Paradise, basically. The further you climb, the more unexpected things get. The more convoluted the stories. The more tragic and oppressive, eventually culminating in a shelter full of child corpses and an ancient example of the skeleton with a diary detailing it's last moments. Also there's an A-Bomb there you get to take with you.
Like a lot of older RPGs, combat is simple enough and the game is mostly a battle of attrition, which fits well with all the random bullshit being tossed on your characters and the weapon degradation and the limited lives. You'll never actually be in danger of being softlocked, technically, so it's mostly vibes, and the vibes are immaculate. Everything is weird and experimental and this is gaming. This is what gaming is. What could be better than this?
Additional credit for sick enemy sprites. Love a gunslinging skeleton guy
The Final Fantasy Legend, also known as the first SaGa game, is a unique RPG for the Game Boy. You start alone and visit a guild to recruit party members, whether they're humans, mutants or monsters!
One of the most noteworthy aspects of this game is that you don't increase your stats with level-ups. Instead, you buy stat-raising items for humans, and mutants increase their stats and learn new moves randomly after fights. Monsters are highly interesting, though. When you defeat an enemy, they can drop meat. When a monster eats the meat, they transform into a new monster, using all of that creature's attacks and gaining all of their stats. This approach to party-building makes The Final Fantasy Legend a unique experience, allowing for players to really experiment with what kind of party they want to build up throughout the game.
Of course, being that this is a Game Boy game, there's a lot of things that the game does not explain, like weapon and armor stats, and the effects of items you buy in shops. Some are self-explanatory, and you can easily assume that the more expensive the weapon/armor, the better it is. However, each weapon gains its power from one of three stats, those being Strength, Agility, and Mana. It is very possible to find yourself buying a Mana-based weapon, not realizing this is the case, and then equipping it to a human, who can't improve their Mana stat like mutants can. Things like this will have players referencing online guides often for proper loadouts. Thankfully, you'll get used to the rules of this game quick, and soon you'll be referring to guides less and less as you play. Certain weapon types tend to use specific stats, making decisions regarding equipment easier to make. For example, bows always use the agility stat, and most swords rely on strength.
Speaking of weapons, all weapons and items (except armor) have a limited amount of uses before they break. This keeps players on their toes regarding their equipment and encourages players to use a variety of weapons instead of relying on the same ones throughout the game. Once you reach the end game, this becomes a non-issue since by then you'll be very powerful and you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with. Until then, though, this system proves to be interesting and keeps you thinking about what you have on your characters.
The Final Fantasy Legend is a fun short romp that will keep you engaged from beginning to end, exciting you with powerful monsters to control as well as cool abilities and weapons to tear through foes with. With how customizable your party is, it feels like the game encourages you to try beating it multiple times with challenging parties or with self-imposed rulesets. It's not a perfect game by any means, but it is one that will stick with me for a while. Hopefully it'll stick with you, too, but I wouldn't blame you ifHe Don't it didn't.
One of the most noteworthy aspects of this game is that you don't increase your stats with level-ups. Instead, you buy stat-raising items for humans, and mutants increase their stats and learn new moves randomly after fights. Monsters are highly interesting, though. When you defeat an enemy, they can drop meat. When a monster eats the meat, they transform into a new monster, using all of that creature's attacks and gaining all of their stats. This approach to party-building makes The Final Fantasy Legend a unique experience, allowing for players to really experiment with what kind of party they want to build up throughout the game.
Of course, being that this is a Game Boy game, there's a lot of things that the game does not explain, like weapon and armor stats, and the effects of items you buy in shops. Some are self-explanatory, and you can easily assume that the more expensive the weapon/armor, the better it is. However, each weapon gains its power from one of three stats, those being Strength, Agility, and Mana. It is very possible to find yourself buying a Mana-based weapon, not realizing this is the case, and then equipping it to a human, who can't improve their Mana stat like mutants can. Things like this will have players referencing online guides often for proper loadouts. Thankfully, you'll get used to the rules of this game quick, and soon you'll be referring to guides less and less as you play. Certain weapon types tend to use specific stats, making decisions regarding equipment easier to make. For example, bows always use the agility stat, and most swords rely on strength.
Speaking of weapons, all weapons and items (except armor) have a limited amount of uses before they break. This keeps players on their toes regarding their equipment and encourages players to use a variety of weapons instead of relying on the same ones throughout the game. Once you reach the end game, this becomes a non-issue since by then you'll be very powerful and you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with. Until then, though, this system proves to be interesting and keeps you thinking about what you have on your characters.
The Final Fantasy Legend is a fun short romp that will keep you engaged from beginning to end, exciting you with powerful monsters to control as well as cool abilities and weapons to tear through foes with. With how customizable your party is, it feels like the game encourages you to try beating it multiple times with challenging parties or with self-imposed rulesets. It's not a perfect game by any means, but it is one that will stick with me for a while. Hopefully it'll stick with you, too, but I wouldn't blame you if
For a game that's unbelievably janky, I really enjoyed it. The whole ending section that reminded me more of weird games like Pathologic than a JRPG was pretty neat, especially for a game from 1989 that barely even had a story. The three different progression systems (mutants use a more standard SaGa system of gaining stats after each battle, humans need to get stronger through the use of consumable items, and monsters eat the meat of fallen enemies to morph into another monster) were kind of cool but expectedly really basic. I didn't like how every weapon was consumable, but other than that I didn't really have any mechanical issues with it outside of the expected jank of an old Game Boy JRPG.
This review contains spoilers
The first time I remember killing God.
This review contains spoilers
i swept through most of this game because sheer luck and persistence made my main character the strongest mage in the world before i could even fight the first boss. i then proceeded to finish the game by killing God in a single hit with a chainsaw.
I wasn’t always a Final Fantasy II defender, but upon revisiting the title a couple years ago for the first time since I was a young teen I was shocked by how smooth that game actually goes down. Like most games the internet latches onto as eternal targets, it’s not actually that obtuse, not actually that difficult, doesn’t actually require an outrageous amount of planning and self-flagellation to excel at. Sure you COULD min max your party by hitting your own characters for hours or whatever, but there’s no real incentive to do that, ESPECIALLY since all of the remakes of the game significantly sand down the rough edges of the NES original. When I look at Final Fantasy II on its own merits today, I see a game that tried a lot of interesting stuff and succeeded at a lot, with beautiful presentation and ambitious, successful storytelling…but I also see a game that was already constrained by the fledgling expectations imparted by its nascent brand. I’m convinced that that game is as rejected as it is in large part because it’s just, y’know, it’s not what Final Fantasy feels like, even in a day and age where what Final Fantasy feels like is entirely ephemeral, and even though it did much more to define the look and sound of the series than its predecessor by far. So what does Final Fantasy II look like if it gets to be the game that it truly wants to be? If we give battle designer Akitoshi Kawazu the keys to the kingdom and put him in the chairs of director and designer and (co-)writer, really just let this guy who is clearly ambitious and hungry and ready to do it, just go nuts?
It looks like The Final Fantasy Legend, or Makai Toushi SaGa, one of the most enchanting and definitive debuts I’ve ever played. This game, it must be said, whips ass. Everything about Final Fantasy II is here and much more intense. The famous and hated stat increase system is back, but now siloed to one of three character classes and seemingly much more random in its effectiveness and distribution. These guys, the Mutants, can only equip half as much stuff as a normal human, but the tradeoff is they can do magic and innately learn special abilities, which appear randomly after battles based on the character’s unseen level, and disappear just as randomly and just as often. It created a great push and pull where I had to make the choice between armoring up my initially quite fragile Mutant party member more or sacrificing a couple of those equipment slots to give her some equippable offensive magic, because for about the first half of the game that’s by far the most effective combat shit you have, and you never know when their flame ability might just disappear and be replaced by a counterspell, or a useless poison ability, or even an elemental weakness instead.
These choices make up all of the game, a constant push and pull of resource management that is at its most dire in the early goings when money is tightest but never completely fades away. Human characters don’t level up at all – they only increase stats by purchasing a small variety of potions from shops that will upgrade strength, agility (all weapons scale off of one or both of these stats in various ways, occasionally weirdly), or HP. They have double the equipment slots of a mutant, but they need that stuff because they never get abilities, can’t use magic, and their defense stat is entirely dependent on their gear. The third class is Monsters, who are simultaneously the simplest and most complex class to manage. They only have their innate skills to work with and can’t learn new ones or equip anything, but when you kill guys in fights, sometimes they leave behind MEAT, and if you have a monster character EAT THAT SHIT, they’ll turn into a DIFFERENT monster. The game doesn’t ever explain any of this system or how it works to you and I didn’t look up the mechanics of it, so as far as I can tell it seems to be based on your monster’s hidden level and a pokemon-esque intersection of monster types interacting with each other in various complex ways behind the scenes (there is actually a LOT of obvious pokemon DNA in this game, it’s very clearly a huge influence on those). Not knowing how this works, my monster was probably the worst guy in my party for most of the game but by the end I had lucked into some combinations that were getting him some sick forms and abilities, it’s really just fun to see what you’ll get next. I highly recommend playing a monster blind.
Compounding all of this is how much the loop of this game revolves around the grind for caaaashola. Everything has a numerical durability, everything. From your swords to your spells to your psychic powers to your monster’s tail swipes, every possible action in the game will have, at absolute most, fifty uses, and frequently as few as ten or twenty, often even lower than that. For natural abilities topping off is as simple as resting at an inn or, for monsters, devouring a fallen foe and/or transforming, but for equipment there is no recourse but to simply Buy More Shit, and, hopefully, Better Shit. Couple this with the way human characters’ developments revolve entirely around buying them increasingly expensive potions and the economy becomes a much more important part of this game than most. This does mean there’s a lot of grinding in FFL, especially in the early game, but there’s also an emphasis on precise resource management that’s not so severe in most JRPGs. It’s a vibe akin to my perennial fave Dragon Quest 1, where you really have to be certain that you’re ready to strike out again before you leave the vicinity of your current safe zone, because getting caught with your pants down far from a town is the only situation where the game will REALLY punish you. And the stakes ARE high – each character comes with only three lives, and aside from the leader of your party who you select at the very onset of the game, if they die three times they’re dead for good. You CAN buy more hearts for characters but these items are the most expensive thing you can purchase for the majority of the game, and it’s obviously better to just not put yourself in a situation where you need them. That means not only keeping on top of your resources but also your stats, as much as is possible and it’s within your control. There’s a lot to juggle in FFL, so even though the combat is pretty simple and often unchallenging, I never felt disengaged from the experience.
It helps that, although I do think that all of these systems and the ways they interconnect are a ton of fun, they are supported by an incredible world, presented beautifully. A mysterious world constructed around a gigantic tower, one that houses myriad other worlds, all menaced by the same demiurge. These civilizations are all strange and beautiful, as notable for their mundanity as they are for their weirdness. This is a world of species parity, where cannibal monsters share towns with human characters, feeding you the same canned NPC dialogue. An early quest has you hooking a small-time king up with a slime villager (who reciprocates his feelings but is being threatened by a local bandit leader, who maybe you kill with your GUN that it's not unsusual for you to have in your medieval fantasy town) and later you find that they’re happily married and expecting a kid. This is just part of the fabric of life here, entirely unremarkable, and when you later find a plane within the tower where a race of gargoyle men has enslaved everyone else it’s bizarre and terrible and everyone is really fucked up about it.
And they ARE fucked up about it! Something that separates this game from many others on its platform and even in its time generally is how talkative your party is. Not just your main guy but everyone in the party has spoken dialogue in story scenes. The simple decision to just flag different characters to speak the dialogue rather than just one general voice or your lead person lends them a lot of character. There’s an implication that Party Member 3 is the subject of one of the three kingdoms in the starting world the tower springs from based on their familiarity in dialogue with the king there. Party Member 2 is noticeably more downtrodden and pessimistic than the others but no to a degree that they will dissent to action, just enough to vocally not want to give a shit about the philosophical underpinnings that begin to become obviously important to the quest the longer it goes. ALL of your guys have a fierce sense of justice but in a funny hotheaded way. In more than one encounter they cold-bloodedly execute defeated villains who are begging for their lives, or start bar fights for no reason, because he man, you shouldn’t have been a shitty bad guy if you didn’t want to get beheaded by us, or you shouldn’t have acted like a tough shit if you didn’t want to start shit. It’s funny and charming and just MORE character than I was expecting from such an early Gameboy game, something that’s been true of practically every element of it, from the depth of the mechanics to the verve of the characters to the color of the world itself.
The tower itself is eldritch in the true sense of the word: uncanny, impossible, vaguely sinister, and moreso these things the higher you climb. The worlds contained within become stranger and more foreign with every step, from sunlit islands hiding undersea kingdoms to a world in the clouds terrorized by a sky-demon and his gang in their flying castle to literally just post-apocalyptic Tokyo with all of the strange implications that implies. This nuclear wasteland and its inescapable, invincible, wrathful fire demon that stalks you across the world map until you can gather the tools and sacrifice the friends necessary to neutralize its defenses is not the ultimate revelation of the game, only one more step up the staircase. Each of these main scenarios is unique with a thoughtfully constructed narrative device and a creative main quest objective that goes beyond just following a the right pathways until you reach the boss and being strong enough to kill it. That Tokyo section even ends with what I can only describe as a Gameboy-tier setpiece climax on a bullet train, it fucking rules! There is SO much ambition packed into these ten hours.
Even the standard Kawazu shit that people hate works here, imo. Stuff like the healing pools you come to rely on in between towns in the transitional floors in the tower being frequently fake as you get higher, or hitting a room where all of the floor tiles have been replaced with stair tiles and not knowing which of them will actually end up being stairs lends itself to the uncanny wrongness of the location. The classic Wizardry-ass, AD&D-esque traps and puzzles do a good job of adding color to the world but they don’t meaningfully harm you if you’re adequately prepared for exploration; they’re more like fun pranks between you and the designer than cruel gotchas. It’s all tuned very well imo, and I feel like I can say this with some authority because I DID beat this game in under ten hours without a manual or looking anything up on the internet. It’s just not that demanding if you’re willing to meet it halfway.
That’s all you really need to do with Kawazu, is something I’m learning. This game has a lot to it, and it IS, on purpose, more challenging to get a handle on than most of its contemporaries. But it balances that high barrier to entry with a deep and varied playground, and it balances the complexity of the mechanics with combat encounters that don’t really pick up in difficulty until well into the back half of the game, even as it’s fairly hard to get to far ahead of power curve. If you can stick it out there’s a truly magical world waiting for you here. I didn’t even mention the music holy shit! One of Uematsu’s early greats. Guy was knocking it out of the park for this weird little Gameboy game. That’s how much I loved this, I FORGOT about the absolutely SLAM DUNK-ASS music. This game rips ass, WHAT an opening statement for a series. The bar is SO high.
It looks like The Final Fantasy Legend, or Makai Toushi SaGa, one of the most enchanting and definitive debuts I’ve ever played. This game, it must be said, whips ass. Everything about Final Fantasy II is here and much more intense. The famous and hated stat increase system is back, but now siloed to one of three character classes and seemingly much more random in its effectiveness and distribution. These guys, the Mutants, can only equip half as much stuff as a normal human, but the tradeoff is they can do magic and innately learn special abilities, which appear randomly after battles based on the character’s unseen level, and disappear just as randomly and just as often. It created a great push and pull where I had to make the choice between armoring up my initially quite fragile Mutant party member more or sacrificing a couple of those equipment slots to give her some equippable offensive magic, because for about the first half of the game that’s by far the most effective combat shit you have, and you never know when their flame ability might just disappear and be replaced by a counterspell, or a useless poison ability, or even an elemental weakness instead.
These choices make up all of the game, a constant push and pull of resource management that is at its most dire in the early goings when money is tightest but never completely fades away. Human characters don’t level up at all – they only increase stats by purchasing a small variety of potions from shops that will upgrade strength, agility (all weapons scale off of one or both of these stats in various ways, occasionally weirdly), or HP. They have double the equipment slots of a mutant, but they need that stuff because they never get abilities, can’t use magic, and their defense stat is entirely dependent on their gear. The third class is Monsters, who are simultaneously the simplest and most complex class to manage. They only have their innate skills to work with and can’t learn new ones or equip anything, but when you kill guys in fights, sometimes they leave behind MEAT, and if you have a monster character EAT THAT SHIT, they’ll turn into a DIFFERENT monster. The game doesn’t ever explain any of this system or how it works to you and I didn’t look up the mechanics of it, so as far as I can tell it seems to be based on your monster’s hidden level and a pokemon-esque intersection of monster types interacting with each other in various complex ways behind the scenes (there is actually a LOT of obvious pokemon DNA in this game, it’s very clearly a huge influence on those). Not knowing how this works, my monster was probably the worst guy in my party for most of the game but by the end I had lucked into some combinations that were getting him some sick forms and abilities, it’s really just fun to see what you’ll get next. I highly recommend playing a monster blind.
Compounding all of this is how much the loop of this game revolves around the grind for caaaashola. Everything has a numerical durability, everything. From your swords to your spells to your psychic powers to your monster’s tail swipes, every possible action in the game will have, at absolute most, fifty uses, and frequently as few as ten or twenty, often even lower than that. For natural abilities topping off is as simple as resting at an inn or, for monsters, devouring a fallen foe and/or transforming, but for equipment there is no recourse but to simply Buy More Shit, and, hopefully, Better Shit. Couple this with the way human characters’ developments revolve entirely around buying them increasingly expensive potions and the economy becomes a much more important part of this game than most. This does mean there’s a lot of grinding in FFL, especially in the early game, but there’s also an emphasis on precise resource management that’s not so severe in most JRPGs. It’s a vibe akin to my perennial fave Dragon Quest 1, where you really have to be certain that you’re ready to strike out again before you leave the vicinity of your current safe zone, because getting caught with your pants down far from a town is the only situation where the game will REALLY punish you. And the stakes ARE high – each character comes with only three lives, and aside from the leader of your party who you select at the very onset of the game, if they die three times they’re dead for good. You CAN buy more hearts for characters but these items are the most expensive thing you can purchase for the majority of the game, and it’s obviously better to just not put yourself in a situation where you need them. That means not only keeping on top of your resources but also your stats, as much as is possible and it’s within your control. There’s a lot to juggle in FFL, so even though the combat is pretty simple and often unchallenging, I never felt disengaged from the experience.
It helps that, although I do think that all of these systems and the ways they interconnect are a ton of fun, they are supported by an incredible world, presented beautifully. A mysterious world constructed around a gigantic tower, one that houses myriad other worlds, all menaced by the same demiurge. These civilizations are all strange and beautiful, as notable for their mundanity as they are for their weirdness. This is a world of species parity, where cannibal monsters share towns with human characters, feeding you the same canned NPC dialogue. An early quest has you hooking a small-time king up with a slime villager (who reciprocates his feelings but is being threatened by a local bandit leader, who maybe you kill with your GUN that it's not unsusual for you to have in your medieval fantasy town) and later you find that they’re happily married and expecting a kid. This is just part of the fabric of life here, entirely unremarkable, and when you later find a plane within the tower where a race of gargoyle men has enslaved everyone else it’s bizarre and terrible and everyone is really fucked up about it.
And they ARE fucked up about it! Something that separates this game from many others on its platform and even in its time generally is how talkative your party is. Not just your main guy but everyone in the party has spoken dialogue in story scenes. The simple decision to just flag different characters to speak the dialogue rather than just one general voice or your lead person lends them a lot of character. There’s an implication that Party Member 3 is the subject of one of the three kingdoms in the starting world the tower springs from based on their familiarity in dialogue with the king there. Party Member 2 is noticeably more downtrodden and pessimistic than the others but no to a degree that they will dissent to action, just enough to vocally not want to give a shit about the philosophical underpinnings that begin to become obviously important to the quest the longer it goes. ALL of your guys have a fierce sense of justice but in a funny hotheaded way. In more than one encounter they cold-bloodedly execute defeated villains who are begging for their lives, or start bar fights for no reason, because he man, you shouldn’t have been a shitty bad guy if you didn’t want to get beheaded by us, or you shouldn’t have acted like a tough shit if you didn’t want to start shit. It’s funny and charming and just MORE character than I was expecting from such an early Gameboy game, something that’s been true of practically every element of it, from the depth of the mechanics to the verve of the characters to the color of the world itself.
The tower itself is eldritch in the true sense of the word: uncanny, impossible, vaguely sinister, and moreso these things the higher you climb. The worlds contained within become stranger and more foreign with every step, from sunlit islands hiding undersea kingdoms to a world in the clouds terrorized by a sky-demon and his gang in their flying castle to literally just post-apocalyptic Tokyo with all of the strange implications that implies. This nuclear wasteland and its inescapable, invincible, wrathful fire demon that stalks you across the world map until you can gather the tools and sacrifice the friends necessary to neutralize its defenses is not the ultimate revelation of the game, only one more step up the staircase. Each of these main scenarios is unique with a thoughtfully constructed narrative device and a creative main quest objective that goes beyond just following a the right pathways until you reach the boss and being strong enough to kill it. That Tokyo section even ends with what I can only describe as a Gameboy-tier setpiece climax on a bullet train, it fucking rules! There is SO much ambition packed into these ten hours.
Even the standard Kawazu shit that people hate works here, imo. Stuff like the healing pools you come to rely on in between towns in the transitional floors in the tower being frequently fake as you get higher, or hitting a room where all of the floor tiles have been replaced with stair tiles and not knowing which of them will actually end up being stairs lends itself to the uncanny wrongness of the location. The classic Wizardry-ass, AD&D-esque traps and puzzles do a good job of adding color to the world but they don’t meaningfully harm you if you’re adequately prepared for exploration; they’re more like fun pranks between you and the designer than cruel gotchas. It’s all tuned very well imo, and I feel like I can say this with some authority because I DID beat this game in under ten hours without a manual or looking anything up on the internet. It’s just not that demanding if you’re willing to meet it halfway.
That’s all you really need to do with Kawazu, is something I’m learning. This game has a lot to it, and it IS, on purpose, more challenging to get a handle on than most of its contemporaries. But it balances that high barrier to entry with a deep and varied playground, and it balances the complexity of the mechanics with combat encounters that don’t really pick up in difficulty until well into the back half of the game, even as it’s fairly hard to get to far ahead of power curve. If you can stick it out there’s a truly magical world waiting for you here. I didn’t even mention the music holy shit! One of Uematsu’s early greats. Guy was knocking it out of the park for this weird little Gameboy game. That’s how much I loved this, I FORGOT about the absolutely SLAM DUNK-ASS music. This game rips ass, WHAT an opening statement for a series. The bar is SO high.