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.


I hope so!

I'm going to sleep. I stole these images from GameFAQs. Thank you, whoever posted them all!

"Poor king...murdered by his own man"

I am still playing SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend. It's enjoyable how broken and odd it is. Once I got past the opening grind it's been pretty damn easy, with my mutant's odd, disappearing/reappearing skills laying most everything to waste on the first turn. My humans are really just there to take over when the mutant is without a good combat skill. The monster is there for comic relief -- he went from a bull to a worm to a piranha with a TUSK attack and...well, right now I have no idea what he is. There's a FAQ that details how the meat transformations work but I don't really want to know. I like surprises.

I remembered spending the majority of the game lost in a tower, but so far the tower segments have been really brief. I did not recall any of these side-worlds you visit at all. I've been to Hell, and Waterworld, and you start off in a typical fantasy kingdom but with a large cephalopod population. I also went to Paradise. Its residents enjoy a life of nothing but eating and sleeping more than I do. It was the first stop on the tower, I think, and I'm wondering why the party didn't just quit the climb right there. The game's such an odd hodgepodge of scifi and fantasy, moreso than any FF game. I mean, my party's inventory is made up of Colt .45s, SMGs, Sabers, Battle Axes, tomes of Fire Magic, beast nails, Grenades, and Rocks. Rocks are surprisingly strong. The world design so far is a similar mess. The whole game...it's not very cohesive. There wasn't much thought put into any of it, I don't think. Sooo it's a lot like this blog, really. And I think that's why I like it. There's a lot to be said for games that don't really know what they're doing. Or games that do know, but don't really care that it's not "right". You know what I mean? You don't see it much from Japan or the West nowadays. Thank God for Eastern Europe. And Kawazu!

SaGaGaGa

So they're remaking SaGa 2. I'm not big on the art style they're using. I'm sure I wouldn't mind it in any other game. It's clean, colorful, nice enough. But I always think of SaGa being all flowery and watercolors, y'know? Maybe that's me applying my impressions from the later games to the earlier ones, cuz the GB games were just little pixel turds wandering around, but without that style...SaGa's retarded, right? As far as I can tell it makes no sense. But if you wrap it in an artsy craftsy art-style you trick me into thinking it's really just too deep for me to understand. Modern shonen art, though? That means it's probably just dumb.

I owned Final Fantasy Legend AKA SaGa 1 as a kid. I kinda loved it. It was the only game I had with me while at camp. Another kid had a Turbo Express with Galaga 88 and boy was I jealous of that kid. But SaGa was cool. I had a party with a mutant, and a monster, and I was climbing a tower so I could kill God? I was getting close to the end, too. Then some other kid stole it. I have no idea who it was. I'm sure they regretted it once they started playing the game.

So this remake announcement has inspired me to try SaGa again. I took a stab at it last summer, but didn't get more than a few minutes in. This time is different, though. I'm cheating from the start. I've got many tabs open with FAQs in each one. I will get over that opening hump and I am going to kill the shit outta God.

Two humans. One mutant. One monster - I went with goblin. We head out of town. We are battling. I need to return to an inn after the first battle. And then the third. And now...I can't afford to heal, because mutants randomly gain HP during battle, and healing at an inn costs 1GP for every HP you need restored. And the only way to level up my humans? By buying items. But I can't afford items, because I need to spend all my money on healing. This is like my life. I can't get a car cuz I don't have a job and I don't have a job because I never went to school and I didn't go to school because I had to get a job and I think Alice Cooper had a song like that. And this FAQ is like my parents, it has no good advice!

Eating the flesh of my enemies has turned my goblin into a skeleton, and now an albatross, and now back to a goblin. One of the skeleton attacks is "BONE" and the goblin's "NAIL". My monster has the lowest HP out of the entire party but he is the only one who hasn't died yet.

I have discovered that you can buy potions. They cost less than staying at an inn! These old UIs, they are tricky and make you feel dumb! But it is also my own fault, because I am not putting in the effort. Trying to learn the game as I should. I have the emulator set to turbo, and so I am missing a lot of what's going on. Like how my mutant learned some special abilities at some point, and has been using them instead of attacking, causing the battles to drag on for much longer than they were previously. I guess I need to pay attention!

Rather than buy armor I spent money on an HP increasing potion for my female human. Success through substance abuse rather than experience. My mutant has learned the ability "GAS" and it is killing enemies in one hit. I better use it every chance I get, because who knows how long it'll be before it gets randomly replaced by some lesser ability, like "QUEEF".

(I know if I ever re-read this post I'll want to kill myself for that last line.)

From a FAQ:

"If you are already at the maximum strength or agility (255), equipping a piece of armor that boosts that specific stat will temporarily reset that stat back to ~1, until you unequip that armor."

That's how you know it's a SaGa!

The king has offered me a reward of "anything I want" if I convince a girl in a southern town to marry him. The girl is an octopus. My mutant has 200HP. My humans have 60. My monster has 20. In addition to GAS my mutant has learned MIRROR. Then ARMOR, which was replaced by ELECTRO. Then ESP replaced MIRROR. Then MIRROR replaced ESP. This was over the course of 20 or so battles. SaGa! I've done little more than grind for money so far. I don't know if you do anything else in this game. I know I made a post this morning about how terrible grinds are, but this is different. This is black & white. This has a catchy 8-bit theme. This has monsters transforming through the power of meat, and a mutant with gas and short term memory loss, and drug-addicted humans, and towns and kings named HERO, SWORD, SHIELD and ARMOR. It endorses bestiality. This all makes it rewarding. It makes a difference!