”The SRPG Masterpiece That Nobody Has Played”, or, ”Why I Dream of Hexagons”
I don’t suppose myself to be a particularly strong purveyor of obscure games, despite my admiration for them. I tend to prioritise playing stuff that’s both widely and strongly regarded, so it’s a bit auspicious that a few years ago, many months into Covid, going down the rabbit hole of Fire Emblem, coming to the realisation that Thracia was my favourite one and that this Kaga guy was “kinda cool” and deciding to check out his other games, was an event which conveniently coincided with the finalization of a fan translation of Berwick Saga, and that such an event led me to discover one of my favourite games of all time and, in my limited estimation, one of the most underappreciated games of all time, with only a measly 68 plays on Backloggd as of writing.
Berwick Saga is a masterpiece, it’s a sweeping, sprawling labyrinth of shockingly thoughtful SRPG design, linking and weaving together a romantic military drama with gameplay entirely in concert with its themes throughout the entire runtime, it’s the culmination of the long, decades-spanning evolution of design sensibilities from the father of Fire Emblem and a game that, in one fell swoop, solves and revolutionizes the perennial problems facing Fire Emblem-like games, in some cases, years before they would even come to prominence. Know that it’s with great love, then, that I say that it’s entirely understandable why the game has languished in obscurity for almost 18 years: the game only received an English fan translation in February 2020, and it was explicitly designed by Kaga to appeal to hardcore fans of strategy RPGs, much like Thracia 776, which was one of the lowest selling Fire Emblem games. Writing on his blog, Kaga even said that “though people wouldn't appreciate me saying such things, this one might not be suited for people who aren't that good with [SRPGs]”. Shockingly, the game still outsold Path of Radiance, which is more of a testament to how Fire Emblem was struggling in this period rather than Berwick Saga’s success, but It’s this combination of only existing in Japanese and being very niche that have left it hidden from people for so many years. I think it’s time will come, (maybe when a certain youtuber brings attention to it), but speaking more selfishly, there’s a certain joy in having what feels like a secret in videogame form, it’s become a yearly tradition for me to do a playthrough of this game, a game which is not only perfectly suited to my interests but exists for so few, and every time I discover new things and refine the clockwork strategy with which I navigate through it, a love the game reciprocates in how it rewards this kind of obsessiveness, it is, in short, a game for freaks.
Let’s rewind back in time, who is Shouzou Kaga? A simple explanation would be that he’s the original creator of Fire Emblem and the lead designer of the first five games in the series, from 1990 to 1999, but to many of the hardcore fans of Fire Emblem he’s much more than this, he’s an icon, a titan of game design, and a man with a strong creative vision. One of the oft-remarked facets of Kaga’s design, especially Thracia, is his commitment to ludonarrative harmony, and this facet was baked into the very concept of Fire Emblem, speaking with Final Fantasy’s Sakaguchi, he stated that “I wanted to make a strategy game that was more dramatic, something where you would really be able to feel the pain and struggle of the characters.”, it was a core ideal that he would gradually refine in the following years and finally perfect with Berwick Saga, and in this interview we see the kindling of what would eventually become another burning ideal for him - the idea of a sprawling, multi-game, military epic:
“With Fire Emblem I’ve made a “role playing simulation” game, but at the same time, it’s very linear. And I think players who spend so much time building and developing their units will probably feel like, for all that work, they didn’t get to use the units very much. So for the next game, I’m thinking of some kind of simultaneous, multi-scenario setup, where there’s a number of different paths to explore.”
We could say, straightforwardly, that Kaga was the creator of Fire Emblem, but much more profoundly, he’s a man trying to create the videogame version of a multi-book war novel, the videogame version of War and Peace, it’s a dream that he’s still trying to fulfil to this day, and understanding this dream contextualizes his actions following 1999. During the development of Fire Emblem 64, Kaga would abruptly leave Nintendo, dissatisfied with the hardware limitations of the N64, specifically how it handled saving and its inability to transfer saves between games. Recognising that the PS1 was much more suited to the fulfilment of his dream game, he would found Tirnanog, his own company, and begin development of TearRing Saga. I won’t exhaustively cover the events that follow (you can watch this if you’d like to know the full story, albeit in a sensationalized form), for our purposes, all we need to know is that Nintendo would file a lawsuit against Tirnanog for its similarity to Fire Emblem, and that Tirnanog was ordered to pay a 76 million yen fine to Nintendo.
Thankfully, TearRing Saga was still allowed to go onto store shelves, it would still recuperate its development costs, and Tirnanog was financially solvent enough to create another game, but this time, it would need to be significantly different to Fire Emblem.
It was a blessing in disguise. The legally imposed requirement to change the fundamental characteristics of his games would allow Kaga to return to the drawing board, inject his years of lessons from making SRPGs, and create something that was far superior to his previous works on an elementary mechanical level. Instead of a square grid, maps were now composed of hexes, a seemingly superficial change with radical implications: Instead of each flank having one side to be attacked from, now there were three. Defending units from attack was now much more precarious and required much more consideration of placement. Instead of the Fire Emblem alternating turn system, where you move all of your units and then the enemy moves all of theirs, now you and the enemy take your turn simultaneously, proportional to how many units you have. This mechanically reinforces the feeling of being outnumbered since, if the enemy outnumbers you two to one, they will get two actions for every one that you get. Reflecting on the superiority of this system to the old one on his blog, Kaga wrote that “In the usual alternating turn system there's no escaping the homogeneity of tactics, specifically the "baiting" tactic. No matter how complex you make the computer’s thought process, the player will always have the advantage. But with the simultaneous turn system, [...] the standard tactic of "keep the distance, bait them out and gang up with overwhelming numbers" cannot be used, and the player is forced to adapt to each situation.” To accompany this, Berwick Saga sees a much more sophisticated enemy AI than any existing Fire Emblem game, which determines and re-evaluates which actions should be prioritised in the turn and where zones of activity are occurring after every action. The simultaneous turn system both requires and allows for much more complicated strategy and care in the order of your actions, my favourite tactic is the ability to abuse the fact that the player always gets the first action of the turn, meaning you can use the last and first action of a turn to take two turns before the enemy has a chance to act. All of these changes iterate and improve upon the thematic precariousness that was expressed in Thracia 776. In that game, the hit rate was hard-capped to 99, such that at any given moment, the player could be required to adjust their strategy spontaneously. With Berwick, the same thing has been achieved more elegantly by baking it into the core systems.
And much like Thracia, the story and resource management reinforce this theme of precariousness and being at the mercy of your environment. Reese, our protagonist, has been called from the remote lands of Sinon to serve in the Berwick League. Their side are losing the war and it’s not pretty. Funds and equipment have to be scrounged together from odd jobs, bounties, or captured enemies. The grizzly reality of war, the abuse of prisoners of war, the corruption and incompetence of those in command, the flood of refugees and proliferation of orphans, all of these are brought to the forefront throughout the story. Unlike any previous game, many units in this game are mercenaries who have to be hired with money, slowly depleting your stock of funds. Decisions have to be made like “do I hire this strong unit or do I save my money?”, “Do I buy good weapons or save up for something else?”. Even the missions build into this: Because the Knights of Sinon have a lot of cavaliers, they’re sent on many guerilla missions where they have to achieve an objective under a time limit - free these prisoners before the sun comes up, protect these injured soldiers as they escape a war zone, then escape yourself, it all has to be done in 24 turns. While many of these time limits aren’t hard to satisfy, they still lead to a frantic, building tension where you escape just in time with imperial forces swarming you, breathing down your neck.
More than any particular bleakness, what I find fascinating about this story is how Reese is merely a part of a much larger epic. As I mentioned earlier, it was always Kaga’s dream to create a multi-game war story, which lends his games a unique feeling of smallness. Easily my favourite map in TearRing Saga is map 21, in which our protagonist Holmes is saved by a group revealed to basically be the real heroes. A completely independent, unplayable troupe of holy relic-wielding badasses undertaking their own quest. It’s a great moment of displacement. In one disempowering instant you understand that, no, you’re not the centre of this story or this universe. Berwick Saga is the same, intended to be just one side of a larger story. The evil emperor and the evil pope of this game are defeated off-screen by two different handsome tragic heroes who could have easily had games made about them instead, of which we only see snippets. Kaga himself summed all this up with the statement that “[Berwick Saga] is not a heroic fantasy, it's a human drama taking place on the stage consisting of history and war“. This is why the game has the (admittedly ridiculous) subtitle of “Chapter 174”, it evokes the feeling of picking out a random chapter in the middle of an enormous chronicle.
Previously, I pointed out how Berwick Saga solves the perennial problem of baiting from Fire Emblem, but this is really only the surface of what it gets right, I’ll touch on two more: Mounted units and supports.
The balancing of mounted units is one of the most infamous recurring problems in Fire Emblem. Kaga himself was responsible for the overcentralizing presence of mounted units in Genealogy of the Holy War, but while in 2005, Path of Radiance witnessed one of the most overpowered incarnations of them, Berwick Saga had already solved it, releasing merely one month later. Cavalry are strong in Berwick, they have 7 move instead of the usual 4 and have the usual Canto skill, but there’s a twist. Horses in Berwick have their own health bars and can die just as their riders can. Once their horse dies the unit is now stuck walking until you buy or assign them a new horse. Buying a new horse (or at least, one that won’t die in two hits) is a significant financial commitment in a game where money is a precious resource. So instead of making mounted units less fun to use by nerfing them directly, Kaga found an outside-the-box way of balancing them which further reinforces the themes and systems of the game, and the fact that Fire Emblem is still struggling to solve this speaks for itself.
Supports are another system that Fire Emblem hasn't solved, which has been relitigated rather recently, Berwick, as usual, solves it in a creative way. Every mercenary has a hidden happiness number that goes up when you hire and deploy them, which unlocks scenes related to their side stories and recruitment, they even have entire hidden paralogues in there! All of this allows specific character moments and developments to be contextualised by occurring at specific moments in the story, avoiding the FE support problem. Members of the Knights of Sinon have entire paralogues devoted to their personal stories, events even occur within chapters themselves, often requiring the fulfilment of some side object, all of which weaves character and gameplay together in a much deeper way than disjointed support conversations.
The unit design is easily Kaga’s best from a gameplay perspective. With Genealogy, Kaga discovered that personal skills were one of the best ways to bestow each individual unit with a different feel and function. He iterated upon this through Thracia and TearRing Saga, until he perfected it with Berwick Saga. Every unit here is radically different and some of the skills are game-changing. There are several playable units who, at base, have the incredibly strong “breaker” and “bane” skills, which in nu-Fire Emblem were strictly reserved for advanced classes, there are units with the skill “Deathmatch”, which puts them into 5 rounds of combat with any given enemy, radically improving their player-phase combat potential, other units have similarly strong but radically different skills, “Pulverize”, for example, allows a unit to double their attack in exchange for not moving, giving these units a stationary turret feel. Not only are the skills strong and individuating, they’re expertly crafted to fit the maps. Kramer, for instance, has the skill “Climber” and “Arrowsbane”, meaning he doesn’t lose his avoid on cliffs, and has extra avoid against all arrows, perfectly suiting him to Chapter 11-1, in which you are tasked with scaling a cliff defended by ballistas and crossbowmen. Esteban has the ability to see further in fog-of-war and negate enemies' forest avoid bonus, perfectly suiting him to chapter 12-1, a fog-of-war map in a dense forest. I could go on for almost every unit. What I want to stress is that every aspect of Berwick Saga is masterfully sculpted to feed into and reinforce every other part of the game: The maps are designed to fit the units, your ability to pick the right units is related to the mercenary system - the happiness and side-stories of the characters, your ability to fulfil these is reliant on your resource-management, which is reinforced by the struggle occurring in the narrative, the narrative intertwines with the maps, and so we come to a full circle in which every part of the game is hermetically bound together.
Speaking of map design, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, Kaga’s map design is so many leaps and bounds more sophisticated and interesting than Fire Emblem’s that it causes FE fans to have existential crises. At times it can be almost too intricate. Berwick Saga maps are a joy, especially the main chapter maps, not merely because of the tension from the aforementioned time limits, but because of the sheer wealth of side objectives and optional events. To give you a sense of this, I’m going to overview a map, Chapter 3. In this map, Reese has been tasked with escorting three priests to a temple, but there’s a twist, the three priests are all old men who stubbornly disagree on the best route to take to the temple, so they decide to all go different routes. The player is tasked with splitting up their 12 units into a top, middle and bottom lane to cover the priests as they advance. Even worse, waiting for them at the temple is a bandit who is able to stack buffs onto himself with the Battle Cry skill, so the player needs to get there first and clear the way. On the way, all three priests will trigger different events: On the lower route is a superboss that the playable unit Faye will attempt to duel and fail, furthering our awareness of her backstory. In the middle is an assassin who attempts to kill the priest, only to be saved by a mysterious Knight who will later become a playable character, and on the top path the priest encounters another playable character, Owen, in an event that hints at his burgeoning secret. On top of this, around turn 20, the playable character Esteban shows up as an enemy and can be convinced to stand down by Christine, citing his financial troubles which the player can help with by later hiring him as a mercenary. Around the same time, the bounty target Garos turns up on the bottom of the map, he’s a tough enemy, boasting the “Obfuscate” skill, which hides his stats, and an assassin knife, which gives him a whopping 80 crit, but if you take him down before he escapes you get rewarded with a handsome 5000 gold by the mercenary guild. On top of this, there’s a locket in the centre of the lake that can be recovered by Axel, the only unit capable of walking on water tiles, four search points strewn through the map, and a Razite cleric who drops the Darkmend spell, useless to the player, but sought after by the collector Ertzheimer. The player must attend to all of this while also juggling regular combat duties, in a word, it’s dense. This is just one map. And if you’ll forgive the constant comparisons to Fire Emblem, whose maps (especially post-Awakening) are often just flat terrain with enemies randomly strewn about with no side objectives or optional events, it’s not even a contest in my mind.
Let’s address some criticism. People say this game is slow, personally I use the word “suspenseful”, but I won’t deny it’s true. Because hit rates are so shaky and hitting or missing has such consequences, the animations are very slow to give each outcome an air of gravitas. However, this does become a problem when you have to reload and redo progress, it can threaten to become tedious. If you’re new and struggling and constantly reloading (which you will be because this game is HARD), those slow animations can become torturous and I’m sympathetic to this. Kaga himself actually suggested only playing the game in 5-turn bursts because of this.
The durability system is weird. Instead of numerical uses, equipment has states of disrepair that each have a chance to break associated with them. It’s possible for a brand new sword to trigger a 1% chance to break upon being used for the first time, which unfailingly makes you want to punch a hole in your wall.
Personally I find these things to be superficial blemishes on what is unambiguously a masterpiece of game design. Despite that, this is not the videogame version of War and Peace that Kaga wished to make, as it’s only one game. Tirnanog would dissolve before any other sides of this story could be told. Hopefully Vestaria Saga can evolve into that, but it’s still a shame that because of the limitations of SRPG studio, Berwick Saga will likely forever be the peak in terms of combining his game design with a unique art direction. While at times it feels like my personal hidden gem, I do hope that this game gets the recognition it deserves one day. To paraphrase a certain critic, if we can all help the cream to rise to the proverbial crop, we’ll all benefit in the long run, and there are ideas in here that desperately need to be injected into the standard praxis of SPRG design, so, long live Berwick Saga, and if you got this far, thanks for reading!
And, if you do decide to give it a try, just remember, trust in Dean. Dean will see you through.
—-------------------------------
Translation of Kaga’s blog, I altered some of this in the text to make it scan a bit better.
Favourite OST
I don’t suppose myself to be a particularly strong purveyor of obscure games, despite my admiration for them. I tend to prioritise playing stuff that’s both widely and strongly regarded, so it’s a bit auspicious that a few years ago, many months into Covid, going down the rabbit hole of Fire Emblem, coming to the realisation that Thracia was my favourite one and that this Kaga guy was “kinda cool” and deciding to check out his other games, was an event which conveniently coincided with the finalization of a fan translation of Berwick Saga, and that such an event led me to discover one of my favourite games of all time and, in my limited estimation, one of the most underappreciated games of all time, with only a measly 68 plays on Backloggd as of writing.
Berwick Saga is a masterpiece, it’s a sweeping, sprawling labyrinth of shockingly thoughtful SRPG design, linking and weaving together a romantic military drama with gameplay entirely in concert with its themes throughout the entire runtime, it’s the culmination of the long, decades-spanning evolution of design sensibilities from the father of Fire Emblem and a game that, in one fell swoop, solves and revolutionizes the perennial problems facing Fire Emblem-like games, in some cases, years before they would even come to prominence. Know that it’s with great love, then, that I say that it’s entirely understandable why the game has languished in obscurity for almost 18 years: the game only received an English fan translation in February 2020, and it was explicitly designed by Kaga to appeal to hardcore fans of strategy RPGs, much like Thracia 776, which was one of the lowest selling Fire Emblem games. Writing on his blog, Kaga even said that “though people wouldn't appreciate me saying such things, this one might not be suited for people who aren't that good with [SRPGs]”. Shockingly, the game still outsold Path of Radiance, which is more of a testament to how Fire Emblem was struggling in this period rather than Berwick Saga’s success, but It’s this combination of only existing in Japanese and being very niche that have left it hidden from people for so many years. I think it’s time will come, (maybe when a certain youtuber brings attention to it), but speaking more selfishly, there’s a certain joy in having what feels like a secret in videogame form, it’s become a yearly tradition for me to do a playthrough of this game, a game which is not only perfectly suited to my interests but exists for so few, and every time I discover new things and refine the clockwork strategy with which I navigate through it, a love the game reciprocates in how it rewards this kind of obsessiveness, it is, in short, a game for freaks.
Let’s rewind back in time, who is Shouzou Kaga? A simple explanation would be that he’s the original creator of Fire Emblem and the lead designer of the first five games in the series, from 1990 to 1999, but to many of the hardcore fans of Fire Emblem he’s much more than this, he’s an icon, a titan of game design, and a man with a strong creative vision. One of the oft-remarked facets of Kaga’s design, especially Thracia, is his commitment to ludonarrative harmony, and this facet was baked into the very concept of Fire Emblem, speaking with Final Fantasy’s Sakaguchi, he stated that “I wanted to make a strategy game that was more dramatic, something where you would really be able to feel the pain and struggle of the characters.”, it was a core ideal that he would gradually refine in the following years and finally perfect with Berwick Saga, and in this interview we see the kindling of what would eventually become another burning ideal for him - the idea of a sprawling, multi-game, military epic:
“With Fire Emblem I’ve made a “role playing simulation” game, but at the same time, it’s very linear. And I think players who spend so much time building and developing their units will probably feel like, for all that work, they didn’t get to use the units very much. So for the next game, I’m thinking of some kind of simultaneous, multi-scenario setup, where there’s a number of different paths to explore.”
We could say, straightforwardly, that Kaga was the creator of Fire Emblem, but much more profoundly, he’s a man trying to create the videogame version of a multi-book war novel, the videogame version of War and Peace, it’s a dream that he’s still trying to fulfil to this day, and understanding this dream contextualizes his actions following 1999. During the development of Fire Emblem 64, Kaga would abruptly leave Nintendo, dissatisfied with the hardware limitations of the N64, specifically how it handled saving and its inability to transfer saves between games. Recognising that the PS1 was much more suited to the fulfilment of his dream game, he would found Tirnanog, his own company, and begin development of TearRing Saga. I won’t exhaustively cover the events that follow (you can watch this if you’d like to know the full story, albeit in a sensationalized form), for our purposes, all we need to know is that Nintendo would file a lawsuit against Tirnanog for its similarity to Fire Emblem, and that Tirnanog was ordered to pay a 76 million yen fine to Nintendo.
Thankfully, TearRing Saga was still allowed to go onto store shelves, it would still recuperate its development costs, and Tirnanog was financially solvent enough to create another game, but this time, it would need to be significantly different to Fire Emblem.
It was a blessing in disguise. The legally imposed requirement to change the fundamental characteristics of his games would allow Kaga to return to the drawing board, inject his years of lessons from making SRPGs, and create something that was far superior to his previous works on an elementary mechanical level. Instead of a square grid, maps were now composed of hexes, a seemingly superficial change with radical implications: Instead of each flank having one side to be attacked from, now there were three. Defending units from attack was now much more precarious and required much more consideration of placement. Instead of the Fire Emblem alternating turn system, where you move all of your units and then the enemy moves all of theirs, now you and the enemy take your turn simultaneously, proportional to how many units you have. This mechanically reinforces the feeling of being outnumbered since, if the enemy outnumbers you two to one, they will get two actions for every one that you get. Reflecting on the superiority of this system to the old one on his blog, Kaga wrote that “In the usual alternating turn system there's no escaping the homogeneity of tactics, specifically the "baiting" tactic. No matter how complex you make the computer’s thought process, the player will always have the advantage. But with the simultaneous turn system, [...] the standard tactic of "keep the distance, bait them out and gang up with overwhelming numbers" cannot be used, and the player is forced to adapt to each situation.” To accompany this, Berwick Saga sees a much more sophisticated enemy AI than any existing Fire Emblem game, which determines and re-evaluates which actions should be prioritised in the turn and where zones of activity are occurring after every action. The simultaneous turn system both requires and allows for much more complicated strategy and care in the order of your actions, my favourite tactic is the ability to abuse the fact that the player always gets the first action of the turn, meaning you can use the last and first action of a turn to take two turns before the enemy has a chance to act. All of these changes iterate and improve upon the thematic precariousness that was expressed in Thracia 776. In that game, the hit rate was hard-capped to 99, such that at any given moment, the player could be required to adjust their strategy spontaneously. With Berwick, the same thing has been achieved more elegantly by baking it into the core systems.
And much like Thracia, the story and resource management reinforce this theme of precariousness and being at the mercy of your environment. Reese, our protagonist, has been called from the remote lands of Sinon to serve in the Berwick League. Their side are losing the war and it’s not pretty. Funds and equipment have to be scrounged together from odd jobs, bounties, or captured enemies. The grizzly reality of war, the abuse of prisoners of war, the corruption and incompetence of those in command, the flood of refugees and proliferation of orphans, all of these are brought to the forefront throughout the story. Unlike any previous game, many units in this game are mercenaries who have to be hired with money, slowly depleting your stock of funds. Decisions have to be made like “do I hire this strong unit or do I save my money?”, “Do I buy good weapons or save up for something else?”. Even the missions build into this: Because the Knights of Sinon have a lot of cavaliers, they’re sent on many guerilla missions where they have to achieve an objective under a time limit - free these prisoners before the sun comes up, protect these injured soldiers as they escape a war zone, then escape yourself, it all has to be done in 24 turns. While many of these time limits aren’t hard to satisfy, they still lead to a frantic, building tension where you escape just in time with imperial forces swarming you, breathing down your neck.
More than any particular bleakness, what I find fascinating about this story is how Reese is merely a part of a much larger epic. As I mentioned earlier, it was always Kaga’s dream to create a multi-game war story, which lends his games a unique feeling of smallness. Easily my favourite map in TearRing Saga is map 21, in which our protagonist Holmes is saved by a group revealed to basically be the real heroes. A completely independent, unplayable troupe of holy relic-wielding badasses undertaking their own quest. It’s a great moment of displacement. In one disempowering instant you understand that, no, you’re not the centre of this story or this universe. Berwick Saga is the same, intended to be just one side of a larger story. The evil emperor and the evil pope of this game are defeated off-screen by two different handsome tragic heroes who could have easily had games made about them instead, of which we only see snippets. Kaga himself summed all this up with the statement that “[Berwick Saga] is not a heroic fantasy, it's a human drama taking place on the stage consisting of history and war“. This is why the game has the (admittedly ridiculous) subtitle of “Chapter 174”, it evokes the feeling of picking out a random chapter in the middle of an enormous chronicle.
Previously, I pointed out how Berwick Saga solves the perennial problem of baiting from Fire Emblem, but this is really only the surface of what it gets right, I’ll touch on two more: Mounted units and supports.
The balancing of mounted units is one of the most infamous recurring problems in Fire Emblem. Kaga himself was responsible for the overcentralizing presence of mounted units in Genealogy of the Holy War, but while in 2005, Path of Radiance witnessed one of the most overpowered incarnations of them, Berwick Saga had already solved it, releasing merely one month later. Cavalry are strong in Berwick, they have 7 move instead of the usual 4 and have the usual Canto skill, but there’s a twist. Horses in Berwick have their own health bars and can die just as their riders can. Once their horse dies the unit is now stuck walking until you buy or assign them a new horse. Buying a new horse (or at least, one that won’t die in two hits) is a significant financial commitment in a game where money is a precious resource. So instead of making mounted units less fun to use by nerfing them directly, Kaga found an outside-the-box way of balancing them which further reinforces the themes and systems of the game, and the fact that Fire Emblem is still struggling to solve this speaks for itself.
Supports are another system that Fire Emblem hasn't solved, which has been relitigated rather recently, Berwick, as usual, solves it in a creative way. Every mercenary has a hidden happiness number that goes up when you hire and deploy them, which unlocks scenes related to their side stories and recruitment, they even have entire hidden paralogues in there! All of this allows specific character moments and developments to be contextualised by occurring at specific moments in the story, avoiding the FE support problem. Members of the Knights of Sinon have entire paralogues devoted to their personal stories, events even occur within chapters themselves, often requiring the fulfilment of some side object, all of which weaves character and gameplay together in a much deeper way than disjointed support conversations.
The unit design is easily Kaga’s best from a gameplay perspective. With Genealogy, Kaga discovered that personal skills were one of the best ways to bestow each individual unit with a different feel and function. He iterated upon this through Thracia and TearRing Saga, until he perfected it with Berwick Saga. Every unit here is radically different and some of the skills are game-changing. There are several playable units who, at base, have the incredibly strong “breaker” and “bane” skills, which in nu-Fire Emblem were strictly reserved for advanced classes, there are units with the skill “Deathmatch”, which puts them into 5 rounds of combat with any given enemy, radically improving their player-phase combat potential, other units have similarly strong but radically different skills, “Pulverize”, for example, allows a unit to double their attack in exchange for not moving, giving these units a stationary turret feel. Not only are the skills strong and individuating, they’re expertly crafted to fit the maps. Kramer, for instance, has the skill “Climber” and “Arrowsbane”, meaning he doesn’t lose his avoid on cliffs, and has extra avoid against all arrows, perfectly suiting him to Chapter 11-1, in which you are tasked with scaling a cliff defended by ballistas and crossbowmen. Esteban has the ability to see further in fog-of-war and negate enemies' forest avoid bonus, perfectly suiting him to chapter 12-1, a fog-of-war map in a dense forest. I could go on for almost every unit. What I want to stress is that every aspect of Berwick Saga is masterfully sculpted to feed into and reinforce every other part of the game: The maps are designed to fit the units, your ability to pick the right units is related to the mercenary system - the happiness and side-stories of the characters, your ability to fulfil these is reliant on your resource-management, which is reinforced by the struggle occurring in the narrative, the narrative intertwines with the maps, and so we come to a full circle in which every part of the game is hermetically bound together.
Speaking of map design, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, Kaga’s map design is so many leaps and bounds more sophisticated and interesting than Fire Emblem’s that it causes FE fans to have existential crises. At times it can be almost too intricate. Berwick Saga maps are a joy, especially the main chapter maps, not merely because of the tension from the aforementioned time limits, but because of the sheer wealth of side objectives and optional events. To give you a sense of this, I’m going to overview a map, Chapter 3. In this map, Reese has been tasked with escorting three priests to a temple, but there’s a twist, the three priests are all old men who stubbornly disagree on the best route to take to the temple, so they decide to all go different routes. The player is tasked with splitting up their 12 units into a top, middle and bottom lane to cover the priests as they advance. Even worse, waiting for them at the temple is a bandit who is able to stack buffs onto himself with the Battle Cry skill, so the player needs to get there first and clear the way. On the way, all three priests will trigger different events: On the lower route is a superboss that the playable unit Faye will attempt to duel and fail, furthering our awareness of her backstory. In the middle is an assassin who attempts to kill the priest, only to be saved by a mysterious Knight who will later become a playable character, and on the top path the priest encounters another playable character, Owen, in an event that hints at his burgeoning secret. On top of this, around turn 20, the playable character Esteban shows up as an enemy and can be convinced to stand down by Christine, citing his financial troubles which the player can help with by later hiring him as a mercenary. Around the same time, the bounty target Garos turns up on the bottom of the map, he’s a tough enemy, boasting the “Obfuscate” skill, which hides his stats, and an assassin knife, which gives him a whopping 80 crit, but if you take him down before he escapes you get rewarded with a handsome 5000 gold by the mercenary guild. On top of this, there’s a locket in the centre of the lake that can be recovered by Axel, the only unit capable of walking on water tiles, four search points strewn through the map, and a Razite cleric who drops the Darkmend spell, useless to the player, but sought after by the collector Ertzheimer. The player must attend to all of this while also juggling regular combat duties, in a word, it’s dense. This is just one map. And if you’ll forgive the constant comparisons to Fire Emblem, whose maps (especially post-Awakening) are often just flat terrain with enemies randomly strewn about with no side objectives or optional events, it’s not even a contest in my mind.
Let’s address some criticism. People say this game is slow, personally I use the word “suspenseful”, but I won’t deny it’s true. Because hit rates are so shaky and hitting or missing has such consequences, the animations are very slow to give each outcome an air of gravitas. However, this does become a problem when you have to reload and redo progress, it can threaten to become tedious. If you’re new and struggling and constantly reloading (which you will be because this game is HARD), those slow animations can become torturous and I’m sympathetic to this. Kaga himself actually suggested only playing the game in 5-turn bursts because of this.
The durability system is weird. Instead of numerical uses, equipment has states of disrepair that each have a chance to break associated with them. It’s possible for a brand new sword to trigger a 1% chance to break upon being used for the first time, which unfailingly makes you want to punch a hole in your wall.
Personally I find these things to be superficial blemishes on what is unambiguously a masterpiece of game design. Despite that, this is not the videogame version of War and Peace that Kaga wished to make, as it’s only one game. Tirnanog would dissolve before any other sides of this story could be told. Hopefully Vestaria Saga can evolve into that, but it’s still a shame that because of the limitations of SRPG studio, Berwick Saga will likely forever be the peak in terms of combining his game design with a unique art direction. While at times it feels like my personal hidden gem, I do hope that this game gets the recognition it deserves one day. To paraphrase a certain critic, if we can all help the cream to rise to the proverbial crop, we’ll all benefit in the long run, and there are ideas in here that desperately need to be injected into the standard praxis of SPRG design, so, long live Berwick Saga, and if you got this far, thanks for reading!
And, if you do decide to give it a try, just remember, trust in Dean. Dean will see you through.
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Translation of Kaga’s blog, I altered some of this in the text to make it scan a bit better.
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