Maintaining a tradition of quirkiness and awfulness since the eighties (★★☆☆☆)
What the hell happened here?
I left the Saga series oh, two decades ago, and it turned into *this* while my back was turned? My last Saga game was Frontier. I played the remastered version recently, so I got my hopes up for the latest SaGa entry. I’m also a sucker for games with multiple protagonists and storylines. I didn’t expect things had gotten this bad, however.
Look, I know SaGa was always the runt of the Square Enix litter. It’s where bad ideas get to live on in peace. How about if stats just increased randomly? How about instead of skill points or books, new skills are learned randomly whenever the game just feels like it? What if instead of a shop, you could trade random items for other random items of similar value? I sense a pattern… what is it with making everything random?
In my mind, I imagine the SaGa series is where Square Enix parks all their more… unusual employees so they don’t do too much damage to the other IPs. Kawazu’s misfits, they call ‘em.
They have the character artist whose designs were considered too garish and feminine even for Final-fucking Fantasy. It’s Harajuku meets glam rock, but I guess it has its charm. They also got the game designer that thinks people hate JRPGs with exploration, villages, dungeons, shopping, story arcs and secrets. So they got rid of all that and kept only two things: boilerplate quest NPC dialogue and combat. They did add baby puzzles where you put blocks in the corresponding shape, however. Don’t ask why, it’s the misfits.
The setup is basically this: you pick one of five characters, get an intro, then your character goes on a semi-random tour of some of the 17 worlds in the “multiverse”: election world, triangle world, witch world, etc. Some of the worlds display interesting ideas, but their general design is unbelievably poor. Every one is literally a cardboard cut-out diorama and all you do is walk around the map going from pre-determined hotspot to pre-determined hotspot. You don’t get to do anything fancy, like entering buildings or anything like that. It’s so lazy it makes you wonder why they didn’t just say “screw it” and make the whole game menu-based. Gosh, everything else in the game is already purely menu-based. Speaking of which, the menus are stylish, but oddly convoluted when it comes to getting things done. I hope you like putting the same item on auction endlessly to unlock new offers. Oddly enough, characters have elaborate running animations , which you only see in the large hub area. For example, Diva prances like there’s no tommorow. Perhaps those animations are leftovers from a more ambitious version of the game?
As an aside, it’s very weird to me that a long-running series from a large company is actually devolving from a technical perspective. As I said, it’s a glorified menu-based game now, which I’d be more okay with if the menus and dialogues weren’t so darn slow. I’m sure you could argue the game is focusing on what matters and cutting out the bloat, but it’s not like Final Fantasy XVI went back to being a 2D top-down pixel art game. It’s kind of humiliating treatment for one of Square’s flagship series, but y’know it’s SaGa. It’s as if this year’s Ford F-150 was now a lawn mowing tractor instead.
Anyway, since every world can be visited by any character, each world’s “story” is a self-contained affair with no relation to anything else. Go fetch this, go fetch that, the end. It sure doesn’t help that all worlds are populated by the same NPCs with very little variation. The dialogue is sometimes interesting, but usually so meaningless that I just scrolled through it, which is saying something considering I usually make it a point of pride to force myself to read every line of dialogue in a game.
I started the game with the very fabulous Scottish singing robot diva that calls everyone “love”. Since the combat depends on having a full party, you’re given a team with zero information on who these weirdos are and, as a consequence, there is also zero character development. Her storyline is basically this: your manager makes you listen to a magic song, so he can block your memories and smuggle you outside the country in another body, only to painstakingly make you unblock your memories to relearn the magic song that summons a demiurge that will let JRPG England rule the multiverse. Perfidious Albion indeed. Did I mention the final boss is to the beat to an electronic version of Auld Lang Syne? Also, remind me why 19th century London has its own J-pop starlet? It’s completely idiotic, but I don’t hate it, you know? At least here I can see the upside of being part of the B team: you’re allowed to go with some really out there stuff that wouldn’t fly otherwise. There’s a bit of “So bad its good” quality here.
You then pick another storyline. There’s the skanky cowgirl and hijab-wearing girl buddy cop duo, the carefree dude that calls everyone bud, the magical girl with a thing for cats and the dour vampire whose attitude is probably explained by what the devs forced him to wear. You get to keep your progress between storylines, which is a godsend, but nothing really gets more interesting the next time around. Every main character has exactly the same dialogue with NPCs, but the lines vary a little according to each character’s speaking quirk. At least you can tell the localization team had fun with this.
It says a lot that the most satisfying story beat in the game for me was when the little kid with magic matches introduced himself: “Gee, how about those mysterious matches, eh? I hope this doesn’t turn out into a whole involved questline!” I had talked to the kid many times before, except now I had the option to answer: “Nope, screw you and your world, I’ll collect my magic cat and I’ll fuck off”. That’s two hours saved! Every world seems to have a few variations and also keeps track if you have completed it before. Maybe that’s why I got to skip it. If so, that’s kind of clever, but not exactly a ringing endorsement, eh? Anyway, no world really got more interesting on repeated playthroughs and the changes are really not that apparent. I don’t see why you couldn’t “destroy” a world and rebuild it with another character. Something big, you know?
I also really like that the magic girl storyline ended after a few hours on a complete cliff-hanger. I guess I picked a wrong choice somewhere, but screw it, the game still counted that as “game complete”. I got my trophy and everything. Good enough for me. For the record, feeling relief at the game ending sooner than expected is not an endorsement either.
What is so weird about the tedious dialogue is that the game has a ”Rewind” button that even lets you take back choices, but no “Fast Forward”. I suspect the main reason I liked replaying SaGa Frontier was that Fast Forward button. Every JRPG should have one now, ESPECIALLY those that show you the same scenes again and again and again like SaGa Emerald Beyond.
To be fair, the combat the real draw here and at least it’s always engaging. The focus is on manipulating the action timeline, grouping your characters to form combos, using conditional attacks while blocking the other team’s and never ever letting an enemy get a whole block of the timeline for itself. If someone gets a big chunk of the timeline for themselves they get multiple attacks in a row in a Showstopper, which lets you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or the opposite if you get careless. There is no healing in combat, so every fight is a war of attrition. Both teams get more action points as the turns pass. Finally, Showstoppers get more likely as enemies and allies fall in battle, so there is always a sense that the stakes are getting higher as fights go on.
The combat system is supposed to be deeply tactical, but in practice it’s a clusterfuck. This sure isn’t a game like Into the Breach, where every action and reaction can be meticulously planned. You have no idea who enemies are going to target or what their attack is going to do exactly. The combat order seems very random, but the game is doing a pretty awful job of teaching you its rules, so who knows? You’re given a whole bunch of battle formations with specific effects, but a situation that actually requires most of these never seems to come up. Fights are usually easy enough that you can win most of them despite multiple screw-ups. Nevertheless, it’s a fun system that rewards attention to the situation and where you can never just be on autopilot. Even weak enemies can mop up the floor with you if you get careless.
What adds another layer to combat is that there’s more to it than just winning. A little one-eyed dude lets you pick mini-challenges for every fight (Mr. S! Final Fantasy Legend II, represent!). In that sense, every fight should also be studied as an opportunity to kill an enemy with an interrupt, get a 10-space combo, etc. Monsters also have skills that can be absorbed so sometimes it pays to set things up to get an enemy’s skill.
The SaGa staple of having human/mutants/robots/monsters is back, with a bunch of little subclasses. What is interesting is that this time around no race feels useless, especially since the “gimmick” classes of monsters and robots also get stat growths to an extent, which makes them more consistently useful.
You’re severely limited on the amount of skills you can use at any one time. On one hand, it forces you to focus on what you really need. On the other, that rare move that costs a ton of action points and only counters blunt attacks is going to stay on the bench forever compared to skills that are consistently useful.
Anyway, unusual design decisions are one thing, but outright crashing is something else. The game crashed multiple times, worst of all during the final multi-part boss fight. Considering how long and involved that fight is, that’s pretty unacceptable. And it happened AGAIN on the final boss on my second playthrough. That’s frankly pretty pathetic. And it’s even the SAME exact final boss except for a few moves switched around. I can’t believe they didn’t even put in unique final bosses for every storyline. That’s the level of workmanship we’re dealing with here.
You CAN get in a good groove with the game. Keeping your skills, levels and items from run to run feels great. There’s a whole bunch of extra challenge fights, alternate endings (which last all of five seconds, but still), special loot to find and characters to recruit. It’s clearly a game made with NG+ in mind. On the other hand, building a dream team to tackle the final challenges is much too convoluted because of all kinds of restrictions on the way the worlds work. There is also that familiar RPG nagging thought: what are you grinding *for* exactly? To fight a fifth recolor of the same monster to get an item you’ll never need?
SaGa Emerald Beyond is certainly not great. It feels like it was made on a shoestring budget by enthusiastic amateurs, not the latest entry in a venerable(-ish?) series from a major company. The combat is pretty good though. It’s a shame everything else sucks.
I don’t really know who I would recommend Emerald Beyond to, or the entire SaGa series for that matter. Perhaps, it’s a game for masochistic weirdos. Unfortunately, I am one of those.
Idle Thoughts 