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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technically the first of the SaGa games, this title was brought the US with the Final Fantasy Legend moniker and in many ways plays similarly to Final Fantasy II. I really like the plot in this one because it develops a unique world with bits of Norse, Indiana, Chinese and Japanese lore serving as foundations. The ending is the most JRPG ending ever, but even the finale leaves an open-ended question for you to ponder. The combat is commendable for working on the Game Boy's limited screen space, and bares more than a passing resemblance to those silly pocket monster games still a few years out.

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.

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.

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.