Unlimited Saga

"Overflowing With Good Ideas, But They Should Have Stuck With A Few And Done Them Well"

Romancing SaGa 3 is one of my favourite games of all time, and I can't say I was expecting the exact same game from this, but anything like it would have been great. Unfortunately, they have very little in common, especially since this game just isn't fun to play. While it does do a good job of separating itself from other RPGs, it doesn't do so in an entirely positive way.

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Storyline (4/10)
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The game offers seven different characters to take control of, providing seven different storylines. While they do crossover at points and you'll meet some of the others characters during your individual adventures, they all have their own goals. However, only a couple are of any interest, such as Ruby's; a fortune teller's sister who takes over when her sister gets ill and starts giving out random fortunes to people then travelling to try and make them com true. I actually found that one quite funny, but then there's Ventus who just has a generic; my brother was murdered and I must find vengeance. They're designed to offer something for everyone, but it takes a while for the story to get started for each character, so by the time you realise you don't like the storyline for this character you've been playing so long you're sick of the game.

The cutscenes do nothing to help the advancement of the storyline in this game, because for the most part it's incredibly dull and rarely actually tells you what you're supposed to do. When I first played the game, I sat through the first five-minute cutscene, then the game just went to the first village, no explanation and no description of where I was supposed to go. The stories are really badly told, and thus what should have been the strongest selling point of this game, actually falls pretty short of the mark.

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Gameplay (3/10)
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The first problem I had here was just being thrown into the town without any kind of reason. You can't explore the towns in this game, you just choose a location from the list, which I don't have a problem with since I've played other games that use that system. However, in this game it extends to the dungeons; they're split up into “rooms” and you just travel around the grid by choosing a next location to jump to. BUT I spent twenty minutes trying to find out how to do this on my first play, simply because you're not told how to move, there are no tutorials in this game at all and considering the mind boggling system they're using that's unforgivable. When you finally figure out you just push the right analogue stick in the direction you want to go to, since the D-pad doesn't work for that, you find yourself moving around a dungeon with practically no reason to do so, just the fact that it's there. As you move around the rooms may contain monsters or a treasure chest for example, and with the monsters, there's a chance you'll go into battle, but to open the treasure chest you have to go through the menus and choose the appropriate skill. The other problem here is, I was doing that for ages and not being able to work out why they weren't opening, then after about an hour I noticed a tiny bar across the top of the screen; you have to press right on the D-pad to highlight the chest, not that you're told you can/have to do this.

Ultimately, the dungeon's aren't a nice experience, and since monsters have been mentioned, I'll move onto the battle system. I was unsure what to think about this part since I'd heard so many people complaining about the slot reels system where basically, you're move is chosen at random. However, I never found it effected the battle all that much, since there were far more “attack” slots than “miss” slots. To attack you get five moves for that sequence, which you can distribute between your party, or just choose one character to attack five times. The problem is, quite often you do next to no damage while the enemy takes of 2x your max HP in one hit. Losing HP isn't so much of a problem, it's when you run out of HP, you lose LP, and when this is exhausted your character falls. The problem is, you cannot heal LP in the slightest, and keeping your HP levels high is out of the question in the earlier parts of the game. You don't level up through combat and thus there's not much point actively seeking out battles, instead at the end of the dungeon you get to level up one trait, which will have an effect on your stats.

The battle system for this game is flawed, and not really because of the “random” slot reels, but because it can be impossible to win. It's also irrelevant since you don't level up for battles and item drops are rare, and thus there's no incentive to do battle, and it becomes an annoyance more than anything. The dungeon maps, while I could live with once I'd finally figured out most the controls, are extremely dull. There's very little character development and overall, very little to keep you entertained in this game.

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Graphics (6/10)
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The backgrounds are nicely drawn, and are colourful, and that's the problem; they're nicer to look at than the characters. While the character designs are terribly bad, the cutscenes just involve their pictures with speech bubbles, which I've seen other games use, but here, it's just dull. The art in the game is pretty good quality, I'm not a complete fan of it, but I can't deny that it does look good; individually. But when put together in the game, the locations, the characters, the menus… they just don't mesh together well and gets confusing for the eye.

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Sounds (4/10)
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If there's ingame music I have to say I didn't notice it, I felt like I was sitting there in silence going through those dungeons, even if there was music. The sound effects are generic, but good enough, but when there's very little going on onscreen, the sounds are all you have to listen out for, and there really isn't enough there. The voice acting; while the voices are alright on an individual basis, there is practically no emotion portrayed at all.

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Lifespan (3/10)
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If you can overlook the faults then you could probably sqeeze an extra few hours out of the game. But even if you can, the game is just incredibly tedious and there's nothing to keep you going. The storylines aren't a good enough reward to keep you progressing through the game. The game is described as non-linear, but nothing could be further from the truth; while you can choose whichever character you want, you can't switch mid game on the same file, you'd need to start another. I guess it is non-linear in the way it never tells you where to go, but that's not desirable. I was sick of this game after 30mins, but tried to give it a bit more time since I'd paid £10 for it, but in the end, I just didn't feel that any amount of time invested in this would ever be given suitable reward.

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Summary (4/10)
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They were trying to be different with this game, that's easy to see, but the fact is; try them out before you implement them and with the ones in this game, you'd have found that none of them worked. There could have been a good game to be had here, and in the end there might be one hidden away, but there's so much they've tried to put in to set it out from the crowd, it becomes overfilled with new features. While I can forgive them for that, not including any kind of help feature or even any kind of plot devices if unforgivable, I would have even preferred “Hey we now have to go to this place” at the end of every dungeon than just be sent back to town having to wander where the next dungeon is. The best advice for people wanting to play this game is don't, because I wanted it for ages but was torn on it, and now that I've played it I wish I hadn't. I gave it a four because while it is a dull game there are some alright ideas here and you can play the game, if you actually want to. Plus, I gave Trapt a 4 and I think it's on a level with that in terms of original ideas but flawed implementation.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 06/18/07