It's not to say that all of bad in Romancing SaGa. For instance, the normal RPG concept of leveling up is modified here. Instead of increasing all of your stats after you have gained a certain amount of experience points, your stats are increased individually as the game goes along and they increase based on your actions. Meaning if you fight with a sword a lot that you will increase your strength and if you use magic then you'll get more spell power. You also gain jewels after major events like battles and completion of quests. You can use these jewels to increase the skills for your given character. In addition you get gold that can be used to purchase additional skills and through skills you can gain proficiencies that can be used outside of battle. One example is having the proficiency to disarm traps, but you'll need greater proficiency as the game moves along to disarm higher level traps. Problem is that jewels and gold become very hard to come by later in the game especially compared to how easily you were able to gain experience at the start.

The battle systems in an RPG had better be able to maintain your interest and SaGa does a better job with this than it does with the story. But that doesn't mean it's good, just better than a bad story. You are able to see a group of enemies before the battle start, so the battles are not totally random. However you can not always avoid a battle because the enemies are able to run you down and engage you even if you'd rather not. You can have up to five characters in your group and will be battling up to five or six bad guys, so things can get a little busy. I did like the ability that characters can have multiple weapons at once, like a bow and sword...not sure how that is possible, but I'm cool with it. There are a lot of stats to keep up with during a battle and it is almost overwhelming at times. You need to manage the battle a little differently than you may be used to. For example, your character has a certain amount of “battle points” and each time you do something in battle you use up these points, but after each round you gain some more BPs. So sometimes you will be waiting a few rounds until you have enough BPs to finally use the attack you wanted. There is also something called durability points (DP) which keeps track of how worn your weapons are. You do have hit points (HP), but if you lose all of them you are only knocked unconscious and you'll lose a life point (LP), keep getting hit while unconscious and you lose more LPs, lose all of your LPs then you are out of the group. So you have BP, DP, LP, and HP to worry about during battles. Just a little too much for me, although if it could be refined a little more it may actually add some interesting strategy.

One really nice thing I can say is that the music is very well done as it is with practically all Square games. There is a nice little tune at the beginning and the musical score during battles helps set the mood. Not as good is the spoken dialog with is lame. Graphically SaGa hold its own with some fairly nice menus and interfaces.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 66%. Romancing SaGa has areas that may prove to be interesting in the future, but the lack of a story and uninteresting characters prove too much to overcome.

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