Once upon a time, I've made it my mission to ensure that I would complete every SaGa game there is to see how the series evolves over time. 14 hours into my playthrough of Romancing SaGa, I'm really struggling to justify my reasons to keep playing, but at the same time, I'm struggling to put it down until I see the credits for myself. What initially starts as a game full of intrigue and promise, devolves into something much more miserable. The Gameboy SaGas were able to justify being 15 hours long. Romancing SaGa can barely bring itself to justify being more than 6 hours, let alone the 30 to 40 hours that it actually asks of you.
Breaking away from the prior linear structure of Final Fantasy and the Gameboy SaGas, Romancing Saga firmly positions itself as the first open world Squaresoft RPG. The concept is exciting. Each of the 8 characters you pick can wind up in a different starting point of the world, and be granted easier access to other parts depending on their story. Because the game runs on a system where certain quests get locked or unlocked depending on how late you get to them, every character will have at least some unique quests to tackle of their own. It's not the type of game where you'll get to see everything, but that's part of the point, to make it more replayable with the other characters.
A particular highlight of this open world was being able to go down into a sewer area, and emerge into a completely different town with new music. My first reaction was to mouth "Where the fuck am I?" to myself. That's where I really saw the appeal of the open world, perhaps in a way that no other open world has instilled in me. I think that the concept of "See that place? You can go there" is boring and overdone, but the feeling of putting you into an underground area in order to take away your sense of direction, and allowing you to emerge into a new unknown land is an unparalleled one.
The combat works like the previous SaGa games, and because of my experience with those, I've found it quite easy to get into. I was already used to the random element of stat-gaining, but this entry streamlines certain elements like Legend III did. There's no weapon durability (thank god), and magic spells are yours to keep when you buy them. A new addition is the return of Final Fantasy II's weapon leveling (at least, I don't think the other SaGa games had that?), which not only increases the weapon's strength, but new to this game, adds new skill abilities onto your weapon, some of which are delightfully overpowered and can mow down through bosses in 3 or 2 turns.
There's also a party formation system, which I've also picked up on quite easily due to Suikoden using something pretty much like this. It's as simple as front-row tanky members get the short-range weapons, average-stat members go in the middle row and get the middle-range weapons, and back-row weak members get long-range weaponry and tend to rely on magic spells. In short, if you've played SaGa and Suikoden before, the gameplay systems here are perfectly simple to pick up.
Alright, so... oh boy. Where did Romancing SaGa go wrong? Well, for one, you remember how Legend II had that one fucking 1-minute loop of a song that kept playing everywhere you went? Well, Romancing has something very akin to that. It seems that each character you start the game with has their own "main theme", and that main theme is gonna haunt you in nearly every town and non-dungeon area you will visit. You don't move very fast here for the record, so that's gonna be a whole lot of time where you'll get to hear this song, and it's gonna be one incentive to lower the volume down to like 5%.
More than anything though, more than the high difficulty, the lack of music variety, or the lack of direction (which I personally enjoyed), I am overcome with an intense loathing for the dungeons. Oh my god, someone help me from punching these dungeons in the face. They are awful. Awful, awful, awful, it's a level of awfulness I have never seen any other RPG get anywhere close to, I can't emphasize this enough.
You see, Romancing SaGa does something a little different with the way you encounter enemies. Instead of a chance of random encounters per each tile you walk across, enemies now visually appear in the dungeons themselves, and, if you're sneaky enough, you can walk around them and avoid the encounter. You know how EarthBound works? It's kind of like that! Well, actually, I would compare it closer to EarthBound with the anti-piracy on. Because where Romancing SaGa falls apart, is the sheer amount of these enemies present in the dungeons.
Within every corridor, every room of a dungeon, there can be as many as 15 enemies on-screen, and yes, all of them count as their own individual encounter. "15 doesn't sound so bad", you say? Imagine 15 enemies that are all forming a conga line in front of you, and there will be 15 more just off-screen.
"Just avoid them?" Well, I assume that's the point, but most of the time, you can't. They're either faster than you are, placed in very tight corridors, or waiting for you right beyond a door that you cannot go around. The way this game generally goes, is that when you kill one enemy, the one behind them takes their place and walks up like they're fuckin' waiting in line for their turn. Moreover, if these enemies make contact with you from the side or from behind, your party formation gets all screwed up, and you risk taking extra damage in a game that already deals pretty heavy amounts.
So, really, it's not a good idea to try and risk walking around the enemies a lot of the time, because they're much quicker to react than you are. Instead, it's better to fight every single one you see, but doing so means that you're going to find out why this game is really 30 hours long. Not because it's full of content, but because it's full of horribly balanced tedium, ranging between dozens upon dozens of boring fights with no strategy required, or enemies that immediately one-hit KO your entire party. Which would've been okay if these fights were found in lesser quantities, but with most of them, you don't even get a literal half of a fucking second of breathing room, before you're thrown into the next one, and the next, and it just goes on until it drives you insane. In SaGa's attempt to fix the frustrations of the "random encounter issue," I can't fathom how the director didn't realize that this was so much worse.
Adding to that, there is very little story. Damage-dealing magic never felt as strong as spamming the attack button, bringing back the problem that Final Fantasy 2 had. And what you ultimately wind up with, is a game where the dungeons are the main focus, and also the worst part of the game. Rather than giving you grinding as a relaxing option to do in your downtime, grinding is instead actively forced upon you in moments where you want it the least.
And yet, despite my attempts at putting the game down, despite me literally deleting my 25-hour save file in order to de-incentivize myself to revisit Romancing SaGa again, I just kept going. No matter what, I couldn't put it down. And for each step of the way, I kept asking myself, why? Why do this to myself? What else is there waiting for me here that could possibly turn my opinion around? Maybe I already knew nothing could. All that mattered is knowing that when I beat this game once, I can safely head into the later entries, without ever having to think about this one ever again.
But, I suppose this leads me into a question I've been wondering about since these initial 14 hours... is SaGa ever gonna click? All three of the Gameboy games and now this one under my belt, and my consensus on each one was that they're all promising, but there's always a catch, whether they're too jank, too frustrating, or too tedious. When will come the point where a SaGa game does most of everything right? Is there such a point? I'm not holding out my hopes for Romancing 2, but I've heard Romancing 3 is very good... perhaps I'll just give 2 a quick look in the future, but make 3 my next big priority. The remake of Romancing 1 is also something I'm interested in.
But, as for this one... this one's a battle. The only reason I haven't dropped it yet is because I wish I could have the same mentality other players have of just simply not feeling like they need to beat something, but I'm too fucked to properly accept that. I have to see this through to the end. Even if it may take another 30 hours to do so. Is that miserable? Yeah! But, perhaps I'll feel at peace once it's finally over...
Update: I saw it through to the end. Am I at peace now? No, not really... I mostly just feel stupid that I even felt the need to beat it at all. Oh, well. It's done. And everything I said in the review still stands.
Breaking away from the prior linear structure of Final Fantasy and the Gameboy SaGas, Romancing Saga firmly positions itself as the first open world Squaresoft RPG. The concept is exciting. Each of the 8 characters you pick can wind up in a different starting point of the world, and be granted easier access to other parts depending on their story. Because the game runs on a system where certain quests get locked or unlocked depending on how late you get to them, every character will have at least some unique quests to tackle of their own. It's not the type of game where you'll get to see everything, but that's part of the point, to make it more replayable with the other characters.
A particular highlight of this open world was being able to go down into a sewer area, and emerge into a completely different town with new music. My first reaction was to mouth "Where the fuck am I?" to myself. That's where I really saw the appeal of the open world, perhaps in a way that no other open world has instilled in me. I think that the concept of "See that place? You can go there" is boring and overdone, but the feeling of putting you into an underground area in order to take away your sense of direction, and allowing you to emerge into a new unknown land is an unparalleled one.
The combat works like the previous SaGa games, and because of my experience with those, I've found it quite easy to get into. I was already used to the random element of stat-gaining, but this entry streamlines certain elements like Legend III did. There's no weapon durability (thank god), and magic spells are yours to keep when you buy them. A new addition is the return of Final Fantasy II's weapon leveling (at least, I don't think the other SaGa games had that?), which not only increases the weapon's strength, but new to this game, adds new skill abilities onto your weapon, some of which are delightfully overpowered and can mow down through bosses in 3 or 2 turns.
There's also a party formation system, which I've also picked up on quite easily due to Suikoden using something pretty much like this. It's as simple as front-row tanky members get the short-range weapons, average-stat members go in the middle row and get the middle-range weapons, and back-row weak members get long-range weaponry and tend to rely on magic spells. In short, if you've played SaGa and Suikoden before, the gameplay systems here are perfectly simple to pick up.
Alright, so... oh boy. Where did Romancing SaGa go wrong? Well, for one, you remember how Legend II had that one fucking 1-minute loop of a song that kept playing everywhere you went? Well, Romancing has something very akin to that. It seems that each character you start the game with has their own "main theme", and that main theme is gonna haunt you in nearly every town and non-dungeon area you will visit. You don't move very fast here for the record, so that's gonna be a whole lot of time where you'll get to hear this song, and it's gonna be one incentive to lower the volume down to like 5%.
More than anything though, more than the high difficulty, the lack of music variety, or the lack of direction (which I personally enjoyed), I am overcome with an intense loathing for the dungeons. Oh my god, someone help me from punching these dungeons in the face. They are awful. Awful, awful, awful, it's a level of awfulness I have never seen any other RPG get anywhere close to, I can't emphasize this enough.
You see, Romancing SaGa does something a little different with the way you encounter enemies. Instead of a chance of random encounters per each tile you walk across, enemies now visually appear in the dungeons themselves, and, if you're sneaky enough, you can walk around them and avoid the encounter. You know how EarthBound works? It's kind of like that! Well, actually, I would compare it closer to EarthBound with the anti-piracy on. Because where Romancing SaGa falls apart, is the sheer amount of these enemies present in the dungeons.
Within every corridor, every room of a dungeon, there can be as many as 15 enemies on-screen, and yes, all of them count as their own individual encounter. "15 doesn't sound so bad", you say? Imagine 15 enemies that are all forming a conga line in front of you, and there will be 15 more just off-screen.
"Just avoid them?" Well, I assume that's the point, but most of the time, you can't. They're either faster than you are, placed in very tight corridors, or waiting for you right beyond a door that you cannot go around. The way this game generally goes, is that when you kill one enemy, the one behind them takes their place and walks up like they're fuckin' waiting in line for their turn. Moreover, if these enemies make contact with you from the side or from behind, your party formation gets all screwed up, and you risk taking extra damage in a game that already deals pretty heavy amounts.
So, really, it's not a good idea to try and risk walking around the enemies a lot of the time, because they're much quicker to react than you are. Instead, it's better to fight every single one you see, but doing so means that you're going to find out why this game is really 30 hours long. Not because it's full of content, but because it's full of horribly balanced tedium, ranging between dozens upon dozens of boring fights with no strategy required, or enemies that immediately one-hit KO your entire party. Which would've been okay if these fights were found in lesser quantities, but with most of them, you don't even get a literal half of a fucking second of breathing room, before you're thrown into the next one, and the next, and it just goes on until it drives you insane. In SaGa's attempt to fix the frustrations of the "random encounter issue," I can't fathom how the director didn't realize that this was so much worse.
Adding to that, there is very little story. Damage-dealing magic never felt as strong as spamming the attack button, bringing back the problem that Final Fantasy 2 had. And what you ultimately wind up with, is a game where the dungeons are the main focus, and also the worst part of the game. Rather than giving you grinding as a relaxing option to do in your downtime, grinding is instead actively forced upon you in moments where you want it the least.
And yet, despite my attempts at putting the game down, despite me literally deleting my 25-hour save file in order to de-incentivize myself to revisit Romancing SaGa again, I just kept going. No matter what, I couldn't put it down. And for each step of the way, I kept asking myself, why? Why do this to myself? What else is there waiting for me here that could possibly turn my opinion around? Maybe I already knew nothing could. All that mattered is knowing that when I beat this game once, I can safely head into the later entries, without ever having to think about this one ever again.
But, I suppose this leads me into a question I've been wondering about since these initial 14 hours... is SaGa ever gonna click? All three of the Gameboy games and now this one under my belt, and my consensus on each one was that they're all promising, but there's always a catch, whether they're too jank, too frustrating, or too tedious. When will come the point where a SaGa game does most of everything right? Is there such a point? I'm not holding out my hopes for Romancing 2, but I've heard Romancing 3 is very good... perhaps I'll just give 2 a quick look in the future, but make 3 my next big priority. The remake of Romancing 1 is also something I'm interested in.
But, as for this one... this one's a battle. The only reason I haven't dropped it yet is because I wish I could have the same mentality other players have of just simply not feeling like they need to beat something, but I'm too fucked to properly accept that. I have to see this through to the end. Even if it may take another 30 hours to do so. Is that miserable? Yeah! But, perhaps I'll feel at peace once it's finally over...
Update: I saw it through to the end. Am I at peace now? No, not really... I mostly just feel stupid that I even felt the need to beat it at all. Oh, well. It's done. And everything I said in the review still stands.