Saga: Emerald Beyond is a Square Enix joint. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Now in earnest, the upcoming role-playing game has a demo out right now, with a neat twist: Depending on the platform that you chose to download the demo, you'll be able to try a different story, from a range of protagonists. Unfortunately for @mint, hijab girl seems the only one who isn't part of this deal. Something something kinda messed up, during Ramadan. It's still a pretty generous offering, especially since the meat of the demo lasts at least two hours. I played more like 4-5 hours, messing around with its systems.
Image from Dawnbreaker: Aeon's Wrath
Saga (which is actually spelled “SaGa” but I refuse to cave to Square’s intercap debauchery) is a pretty long-running series with very hit or miss entries. These things are, let's say, eccentric. Right off the bat, you'll get a feel for what that means, when being beset by this game’s visuals. In one word: Grody. From the squiggly font, down to the still frames and clip art, you can tell that this is one of the studio’s stingiest projects yet. The whole applies that kind of posterize effect that makes everything, somehow, both harsh and blurry to look at. There's a reason that this filter hasn't been used since the PC-98 days, aside from the occasional Steam porn dumpster, prior to the image generation boom. It's a shortcut for when you don't want to or don't have the resources to shape your presentation otherwise.
I hated looking at Saga the entire time that I played it and that alone is a pretty big issue. I couldn't see myself picking up something so off-putting, in the same sense that people just don't play Cruelty Squad, because they can't get past the presentation. The ”made with Unity” splash screen at the start, also, didn't fill me with confidence. I'd have a much easier time believing that Square Enix doesn't even bother paying for an enterprise license, rather than that they struck a deal to advertise the failing engine. It's bad; the game looks bad. The storyline is equally flat, as you're just another anime trope. In my version, on Nintendo Switch, it's something about a schoolgirl being Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The writing, which is already scrawled on an eyestrain of a font, is forgettable at best. I don't see it improving, but you can't really tell from the few hours of delirium on offer.
My retinue has grown
I did, however, play the whole demo and not just out of obligation, so there's some good here, aside from the front-loaded despair. When I say that this game is peculiar, I mean that it stretches in a multitude of directions. I was almost constantly barraged with sub-systems, which isn't always a net positive, but it does mean that there's a lot going on. The main aspect, which are the combat sequences, are a veritable math problem, which is hard to explain succinctly, given the prior depth that I mentioned.
You have multiple party members, who fit into a certain formation, which earns a number of action points each turn, which are set on a timeline, which can be altered or combined in several ways, along with triggering yet more unique effects. It's a lot and I understand little of it, if I'm being honest. When acting directly, your characters have a range on the timeline and when other members also attack within that same range, you'll perform a combo together. Combo well enough and you'll raise the percentage to where you get to perform another chain, free of charge. That's the one main chunk of combat, but there are like half a dozen other things that can happen.
You can interrupt enemies or they interrupt you. You can set up traps, charge attacks for the next turn, protect party members and so on. I'm getting real Boss Baby Shadow Hearts vibes from these systems within systems that, I think, some real sickos would appreciate. I'm somewhat of a sicko myself, which is why I didn't mind trying and failing as much as I did. I have no idea how an interrupt works, but I'll keep at it! If all else fails, your last standing character can still trigger a special “Showstopper” attack, so there's always something different happening. You don't have to feel bad about your party members dying, as they get back to full health, after each fight. They expect you to experiment. And that's not mentioning absorbing enemies, unlocking new concepts, farming resources from objectives to make new gear. Unsurprisingly, you will be looking at a menu a lot in this game. If you like that kind of preparation, great! If you like more immediacy, maybe Saga isn't the one for you.
My main attraction here is the sheer possibility of it all. Most weapons have similar basics, but the playstyles are still pretty different. I had a puppet…thing that would always act before anything else on the timeline, so it would permanently try to stun enemies out of their upcoming turns. Other party members had much larger ranges, so I tried to have them use the finite action points the most, while others would facilitate where they could. Most turns, I was trying to optimize the points I had with how the timeline was shaped, which can take a solid minute to piece together. Fighting is a surprisingly cerebral endeavor, which you will not be able to clear by just attack spamming, like in other RPGs. And you can customize that aspect further by equipping different weapons and accessories, which come with their own attacks. Like I said: Have fun looking at menus.
This game is definitely not something that will be for everyone, as there are just too many elements thrown at the wall here. For instance, the downtime had me running around to find cats in the overworld, which just felt like busywork to me. You can rewind time and do certain periods differently, but that's pretty much just how save games work. That said, this is a game that tries and, like I always say, I'll always prefer a game that tries and fails, over something that's just going through the motions. Complacent, they are not. I just wish that the budget was more than a stick of gum and a lukewarm soda. You can really feel how cheap it is, which sucks.
Oh, except for the music: The soundtrack goes so incredibly hard that it almost doesn't fit the fugly game it's in.
Saga: Emerald Beyond - it's weird!