I've been playing the SaGa games. If you don't know, they are turn-based RPGs. The first three SaGas, for the Gameboy, were localized as the "Final Fantasy Legend" games, so you may have played one already without realizing it.

So far, I played 4 out of the first 5 games. (I skipped SaGa 3 for now because it was made by a different team than the others, and I've heard it's a little more basic and orthodox, though I'll probably still check it out at some point.)

I think these are some of my favourite games. I'm constantly blown away by their ambition, cleverness, and defiance of convention. All four that I've played have been bangers of cosmic proportions and I can't stop thinking about them.

Betore you try them, I should note that the SaGa games can often be tedious, confusing, cryptic, frustrating, and unfair. If you think those are bad things for video games to be, I cannot stop you.

I think the best time to try SaGa is if you have played a lot of video games and you're tired of video games that are fun in a normal way. If you have a lot of preconceptions about what a good video game should be like, you might find SaGa kind of baffling. Approach SaGa with an open heart and let yourself feel new emotions.

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Makai Toushi SaGa (The Final Fantasy Legend)

This is essentially a perfect game to me. If you're the type of person who is picky about the balance of encounters in RPGs, you probably won't agree. It has very frequent random encounters, and later in the game, the difficulty becomes cruel to the point where single encounters can easily ruin you, and you have to save very frequently. Often I would reset the game and load my save just because I got a scary encounter I didn't want to do.

When I was younger, I'd often quit games because the encounter rate was too high or the battles were too long or other stuff like that. Now, I think I have much more patience for that sort of thing. To me, the real point of an RPG is the journey you go on, and the encounter design just adds a certain texture to traversing the world. I don't mind if encounters are a little annoying or tedious as long as I'm enjoying the journey.

The reason I think it's perfect is because it's such an amazing journey. It starts out with a relatively conventional fantasy quest about collecting legendary items from three kings, so that you can enter a grand tower the supposedly leads to Paradise. But as you climb the tower, you encounter increasingly stranger and more surreal vignettes and travel to new worlds. The most striking aspect of the level design to me was how playful it feels. The game really makes the most out of a few simple tilesets and rules to construct surprising situations, and there's a nice escalation in how out-there the dungeons get, culminating in things like invisible wall mazes, and floors where every tile is a staircase but only one stairs is real.

If you don't mind the encounter rate and difficulty, the battle system and character progression are also interesting. You can choose from three character classes: Humans, Espers/Mutants, and Monsters. Humans can only increase their stats with items, while Espers can hold fewer items but gain stats and skills automatically. Monsters have no stat growth or items, but can transform into other monsters by eating their meat, and their capabilities change depending on their form. Humans are useful but a little boring, while the constant flux of Espers and Monsters makes them unpredictable in a fun way. I played with a Human, two Espers, and one Monster.

The ending really brings the game together for me. At the tower's peak, you finally meet....

Spoilers!

The Creator, who created all the worlds you travelled through. He explains that everything was part of a game he created to test people's bravery and courage, and offers to grant the party a wish. The party refuses the offer in anger, and a battle ensues. After defeating the Creator, the party discovers a mysterious door, but they decide not to go through it and to remain in their own world.

This final twist recontextualized the game for me as something of a meta-work about game creation. The worlds are so strange and surprising and playful because they were created for a game. It presents a vision of what game worlds can be like that I found very beautiful and relatable as a game designer. It's a fourth-wall-breaking twist that doesn't feel corny and cheap to me, but instead enriches the whole work.

The game is short for an RPG (I think under 10 hours?) and densely packed with creativity and charm. I think this is one of the best games ever made.

SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu (Final Fantasy Legend 2)

This is the SaGa game I feel the least strongly about so far, but it's still so lovely.

It has a cool premise: there are 77 objects called MAGI in the world and you have to get all of them. At first I was wondering if it would be a non-linear game where you wander around everywhere finding MAGI in random places, but it's actually fairly straightforward and is structured much like SaGa 1, where you go from world to world in a linear fashion, getting MAGI along the way as you resolve different problems.

The encounter rate and difficulty is similar to SaGa 1, but the battle system and character progression are a little more streamlined and intuitive, while still retaining the uniqueness of the previous game. I don't think there was really anything "wrong" with the SaGa 1 system, but some of the refinements here are nice. For example, the game actually tells you when you gain stats after a battle, instead of the stats just increasing silently and mysteriously. Humans gain stats from battles instead of items now, and Espers have more control over skills (you can now actually keep skills that you like permanently). There's a new class called Robot which is a lot of fun; they get stat increases based on equipped items. For example, a blunt weapon might boost strength, while a small knife would instead boost agility.

Unfortunately, the dungeon design feels a little more generic compared to SaGa 1, although there are a few I really liked (the giant's town, the body dungeon, and the Nasty Dungeon come to mind). But a lot of them are just normal mazes that feel like they're lacking that SaGa 1 playfulness.

That's not to say this isn't an amazing game, even if it doesn't reach the same heights as SaGa 1 for me. The characters and scenarios you encounter are delightful, the tweaks to the mechanics make it a little smoother to play, and it has an incredible finale. I imagine a lot of people would prefer it to SaGa 1, if only for the gameplay refinements.

Romancing SaGa

This game exploded my mind and splattered my brains everywhere. I couldn't believe the wild ambition on display here compared to SaGa 1 and 2. At the same time, this is probably the SaGa I find hardest to recommend to people because of how unusual and tedious it is. But if you love tedious games, this one is an incredible experience.

There is no official English translation of this game (only of the remake, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, which I haven't played). I played a fan translation of the original SFC game.

This is a highly nonlinear open world RPG. When you start the game, you can choose from 8 different player characters. Each character has a short introductory quest, but then it pretty much just stops giving you any hints about where to go or what to do. It doesn't really put up many barriers either. If you run out of things to do in your starting area (different for each character) you can hop on a boat to another continent and wander around there. There are a lot of towns and very little to do in them; sometimes you'll learn about a new area you can travel to, and even more rarely you'll discover an actual quest to complete. There's no shortage of quests in the game, but many of them depend on stumbling into the right place at the right time; a lot of events don't appear at fixed locations and seem instead to depend vaguely on your overall progression. There's a sense of time passing in the world; you'll occasionally encounter the same characters in different places, and the monsters seem to gradually get stronger as you play regardless of what area you're in.

Exploring this world is made difficult by the sheer number of monster encounters. You navigate the world map by just selecting locations with a cursor, but once you enter a location, you switch to traditional top-down RPG movement. This game eschews random encounters for "symbol encounters", that is, enemies that actually appear on the screen and walk around, initiating an encounter if you touch them. I think many people prefer symbol encounters to random encounters (I certainly did when I was younger) but this game made me understand the true terror of symbol encounters. There are so many monsters in this game. Getting two random encounters in a row with one step between them (which can happen in SaGa 1 and 2) simply doesn't compare to seeing a cluster of 10+ monsters gathered around a chokepoint. You are going to have to fight your way through. With random encounters, you at least have some hope of getting lucky, but with symbol encounters, there's only despair.

The encounters are also pretty banal in this game. I don't know if it was just my playstyle, but after some initial difficulty in the early game, it felt like I could defeat 99% of the encounters by just holding down the A button to do normal attacks. Maybe I just accidentally outpaced the level curve, but I didn't really grind or anything. In any case, the encounters were not only plentiful but very easy, aside from the rare occasions where it'll throw you a monster way outside your level range and you get party wiped (which is pretty funny unless you haven't saved in a while). It becomes extremely mind-numbing to push your way through the walls of symbol encounters in every dungeon and field area, holding down A all the way.

The lack of direction, the absurdly tedious encounters, and the unintuitive event system could all be considered "flaws", but for me, it just gave the game an irresistible and mysterious charm. The game has this huge ever-changing world that feels both overwhelming and oddly empty. You're constantly wondering where the hell to go and wandering down dead ends and struggling to understand what the game expects of you. It feels like a work with incredible ambitions that's straining to keep up with itself. In some ways, it feels like a bit of a mess.

Yet I was so captivated by it that I played it nonstop for three days. I started it on a Friday evening, and played from early in the morning to late at night on Saturday, finishing up on Sunday. I couldn't stop playing it and I couldn't stop thinking about it when I was done. I wanted to write about it, but I struggled to put my feelings about the game into words.

I struggle with that even now. All I can say is it's a really special game that felt like nothing else I'd ever played before. The open-ended directionless nature truly lets you write your own SaGa.... I loved talking with friends about how wildly different our experiences and progression were. Romancing SaGa is far from the first or last game to offer open world exploration, and admittedly, my unfamiliarity with western RPGs (which I think have a stronger tradition of openness than Japanese RPGs) might have contributed to how unique it felt to me. But if I compare it to open world games I've played, there's a much stronger sense of your character being a small and insignificant part of the world, carving out your own path. It's not really a game you can describe with slogans like "your choices matter". There are choices and consequences, but it's not a game about guiding a prewritten narrative with your choices. The prewritten narrative is very light, and it's the narrative you craft for yourself by exploring that matters.

I still don't think I'm properly conveying how alien this game felt to me, with all its aimless wandering, tedious monster-choked dungeons, and questlines that end abruptly with no fanfare. And how it all came together into one of the most compelling and beautiful games I've ever played.

Romancing SaGa 2

The original SFC version has no English translation (not even a fan translation), so I played the "remastered" version available on modern platforms (specifically the Switch release).

Romancing SaGa 2 feels like a realization of Romancing SaGa's ambitions. I thought at first it was going to be like SaGa 2 was to SaGa 1: a streamlined, mechanically refined sequel that's a little smoother, but doesn't quite have the same magic as the original.

Initially, the game is immediately more intuitive and gives you a lot more direction. You play as an emperor and there's an advisor character who basically tells you where to go for the first 6-7 hours or so. There's a really cool "generation" system where when your emperor dies, or when you complete enough events, then you get to pick an heir from 4 choices (which can be your party members or other recruitable characters) and pass on your skills and stats to that character, and the game continues with the new character as the emperor.

I played Romancing SaGa without looking anything up, so it took me a while to even understand that there was some sort of "passage of time" mechanic in the game that affected monsters and events. Here, it becomes clear very quickly that things are going to change over time as you progress, and there are explicit points where time skips forward by a bunch of years, prompting you to revisit old areas. From a design perspective, it's an elegant way to make the time mechanic more intuitive and visible.

After a few generations, the game finally showed its fangs: the advisor didn't have any new advice for me. Fair enough; there was only really one place on the map I hadn't explored much, so I went to check it out.

This unexplored region branched out into like 4 or 5 new towns, a dangerous desert area where your HP is halved, a mysterious lake with a giant fish I couldn't interact with, and a scary-looking jungle that I immediately backed out of. I wandered and wandered and kept finding new stuff that I didn't know what to do with. I spent the night in a small village and got attacked by giant termites in my sleep. I followed the termites into their underground den to fight the termite queen, who seemed literally impossible to beat. I considered accepting that my current empress's fate was to die in a termite hole, but I decided to battle my way back out of the den, only to find that a different town I visited earlier was now overrun by goons, who kidnapped me and took me to their landship (it's like an airship but for land). I now had to fight my way out of captivity without armor and weapons, or die trying. The formerly straightforward structure had devolved into complete chaos.

I realized this game isn't going to keep being a simpler, streamlined take on Romancing SaGa. It's actually the same thing again but the battles are 20 times harder. Fuck yes.

Yes, another major change is that the game is hard, closer in difficulty to the first two SaGa games, with late-game encounters becoming very dangerous, and one of the most absurd final bosses I've ever experienced. This isn't a game where you can hold down A for every fight; you can beat some groups of enemies easily, but you'll frequently have to think about which targets to prioritize, which skills to use, how deal with foes that hit hard or inflict annoying status ailments. Character growth is based on your actions in battle, which adds an additional element of diversifying the skills and magic you use so that you don't become too weak in any single area and miss out on high-level techniques.

Strategically, it's more interesting and involved than any of the previous SaGa games I've played, especially compared to the brain-melting grind of Romancing SaGa 1. This also makes it kind of tiring to play for too long. I mainlined Romancing SaGa 1 in three days, but 2 took around ten days, and I felt the need to stop and take breaks more often. I'm not going to claim that Romancing SaGa 1 was made better by having boring easy battles, but it definitely changes the texture a lot.

Romancing SaGa 2 has the same sense of chaotic free exploration as its predecessor, but feels like a more complete and robust game. Where Romancing SaGa 1 felt strangely empty at times, almost an unfinished feeling, the heavy strategic focus and deeper systems make Romancing SaGa 2 feel overwhelmingly dense. But it doesn't abandon the spirit of 1. The overarching goal is more clear and the progression feels more intuitive, yet there are still plenty of cryptic quests with minimal hinting and towns that seem pointless until you stumble upon the right event trigger. It captures the odd charm of 1 while fulfilling many of its ambitions! It's remarkable.

I'm not totally sure whether I like Romancing SaGa 1 or 2 more. Romancing SaGa 1 blew my mind, and the messy stuff that 2 "fixes" is part of what made it special to me. It's hard to compare a mind-blowingly unique game to a sequel that builds on its ideas. But as I reflect on both games, I can't help but feel a great warmth for Romancing SaGa 2, for its own ambitions and messiness, and the love it shows for its strange predecessor. Both games will shine brightly in my heart.

Conclusion

I'm excited to keep playing more SaGa. Sometimes I feel like I don't know what I want from video games anymore. Well, I think what I want is to discover more games with the same experimental and playful spirit as SaGa.

Let's create even more sagacious games than before.

See you again!