Romancing SaGa

"First Impressions can be Misleading"

Many of the more negative reviews seem to be written based on first impressions and less than 5 hours of game play. The first thing I myself thought when I popped this game in and started up a new game as Gray was "Oh crap, I just got ripped off" and I thought so for good reasons, an uncontrollable camera angle and bad voice acting being some of the main reasons. However, after I learned the game play mechanics and how to navigate (no small task mind you) I quickly discovered that this game is packed full of fantastic adventure, decent music, somewhat decent story plots, and best of all it's extremely non-restricting and open ended. This is a game that you can beat and still play, and unfortunately you'll have to play through multiple characters to unlock everything. I'll be ranking each element on a 1-10 basis.

Story 4-8 (Varies): The story is varied, there are 8 characters and some are more interesting than others. The best and most fluidly solid stories, in my opinion, belong to Claudia and Albert. There are many sub-plots in the game, some of which are optional and a few of which are required to move the game forward, but for the most part you're free to roam around and do as you see fit. The main plot is rather good though, once you start to delve into it. I won't give away any of the main plot but it involves many gods, one of which was imprisoned and is trying to return.

Controls 6: It's not too difficult to get your characters to do what you want them to do, the problem is there's no control over the camera angles. The world is massive and in most environments the camera shifts and pans to give you a decent display but sometimes it causes you to fight battles you could have dodged or makes something hard to see. The camera isn't that much of a problem once you learn to navigate, you'll almost never get turned in the wrong direction because of the camera and you may as well ignore your compass most of the time once you know an area. The battle controls are turn based, you don't get the best view of your party to manage attack patterns but normally that won't be a problem. One thing that turned me off at first was how it would jump to the character about to act and I couldn't see the rest of my party, but once you grow accustom to this minor problem the combat is actually rather good, involving Glimmers (new moves randomly unlocked in battle) and combined spell effects, combos, and special Vortex combos that invoke special powers that are truly worth the effort as they can effect alignment and add as much as 300% to damage output.

Graphics 6: The graphics aren't as bad as some reviews would have you believe. There is very good, distinct, and sometimes moving artwork scattered throughout the game. The character modals are magna styled with slightly big heads but after you play for awhile you'll hardly notice. There are very few instances of clipping (most clipping is caused by captain hawk's beard in dialogue) and there are some pretty nice areas to explore. The cut scenes vary, some are made in the Magna style so they focus on characters and expressions with lots of still art, not very fluid and crisp, but as art it can be appreciated and it can also be skipped and isn't common enough (a couple of times per character) to be a bother.

Sound 8: The sound is wonderful, I would give it a 9 but I detract a point for some of the horrible voice acting (some of which was obviously deliberately bad, such as some of the "Oh warrior of Mirsa" voice overs. The voice acting is varied, and ranges from the well read and expertly acted to the laughable and utterly annoying. Most of the voice acting is simply a means to an end, neither good nor bad.

The music in this game ranges from cliché dungeon music to wonderful orchestral music. The intro song is great if you know the lyrics (I'm not going to list them here) and is sung in Japanese (most in the United States won't understand it) but it's still easy on the ears and something most people will listen to just to see the playable characters in the background of the opening scene.

Replay Value 10: The replay value of this game is very high. What you do in the game effects the ending in many more ways than simply whether your party lives or dies after defeating the final boss. You have to play the game at least 3 times to unlock all of the content (besides the bonus ending and character story plots) but you'll definitely want to play this game more than once if you've played it enough to beat it. The huge mistake most will make is to judge this game without ever really experiencing it due to a bad first impression, but if you get past that you'll find this game being like a vacation every time you get home from work.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/06/06