October 24, 2005 11:24 am - PS2, impressions

A brief return to (and escape from) Unlimited SaGa

What a spectacular joke was played with Unlimited SaGa. Producer/director Akitoshi Kawazu took his pet series, which was already known for its strange and unintuitive design and mechanisms, and made a game even more bizarre and inscrutable, with even less documentation this time around. I really don't know how he got away with releasing that game with his position intact, aside from the likely fact that the game was so cheap to produce that even its tiny sales generated a profit.

I have a habit of seeking out games that are foreign experiences to me, don't receive a lot of attention on release, and have enthusiastic fanbases. This has led to some nice discoveries for me (the King's Field series and related games, Romance of the Three Kingdoms), and some intense bewilderment (mostly the SaGa series). Even though I hadn't found my footing with SaGa even once yet, when I came across people grokking and even enjoying USaGa, I knew I had to give it a try.

I purchased the game around a year ago for about $13, and after several hours spent going through fan documentation, I managed what I thought was a decent handle on how the game worked. When I started Laura's scenario, I discovered that the game really wasn't terribly difficult to play once I had an idea of what I was getting into, and that there was even some fun to be had here and there. I let myself fall away from the game after seven hours of play or so, as the battles had become repetitive and I hadn't found much to like in them (yet).

Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song's recent warm reception in some circles brought back that terrible, wonderful curiosity, and I pulled USaga back out of storage. It took me a couple of hours to realize that I hadn't scratched the surface of several of the mechanisms last time, and after some more reading and playing I realized that I could've been having a lot more fun with the battles.

In the SaGa series, there's no unified "Attack" option. Characters' physical attacks are all skills that are gained either from their specific weapon or by "sparking" or "glimmering," in which a lightbulb appears over a character's head during battle and the character uses (and learns) a previously unknown technique. The character gets to keep the sparked technique for future use, and several characters using skills like this during a turn can make for some powerful combos. Random chance decides when a character sparks, but the player can influence the probability by improving a character's ability with a given weapon type, or by fighting stronger enemies (greater odds in battle lead to greater chances of sparking). I didn't understand this mechanism at all in my previous time with USaga, and so I found it frustrating that I could never get my characters to learn any new attacks, and that weapons would become fragile or break without my characters ever having used them to good effect. This time around, though, I learned exactly how to influence where and when and how I received these attacks, and the thrill I got from seeing a three-or-four-hit combo pulled off with a newly-sparked powerful attack thrown in became incredibly addictive.

I believe it was this mechanism alone that kept me playing for the eight or so hours I stuck with the game this time. The rest of the game is basically a haphazardly-designed digital set of Dungeons & Dragons game boards, complete with dice in the form of the ever-present reel. There's something to be said for the nicely-painted backdrops that are used in the city scenes and dungeon locations, but it rarely feels like any care went into the dungeons' design. The dungeons simply exist, and their floorplans simply represent the areas they portray. There's seldom any cohesion between what it feels like to play a dungeon and what sort of challenges the location the dungeon portrays should offer. You simply move your pewter character around the board, roll the dice, fight some battles, and hope you don't run into one of the game's many seemingly out-of-depth boss encounters. You're playing a board game, and it doesn't get any more engaging than that.

There's little cohesion between how the main quests and sidequests are balanced. Main quests' difficulty varies by each character's scenario and increases for each scenario the player completes. Sidequest difficulty is set at a specific level, once and for all and forever, regardless of main quest difficulty. This makes it very easy for the player to start a more difficult quest early on in the game, make it a half-hour or more along in the quest, scraping along but generally surviving, only to be hopelessly outclassed by the dungeon's boss. Likewise, it's easy to choose a quest that's too easy when you're near the end of your scenario, jog through it, complete it, and be forced to replace one of your hard-earned, high-level skill panel sectors (charater stats depend on placement of skills received through quests on a grid) with a weaker skill.

A hardened SaGa fan might tell you that none of this is an issue, because the player should have known beforehand not to embark on a quest that's not appropriate for his or her party's level...but how is the average player supposed to know this? There's no visible difficulty rating when the player selects a quest. There's no clue that choosing a given quest at a given time might be a bad idea.

This sort of problem extends to most of the game. How is the player supposed to know how the magic system works? I've read the manual and documents on the subject, and I still don't know how to use spells I've gained from tablets. How is the player supposed to know how to influence skill sparking? What about regaining HP during a dungeon? The manual mentions once that pressing R3 or L3 allows the player to rest for a turn, but there's no clue in-game that these rarely-used buttons are needed for something so important. The persistent market rank variable can make some necessary items difficult to get hold of when it's at a low level, making some characters' scenarios a pain to play if they're played first or second. The difficulty of different scenarios varies widely, but once again, the player has only the characters' names, portraits, and backstories to go on when deciding on which to play. Trial and error seems to be a running theme throughout this game, and there's really no excuse for it when the game's design is already so esoteric.

I will admit that there's a certain satisfaction - which probably borders on masochism - that I get from taming this game's systems one by one. I'm sure it's the same sensation that has earned the SaGa series some very devoted fans, and the same that often drives the series' more vocal fans to namecalling when a SaGa game receives low review scores. A very small part of me would like to give the game a free pass because the satisfaction can be so strong at times, but the rest of me knows that it's really quite unforgivable for a game to be released in such a laughably undocumented state, with such an obfuscated interface, in a genre that's generally so well-known for its intuitive nature. If USaGa had come with a fifty-page-plus manual detailing all in-game systems and laying out difficulty ratings for each character and sidequest, it would have been well on its way to being playable by those not willing to spend hours going back and forth between GameFAQs and the game. As the game is, while I did have fun with it for a while, I wouldn't fault anybody for hating its very existence.

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Looking forward (and backward), now that I've found something to genuinely enjoy in a SaGa game (namely, sparking), I'm excited to play other games in the series, especially since it seems that the parts I enjoyed most about USaGa are what it shares in common with the rest of the series. I've heard that the Romancing SaGa remake actually does a really good job of informing the player of everything he or she needs to know via in-game, realtime help systems. If this is true, then it should go a long, long way toward redressing USaGa's crimes. Also, I'd like to give SaGa Frontier 2 another shot, as my first tries at the game were fleeting and confused, and I'd really like to be able to attach a nice gaming experience to that gorgeous art and soundtrack.