or at least that's what i keep hearing. i was scared and excited to try the game for such a long time, and then after i finally played it, so many years later, the first thing i learned was that everything people complained about was true. it's a stupid game. and a great one.
the logo is printed sideways on the cover. on the english one there's a little collage of all the characters next to that, which makes the normal orientation look correct again, kind of. i think this is a mistake; the original version kind of makes this not look like a videogame at all if you hold the box so that the art is in the correct position.
unlimited saga is, of course, still a videogame. but it's definitely trying not to be, and i think a lot of the frustration with the game comes from people expecting it to be like another videogame. (or at least ones that people like. it's a bit like saga frontier ii, and dept. heaven games.) there's a baffling synthesis of the kinds of things you might find in board or tabletop games, and maybe gamebooks: character sheets, little spinners, clearly delineated campaign quests with abstract maps. you inspect the rooms like an adventure game and roll to not get hit by spikes, until you realize that that happens about once every minute and it's too much work to do it right, and actually if anything you're better off getting hit anyway. it'll toughen your characters up.
although saying that makes it sound like i think i know what's going on in the game, which, honestly, i surely don't. it's all too easy to fall into a trap where a strange game makes no sense at first, then once you figure out some things, including how to beat it, it's easy to think "i've got it now, it's so simple!" but games are rarely so simple, and saga games almost never. the nature of your choices are inevitably filtered through the game's own obscured mechanisms, and the game's capacity to surprise through offering things you didn't know you could do, or absolutely vex attempts to do something you thought you knew exactly how it worked, is something common to almost every saga, and one of the series' greatest charms. as much as i've liked many of the stories and characters, the games are always about playing the games, and wanting to have the exciting and surprising experiences they have to offer again and again. and coming off of seeing frontier ii, and playing a bunch of this game's successor, the ps2 romancing saga remake, i'm more excited than ever to come back to it and play more. it's so cool. it's so stupid