State Home For The Ugly: The End Of SaGa

My humans, mutant and monster scaled the tower, were booted to the bottom, then climbed back up only to discover that their entire adventure was just a game designed by the Creator for his own amusement. So my dudes killed him. They had the option of going through the Creator's secret door -- a door that surely lead to other worlds! -- but they declined and returned home. The End.

It was pretty awesome. I had far too much fun with this game. That may have been because it was short, I didn't pay for it, was able to speed it up in the emulator, and I FAQ'd my way through the whole thing. All that made it feel less like work and more like fun times. I wasn't obligated to play it because I stupidly bought it cuz it was on sale! I was doing it cuz I wanted to. I was doing it for love.

Now I'm thinking about maybe playing SaGa 2. I imagine the remake will be pretty different, and who knows when/if it'll come out here. But maybe I should play some of the games I paid big money for? I like a lot of those games, but I often delay playing them because, well, I like them. I postpone joy! You shouldn't do that. You never know when your number may come up.

(I coulda swore it said "killed". You do see some dead kids later, though. Hardcore.)

I bought the Last Remnant when Amazon had it on sale. Lots of people have called it a secret SaGa game, and I guess I can see that, what with its needlessly opaque systems and all. But I just couldn't get into it. It would alternate between being mindlessly easy and frustratingly difficult, and the battles just dragged on and on due to all the combat animations. Its world and art design also did nothing for me. Or my room mate, who repeatedly called it "the gayest thing" she's ever seen. The technical issues, which seemed to be the big reason why it reviewed so terribly, were totally overblown, though. You install the game and its problems are no worse than any recent highly rated WRPG I've played. But still. Too damn slow. Maybe someone will release a mod for the PC version that greatly increases the speed of the battle animations. That would be nice. I want to like it more than I did. Its systems were weird but it sure wasn't SaGa weird.

I don't have much nostalgia for 16-bit Square RPGs. I loved them at release, and I can still appreciate them, but my fondness for the SNES has waned over the years. That sound chip? I was blown away when I heard that music in Super Mario World, man. The pianos kinda sounded like real pianos! But now I prefer that Genesis chip. It's raunchy. It's not pretending to be something it isn't. It's its own thing and it doesn't care what you think. Like SaGa.