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