"Affection: The extent to which this attribute grows depends entirely on you. Even if you don't feel it today, you may feel it tomorrow. If you were to wake tomorrow and find that you hold affection for your characters, one can only imagine how blessed they themselves might feel."

If that ain't the SaGa philosophy in a nutshell, eh? These games don't demand that you fall for them right away. They are niche by design, concerned less with instant gratification than giving you layers to peel away, demanding that you repeatedly change your understanding of the game over time before you're finally staring with rapt fascination at the core. The position and thickness of each layer, however, vary from one barely-scrutable Akitoshi Kawazu fuckfest to the next.

Here he fixes his lunatic eye on story structure. There's a lot of overlap between the four protagonists and the quests each of them undergo in their routes, but Scarlet Grace differentiates the experiences by packing each quest with a truly dizzying amount of flags. I haven't been this daunted by a game's systematic depth since... well, Unlimited SaGa. Regions you've been to, choices you've made, quest nodes you've hit, items you've picked up, characters you've talked to: hundreds of possibilities are accounted for, sometimes to the point of narrative incoherence. The story is impressive less for the emotional or intellectual effect of its plotlines themselves, but rather its interpretation of the sheer clockwork of a world in motion. The 2D/3D living storybook art design is as honest as it gets about the game's (and SaGa's) fizzy, quicksilver nature.

If this all sounds exhausting, it is ultimately easy enough to power through when you're also given what is plainly the best turn-based battle system of any contemporary JRPG. Encounters are far more than mere DPS races, prioritizing timeline manipulation and damage mitigation. There's very little resource management and healing is both rare and unreliable; after attempting to account for all the requisite under-the-hood SaGa chaos, you're left with little more than time to plan. It is frequently challenging, and defeat teaches you well about what to improve on and anticipate. For my part, I was taught humility as I approached the final boss four times, each time cockier than the last, each time having my ass summarily handed to me.

As with every SaGa game, Scarlet Grace is best enjoyed over a span of several years, this one moreso because of the aforementioned frequent overlap of each lengthy scenario. For all of the minutiae unique to each route and the pithy character writing that differentiates them, the overall novelty of the affair probably wouldn't survive four back-to-back playthroughs. Even after five years to let it all breathe, I still nearly lost my shit when I realized that I would have to do the Phoenix scenario for the third time because it's mandatory for Taria. But it's not SaGa without a little madness, right?