While the SaGa series is known for unconventional gameplay, newcomers to the series may be blindsided by these particular quirks.įrom a presentation standpoint, SaGa Frontier Remastered regularly underscores how poorly the original title has aged. While meaningful player choice is appreciated, sometimes even a mundane choice may have massive implications for a player who almost certainly won’t know until it is too late. There are numerous “points of no return” in any given story with little to no warning, ranging from a fork in the story path to even precluding specific types of abilities (as certain types of magic will foreclose learning abilities of the opposing element). This freedom is a double-edged sword: it is both thrilling and overwhelming to be adrift in a sea of choice. The gameplay loop is relaxed and player-oriented, allowing for leisurely exploration and providing an organic sense of an unpredictable, open world. In between main scenario quests, players are expected to complete sidequests, recruit party members, and engage in battle to learn new abilities and level up individual character attributes. While some protagonists’ plotlines feature a good number of story sequences, other main characters can reach their final boss within hours or even minutes. The flow of individual storylines is uncomplicated, and the freedom offered to players grants wide possibilities. The Free-Form Scenario system ensures different players will get different experiences.
There’s definitely a better way to describe this. While some of the individual characters feature razor-thin backstories, it is thematically consistent that each character contributes to the overarching sense of smaller, individualized journeys that intersect more than intertwine. It is common to pick up other major characters during a playthrough, even if they are irrelevant to the player character’s story.
There are dozens of characters to recruit, some of whom may be crucial to the plot in one story but only uttering a sentence in another. While each storyline varies in length and quality, all of them provide some level of non-linear exploration with a keen focus on sidequests and character recruitment. Instead, the journey truly is the destination, and the player is given control over nearly ever aspect of the narrative.
These disparate storylines are loosely woven throughout the game world with an emphasis on player choice in what is dubbed the “Free-Form Scenario.” In SaGa Frontier, there is no onboarding process or an airship to acquire twenty hours in. Rather, these are seven (eventually eight) personal journeys featuring questions of identity, destiny, belonging, and revenge. This is not a standard RPG tale of strangers banding together to defeat a world-threatening terror. The player is immediately given the opportunity to choose one of several characters. With meaningful quality-of-life updates, notable additions to multiple storylines, including a new playable character, Square Enix has established a model for reintroducing nostalgic classics to modern audiences without diluting the essence of a wonderful, challenging, and sometimes confounding experience. Widely considered a cult classic, SaGa Frontier represents the first exposure of the series to many RPGamers. Between the revitalization of the series and scarcity of the original title, Square Enix announced SaGa Frontier Remastered, previously released for the original PlayStation in the west in 1998. The SaGa series has seen a resurgence in the west, with recent ports of Romancing SaGa 2 and 3, the western premiere of the formerly PlayStation Vita-exclusive SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions, a new mobile title, and even a Nintendo Switch compilation of the Game Boy series known in the west as Final Fantasy Legend.
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