It’s a series of games that only have in common their creator: Kawazu.
He has been trying weird systems for the past 30 years, and most of his games are strange beasts to say the least. Some of them are light on the weirdness (most games allow “monster” creatures to eat others and mutate for instance), while some get really overboard with time-limits, wargaming and capitalist entreprising elements.
Following the SaGa lineage is also a bit difficult in the West because of naming weirdness (SaGa 2 became Final Fantasy Legend 2 in the Western markets for instance), and most of them being only translated in recent years.
On sale now is the SaGa Collection, a collection of the 3 gameboy RPGs. They are the most standard of his games in a way, but they are also very good. SaGa is a bit plain, SaGa 3 a bit iterative, but SaGa 2 is probably the best gameboy RPG, period. The various classes and their different mechanics make those games stand out compared to simpler ones.
Romancing Saga 2 and 3 are remakes of SFC games, based on remakes made for phones. They ease-up the balance, mainly, as the original games were really infuratingly difficult and unforgiving. They are some of the strangest of his games, as they mix many genres and try many, many new ideas. Some people love them, some don’t. I didn’t enjoy 2 much (it was just too weird), but I watched somebody play 3 and it looked very interesting, so I am grabbing this one.
SaGa Frontier is a recent remake of the PSX game which focused and streamlined on the concept of multiple intertwined storylines. As the Romancing SaGa games, the remake makes the game massively easier, avoiding having to grind over and over each chapters notably. I haven’t played this one at all but watched somebody play it and it was quite mesmerizing, although probably not my thing.
SaGa Scarlet Grace is the most recent game, released only a few years ago, and I have yet to play it.
I didn’t read over this rant of mine.
Anyway I only played a few of them as you can see, and most in a far past, but interestingly I was much more harsh to them at the time than I am now, having played so many other JRPGs that were massively inferior afterwards. Probably not a box quote, there, ha ha!
I think 2 is the one I’ve been considering trying out for the past few years, assuming it’s the one with a dynastic element to it (you play first as the father, then continue as the son, and so on). But, between SMTV and (soon) Dungeon Encounters I’ve probably hit my JRPG quota for the year. I wasn’t even aware of there being a new SaGa on Switch, or even that they were still making the series.
I played this on the PS1 when I was a young Square/Final Fantasy fanboy. It was very odd, highly erratic in quality (multiple storylines, some certainly better than others), and not very intuitive. It felt old school even by the standards of 1997/98 with little guidance offered to the player but lots of freedom in terms where you went and what you did.
I played and really liked this one last year. It is very stripped down, graphically, and has a frustrating amount of grinding until random, unhinted-at abilities manifest during encounters. But it is a really compelling turn-based system that heavily relies on structuring turns, like SMT V, and has an unusual open world structure that works great portably.
And I don’t really care for the Switch touchscreen, but this is a JRPG with the option of playing with good touchscreen controls, if that’s your thing.
My wallet is feeling much poorer right now for it, but I picked up the Nintendo Pro Controller from Walmart yesterday for $50. I opened it today at work, tried out how it feels.
Wow, I’m very impressed. It fills my hands like a controller hasn’t done since the original Xbox Duke. Very nice. It’s pretty heavy too, not sure if that will be an issue later or not, but it’s probably the heaviest controller I’ve ever used.
Which is funny, because my use case is 100% either joycons docked to the Switch in portable mode, or Gamecube controllers playing multiplayer such as Mario Kart.
