I think I just no-lifed SaGa Emerald Byond harder than any game I've ever played before, even as a kid on summer break. Much less as a working adult in my late 30s.
I'll get a few basics out of the way before jumping into my rants on what I like.
This is a budget game. The character models and UI design really show the lack of money. Voice acting is very sparse.
This is not a narrative tour de force. The storylines are schlocky B-movie kitchen-sink nonsense, but, if you like that type of thing, it's very fun and frequently funny. I had an absolute blast with it. I love singing robots and saving molemen and helping plant people bloom, but I can easily see people being put off.
This is not a standard JRPG with dungeons and exploration. You move from event to event on a pop-up book like map, engaging with visual novel type sections or combat. It's a stripped down experience in many ways. As with the narrative, I enjoy this and relish the change of pace, but can easily see how others might not.
Kenji Ito delivered another banger soundtrack. This might be the thing Emerald Beyond has most in common with its higher budget cousins from Square.
With that out of the way, I'll dig into the real meat of what I love about Emerald Beyond. There are two main factors: the combat and the new-game plus cycle.
The combat is absolutely excellent, and sits as my favorite JRPG combat, maybe even surpassing SaGa Scarlet Grace. Much like Scarlet Grace, it's all about timeline manipulation and features a shared action point pool for your party. The specifics of how "united attacks" work has changed and is easier to perform -- for both you and your enemies. More importantly, there's far more variety in your characters -- humans with a ton of weapon types and magic, mechs that scale off equipment and get unique abilities from it, monsters that absorb enemy skills, and ephemerals who get more powerful as they cyclically die and are reborn. The systems are so much fun. Well, except for trading, but I'll circle back to that.
The most mind-blowing thing about the game is its new-game plus structure. There are 5 characters with their own stories and 17 worlds, each also with their own story. All of these stories -- characters and worlds -- can change across successive playthroughs. You can make different choices on who to help, sometimes new options are simply available to you, sometimes you get an entirely different story. Sometimes you recruit entirely different allies. The second playthrough for some characters is almost a sequel to their initial playthrough. It's so cool to see the huge variety in ways things can possible play out as you come back for successive runs. All of the games systems are made to work over multiple 5-20 hour runs, so your overall strength and progress is moving forward even when you restart with a new character.
My biggest complaint about the game is the aforementioned trading system. Essentially, once unlocked, after each and every battle, you have the option to 'sell' items for a random choice from several items, and the option to 'buy' items in fixed deals. These deals are all based on your trading rank, which takes hundreds of trades to level up. The best way to do this is to constantly trade high level weapons for other high level weapons that you then trade for more and so on. It's nothing but tedium, and I don't even have it maxed out after 75 hours of play. The UI is slow, requires a ton of clicks, and is just overall miserable to interact with. Unfortunately, it's the best and most consistent way to get crafting materials, so if you choose to ignore it, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. It wasn't enough to knock the game out of favorite territory for me, but it was extremely annoying and unnecessary -- they could have just tied the trades to your battle rank and had the interface be an option directly at the end of battle screen. I guess it wouldn't be a SaGa game without at least one terrible system, though.
So, uh, rant about trading aside, Emerald Beyond has made its way right to the top of my favorites list. I never enjoy a game for 75 hours and still have plans to come back for more after a break. That just doesn't happen for me. I'm literally considering figuring out of I can mod trading out of the game. Give the demo a try. You'll probably hate it, but you might love it as much as I do.
I'll get a few basics out of the way before jumping into my rants on what I like.
This is a budget game. The character models and UI design really show the lack of money. Voice acting is very sparse.
This is not a narrative tour de force. The storylines are schlocky B-movie kitchen-sink nonsense, but, if you like that type of thing, it's very fun and frequently funny. I had an absolute blast with it. I love singing robots and saving molemen and helping plant people bloom, but I can easily see people being put off.
This is not a standard JRPG with dungeons and exploration. You move from event to event on a pop-up book like map, engaging with visual novel type sections or combat. It's a stripped down experience in many ways. As with the narrative, I enjoy this and relish the change of pace, but can easily see how others might not.
Kenji Ito delivered another banger soundtrack. This might be the thing Emerald Beyond has most in common with its higher budget cousins from Square.
With that out of the way, I'll dig into the real meat of what I love about Emerald Beyond. There are two main factors: the combat and the new-game plus cycle.
The combat is absolutely excellent, and sits as my favorite JRPG combat, maybe even surpassing SaGa Scarlet Grace. Much like Scarlet Grace, it's all about timeline manipulation and features a shared action point pool for your party. The specifics of how "united attacks" work has changed and is easier to perform -- for both you and your enemies. More importantly, there's far more variety in your characters -- humans with a ton of weapon types and magic, mechs that scale off equipment and get unique abilities from it, monsters that absorb enemy skills, and ephemerals who get more powerful as they cyclically die and are reborn. The systems are so much fun. Well, except for trading, but I'll circle back to that.
The most mind-blowing thing about the game is its new-game plus structure. There are 5 characters with their own stories and 17 worlds, each also with their own story. All of these stories -- characters and worlds -- can change across successive playthroughs. You can make different choices on who to help, sometimes new options are simply available to you, sometimes you get an entirely different story. Sometimes you recruit entirely different allies. The second playthrough for some characters is almost a sequel to their initial playthrough. It's so cool to see the huge variety in ways things can possible play out as you come back for successive runs. All of the games systems are made to work over multiple 5-20 hour runs, so your overall strength and progress is moving forward even when you restart with a new character.
My biggest complaint about the game is the aforementioned trading system. Essentially, once unlocked, after each and every battle, you have the option to 'sell' items for a random choice from several items, and the option to 'buy' items in fixed deals. These deals are all based on your trading rank, which takes hundreds of trades to level up. The best way to do this is to constantly trade high level weapons for other high level weapons that you then trade for more and so on. It's nothing but tedium, and I don't even have it maxed out after 75 hours of play. The UI is slow, requires a ton of clicks, and is just overall miserable to interact with. Unfortunately, it's the best and most consistent way to get crafting materials, so if you choose to ignore it, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. It wasn't enough to knock the game out of favorite territory for me, but it was extremely annoying and unnecessary -- they could have just tied the trades to your battle rank and had the interface be an option directly at the end of battle screen. I guess it wouldn't be a SaGa game without at least one terrible system, though.
So, uh, rant about trading aside, Emerald Beyond has made its way right to the top of my favorites list. I never enjoy a game for 75 hours and still have plans to come back for more after a break. That just doesn't happen for me. I'm literally considering figuring out of I can mod trading out of the game. Give the demo a try. You'll probably hate it, but you might love it as much as I do.