Sigma Star Saga

"Worth the 30$ price tag and your time if you like RPGs and Space Shooters"

When Sigma Star Saga was first announced it grabbed my interest, it was a space shooter RPG game. Normally Space Shooter and RPG do not belong in the same sentence, but SSS brought them together to make a great game.

Graphics 10/10

The graphics of the game are sprite based in the adventure sections and are very bold and powerful. They are full of color, have a wide range of motions, and are very big, almost too big. The monsters you face in the over worlds are fluid and interesting to look at until they get recycled over and over again. In the space missions the game has your typical R-Type graphics, highly detailed ships and highly detailed enemies to shoot at. The backgrounds to repeat a lot as is custom with space shooters but they are still varied and interesting. Over all the game has some of the best sprite based graphics to grace the Game Boy Advanced.

10/10 Perfect graphic that look great and really help emerge you in the world you are in.

Audio/Music 7/10

The audio and sound effects in the game are very limited, you have your typical laser and gun sounds that go off millions of times and are never that interesting, but they get the job done. The Music is what saves this game, each tune is very powerful and fits every scene, the over world and battle musics do tend to get a bit repetitive but there are enough different soundtracks to keep you entertained. This game does have a few sound bytes, but they do not fit the characters at all.

7/10 The Music is amazing, but the sound effects are very stale and voices are bad.

Gameplay 7/10

The meat and bones of every game, and SSS delivers......eventually. At first the gameplay is like that of any space shooter and adventure game, kinda boring, with the promise of bigger and better things to come. The adventure aspect is fun but often feels like an excuse to give you a means of finding new gun data's and to enter ship battles. The game has random battles, only instead of fighting monsters you get beamed up to a ship (selected by random from the computer) to fight a space style battle, in which you must kill ___ number of enemies to move on. Your ship by default has a very weak cannon that you can upgrade with gun data's.

Gun data is the meat of the game, and every time you get a new gun data you will jump for joy and being to toy around with your new options...or at least the game at first gives you that impression. The truth is however that most gun data is very unoriginal or useless, and you will often just stick with the setting you already have. Why would I want to shoot behind me when the monsters attack from the front? While the game promises you over 10000 different gun data combinations most of these are too similar to notice much of a difference. You also don't get many good gun data's until the end of the game.

The enemies in the adventure aspects of the game are just distractions that are best avoided (your main weapon never gets stronger). SSS also has difficulty issues, at times the game will be way to easy and at other the game will be down right hard.

7/10 SSS starts off slow and does not take off gameplay wise until the last few hours.

Story 10/10

The story about a double agent who holds the fate of the universe in his hands is dark, gritty, and just awesome. Despite all the problems the first half of the game contains the plot starts off well and gets faster and better until the last breath taking event. I can't say much else without spoiling the game but SSS has one of the best stories I have ever seen in a video game.

10/10 Just amazing is how I would describe the plot.

Replay 10/10

While your first run though SSS will not be that amazing you will want to play it again. This may seem like an odd thing to say, but one feature the game has saves it and makes it worth owning. New game + allows you to carry over all the gun data you found on your first play though. This allows you to play the game it was meant to be played IMO. The game also has 4 different endings and you can not get the best ending on your first play though.

10/10 You will want to come back and play it again.

Final Score
Graphics 10/10
Audio/Music 7/10
Gameplay 7/10
Story 10/10
Replay 10/10

Final Score 8.8/10 round up to a 9/10

Positives
+Deep Plot Line
+Multiple Endings
+New game + mode
Negatives
-Slow opening
-Lame audio effects
-Weird Difficulty

Bottom Line
Go out and pick it up!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/06