Romancing SaGa Review

By Gary Kearney

I have always thought that with experience you will general become better. For example, walking. None of us were good at it the first time, but after falling countless times we learned all the little things that go into a successful walk. Yet every now and then we might just be walking along and BAM! for no good reason we stumble. What does this have to do with video games and with Romancing SaGa for the PlayStation 2 in particular? Well with all of the tremendous experience of creating great RPGs that Square Enix has they are bound to stumble every now and then. In order to have a good RPG there are several areas that most be solid and there are a couple of areas where SaGa does not have solid footing and one is a big misstep (OK, enough with the walking analogies).

At the beginning you choose one of eight different characters to play; Albert, a young nobleman; Aisha, a nomad girl; Gray, an adventurer; Claudia, a ranger; Jamil, a thief; Sif, a female barbarian; Hawke, a pirate; and Barbara, a traveling dancer. The story takes slightly different paths depending on whom you choose, but not as much as I would have liked to have seen. The biggest difference is where each character starts the game from and after that they more or less do the same things. You'll run into the characters you didn't choose along the way and some will join you. Problem is that none of the characters are that deep and do not have interesting back stories so it's a little hard to like them.

The story is set in the world of Mardias which has a variety of people inhabiting it. It seems that Mardias had three evil gods long ago. These three decided to pick a fight with the good gods. Ends up that two of the evil gods were defeated while the most powerful one, Saruin, was subdued by Elore the most powerful god of them all, by using ten magical stones to seal Saruin. Naturally about a 1000 years later Saruin is ready to break out of this seal and destroy the world.

OK, we've all heard this story before in one way or another. Problem here is that this is basically all of the story that there is. You are way too often left to roam around without any clue as to what it is you are supposed to be doing. It's kind of like if someone came up to you at your house and told you that you must save the world and then walked away. What are you suppose to do? How are you going to do it? Where do you need to go? Saving the world may sound fun but there is really a lot of details you need to know and you just aren't given them here. Here you end up wandering around looking for people to talk to and just hoping that one of them will tell you something interesting that helps you figure out what to do next. To its credit, SaGa tried to create an open-ended RPG which sounds good on paper but turns out not to work very well in execution.

Because of the lack of a strong story SaGa throws in bunch of side quests in an attempt to keep you entertained. However even these quests leave you scratching your head. If these people really wanted you to help them wouldn't you think that they would give you as much information as they could? And a big problem is that way too often you are ill-prepared to complete the quest. Say that one quest require that you climb a mountain. It's not until you get to said mountain that you find out that you need to have a special skill. Fine, so in order to buy the skill you need to get some jewels...but to get jewels you'll need to complete quests. See the problem here? How do you know which quests you can complete with the skills you already have? You don't!

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.