Romancing SaGa

"One of the most fun games I played in a long time"

I usually don't have any interest in ports of old SNES games, since they rarely add something new (see the numerous Final Fantasy ports, or Breath of Fire), but Romancing saga: Minstrel Song is an exception for two reasons. First of all, the original game never saw a US release, and given my limited knowledge of Japanese, I haven't played it. The second reason, and the most important one is that the game isn't a simple port, but in fact, it's a complete remake, with better graphics, new designs, new quests and dungeons, only based on the original game. Since I've been a fan of Saga games for quite a while, I was looking forward to this game, and after clearing my backlog, I finally had a chance to sit down and play through it.

For those among you who are familiar with the Saga games, you'll probably agree with me that the story is the series' weak point. For those unfamiliar with the games, in the beginning you can choose a character to start with. There are 6 or 7 characters to choose from, ranging from a nobleman to a pirate. After that, each of those will play through their own little introduction. Hawke, for example is a pirate who has to flee from his hideout after being betrayed by another pirate, while Gray is a young adventurer who wants to forge a legendary blade. After the introduction, the linearity of the game stops. You are free to go where you want, there aren't that many things required to do, and you could basically just go on exploring without advancing the story. However, as your party grows stronger, the hero of your choice will be drawn closer to the battle between the gods, as the darkest one of them all, Saruin wants to regain his former power.

Now, this looks like an interesting story, albeit a bit cliché, don't you think? Well, think again, because there basically is no story. All that you have to do in the game is take on quests, that are hardly related to the main storyline, and fight until you get strong enough to unlock the final quest, meaning taking on Saruin. As for the rest of the game, some of the quests have a nice story, but there will never be any room for something as character development, nor will there be any emotional attachment possible to the characters, since they basically don't have any personality.

The background story the game gives you is a lot better. In every town, you'll encounter the minstrel, a travelling bard, who will tell you tales of the world. He'll teach you about the battle between the gods from long ago, or the legacies of the various kingdoms in the world. On top of that, the city of Melvir has the royal library which gives you plenty of books to read, not only with useful gameplay tips, but also filled with the history of the world, Mardias. I rather enjoyed reading through all of this, and checking back with the Minstrel from time to time to see if he had more stories to tell, but this couldn't fill the void of the actual story.

What doesn't help the story either is the lack of character development. The characters in your party have absolutely no distinctive personality, and the hero of your choice gets some development during his or her introduction, but don't expect anything more to happen. Another problem is that there is no antagonist, since the main villain only shows up during the ending quest. Sure, you encounter his minions during the various quest, but they all have the same personality, or lack thereof.

Graphically, the game's a hit or a miss for you, mainly because of the look of the characters. The designs and the artwork are absolutely wonderful, and a pleasure to look at. These designs translate to the super-deformed looking characters, which could be difficult to adapt to for some gamers, although I personally loved their look. For the rest of the game, graphics are top notch, with nice towns and awesome environments. These only add to the open non-linear feeling that the game gives you, when you know that there are plenty of unexplored places, just waiting to challenge you.

During battles, the special effects of the various spells are great, especially when you learn more and more powerful techniques. I was a bit disappointed by the look of the final sword techs, since I expected them to be more spectacular, since they already where awesome looking in Romancing Saga 3. This does have an advantage, since you don't have to wait for an attack animation to be completed, making battles pretty fast-paced. Monsters also deserve special mentioning, because they all have a rather cool look, especially bosses, and their animation's fluent.

As for the game's sound, the music is awesome. As expected, town and dungeon themes are nice, but nothing that will stay in your head for days, but the game really shines during the boss battles. Especially the fixed boss battle themes have a really epic sound, and are even enjoyable to listen to outside of the game. The final battle deserves to be mentioned here. The music leading up to the fight, starting when you enter the final dungeon up until the actual beginning of the battle made me pretty excited, even though the story didn't manage to get me hyped up for it. The final battle could truly be called epic, and the game has one of the more memorable final battle themes.

Unfortunately, I can't be so positive about the voice acting, since most of the actors suffer from over-acting. Maybe it was because of the main character I chose (Hawke), but most of the voice actors I encountered sounded dull, were trying to hard, and pronounced everything too articulated, like they had to read something nice in school. Some voices like the Minstrel or one of Saruin's minions where cool, but they can't make me forgive the rest of the bad voice acting. It's nice to see that every character has a voice actor, even the most useless NPC in a town is fully voiced.

Now, for the best part of the game, the gameplay. For those of you who aren't familiar with Romancing Saga games, a quick tutorial. In Saga games, you don't level up, but your stats are raised while battling. If you take a lot of damage, your hit points and your vitality (defense) will rise, when you rely on physical attacks your strength will rise and your intelligence will be neglected and so on. Since there are no levels, how do you acquire new techniques than? When you are battling, sometimes there will appear a light bulb above your character's head, and he'll execute a new technique, depending on the weapon that he or she has equipped. If you're fighting a strong enemy, your chances of acquiring a new technique are higher, so the best thing that you can do is seek out stronger and more challenging enemies.

Aside from this, Life Points also play a major role in the game. Your hit points serve as a shield for your life points, and it isn't until these points are depleted, that a character truly dies, so even if your entire party is still alive and kicking, as soon as your hero loses all of his life points, it's game over for you. When the other characters lose all of their life points, they will leave your party permanently, with all their equipment, and they can never be recruited again. Since you can't level up the number of life points, you have to pay attention to them during the game, since you don't want to end up with a bunch of unrevivable characters just before a major boss.

Now that you know the basics, allow me to explain more about the specifics in Minstrel Song. You can have up to five characters in battle, and you enter all of their commands before each turn, which can be a bit annoying if an enemy unleashes a powerful attack before anyone of your party had the chance to attack. The various techniques consume Battle Points and Damage points. Damage points depend on the weapon that your character has equipped, and when they are all depleted, the weapon becomes unusable until you repair them at a blacksmith. Battle points system is a bit difficult to obtain. You start with 5 points for example, and every turn you get 4 extra, so you have the choice to spend the 5 initial points with a relatively simple technique, or you can save them up to unleash one killer attack. The battle points that you start with and the ones that you gain extra each turn are set in the beginning, but you can raise them in the same way as HP, strength or any other stat.

Aside from this, you can of course also cast magic in the battles. Contrary to weapon techniques, magic isn't learned in battles, but simply bought from shops. There are around ten different schools of magic to choose from to fully customize your mage. Magic consumes battle points in the same way as weapon techniques, but they don't deplete your damage points, instead, the more powerful spells eat away at your Life Points! Since bosses require your strongest attacks, a mage can quickly lose all of his life points if you're not paying any attention.

That's basically the battle system, except for one thing: the difficulty. Normal battles are easy most of the time, but sometimes the game will present you with a ridiculously powerful monster, which can decimate your party with only one attack (I'm looking at you, Golden Dragon), so you really have to pay attention during a battle, and carefully plan your attacks. Luckily, your HP is restored at the end of each fight, but this can be useless when you're caught in a chain, wherein monsters will attack you continuously, and you don't have time to rest and recover HP during the battles.

The boss battles are also damn challenging, and I have a small point of criticism here. While the normal enemies in a dungeon are usually adapted to your level, the strength of a boss is fixed, which can cause some nasty surprises when you are cruising through a relatively easy dungeon, and all of a sudden, you face a boss who only has to look at you to cause a game over screen. Although this is one of the inevitable characteristics of the Saga games, it can still annoy me, especially if I spent an hour in a dungeon, not thinking about saving only to be killed by the boss.

As for the rest of the gameplay, during the entire game you'll be taking on quests. These can go from simple requests, like bringing an item from point A to point B, to huge quests like the Jewel Beast, which can consume at least a couple of hours. I've clocked in just 30 hours, and I have only completed around 17 of the 50 quests, so you can really make the game as big as you want to. Most of the quest are interesting and rewarding, even though some of them can be a bit tedious at times, and I had a lot of fun with them. The only complaint I have is that they quests are unlocked seemingly randomly, since I never had a clue what or who would give me a quest or not.

Now, as a reward for quests or for battles, you will receive money and jewels. These jewels can be used to train in various skills and classes, which can make your character stronger. You can train a character in swords, which makes his efficiency with this weapon higher, and makes him learn sword techs more easily. Aside from that, when you've trained certain skills enough, you can change to a class. These classes have a multitude of benefits, like stat enhancing or special skills. The craftsmen, for example can sometimes use an attack without consuming BP, or the Rosalian Mage can combine up to three spells to create one killer attack. The best classes, the legendary ones don't get a stat boos, but they get the benefit of hardly consuming any DP, making weapon repairing only a minor annoyance.

Jewels can also be used to train Proficiencies, which are skills like Jump, Climb, Find Chests, Lurk (to avoid enemies), and can be a requirement in certain dungeons. I was rather annoyed with this, because you can only activate 5 of these skills before entering a dungeon, and there were often times when I had the wrong ones activated, which prevented me from progressing in certain dungeons, or the ones I had didn't have a high enough level, which made them useless.

As for replay, there really are no complaints about that for me. There are 6 different characters, which makes for 6 different endings, there are quests that require up to 3 playthroughs to fully complete them, there are optional bosses waiting for you after clearing the game with every character, and most important, you create your own story. As I've said before, I only completed 17 of more than 50 quests, so on my current and second playthrough, I took on entirely different quests, used different weapons and recruited different characters, making the game a totally new experience for me. I really have no complaints about sidequests or replayability.

Overall, Romancing Saga is not a remake, it's basically an entire new game, not only does it offer new options, it also learns from the mistakes of past Saga games and improves upon them, making this one of the most fun games I played in a long time. If you're not that bothered by the lack of a story, and if you're looking for a challenging non-linear RPG, this is the best choice for you.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/04/06