SaGa Frontier: A Primer

Disclaimer: My advice in this post is based on the original, PS1 version of the game. My aim here is to try and provide a guide to the game that just covers the basics. As more details come out about the remaster, I will also update this post.

So… Square Enix announced a remaster of SaGa Frontier last November. The announcement was pretty shocking in a year already full of shocking events! Other fans of this game that I know were just as surprised as I was.

SaGa Frontier is a quirky little JRPG released in English in 1998 by Squaresoft (now Square Enix). It came in on (was actually localized) the JRPG boom caused by Final Fantasy VII‘s success. It’s a fairly niche game with a high learning curve and is known for its esoteric game systems and not giving the player any sense of where to go to continue the story. All of this is why this game getting a remaster was so unexpected!

More positively, SaGa Frontier is also an incredibly unique game with amazing visuals that gave the player a degree of freedom that wasn’t common in JRPGs at the time.

Image from FantasyAnime

The Essence of SaGa Frontier is an excellent resource for in depth information about this game.

And HardcoreGaming101 has a great summary of SaGa Frontier and how it fits in with the rest of the series. I also want to thank HardcoreGaming101 for letting me use some of their screenshots for this post.

Finally, the GameFAQs community for this game is great and has continued to datamine for more than a decade after the game’s initial release. If you want a very in-depth guide that digs into every bit of the game’s hidden mechanics, I recommend Zaraktheus’s guide.

This Blog Still Lives!

I am terrible about updating this blog. But it’s a new year, and thus I will attempt to breathe some life into this! In any case, I really do enjoy writing in this blog. I just find a hard time condensing my thoughts into one post. And I always want to include every single thought I have on a particular subject. So I’ll try more posts, but make them shorter. And hey, I can always return to the same topic again. It’s my blog, after all.

Another reason I haven’t been writing is that I’ve been spending a lot of my free time playing Xenoblade instead. Coincidentally, this game is what my next post will most likely be on. Or not. I’ve got a lot to say about this game. To put it quite simply, it’s amazing.

Happy 2012 everyone. I hope to write a lot more this year. About games, books, movies, and whatever else I can think of. Mostly games, though. Probably.

Uh… hey there

Well, this is awkward. I created this blog quite a few months ago with the intention of, you know, doing something with it. Then I got lazy, as usual. I’m terrible about that sort of thing. My problem when it comes to writing blogs is that I need to be in the mood to do it. That rarely seems to happen.

What changed to make me actually write here? I suddenly find myself with an unprecedented amount of free time, for better or worse. You figure out what the reason behind that could be. It’s not that hard.

Anyway, the name of this blog is The Broken Base. Why? Because it’s a trope that describes the fans of my favorite video game series of all time, Final Fantasy so perfectly. I plan to talk about video games in this blog quite often, so I might as well expound upon things early. I’m a huge fan of Japanese RPGs. They’re called ‘JRPGs’ nowadays thanks to the boom in RPGs made in the West on consoles in the past five years. Have I mentioned how much I hate the term ‘JRPG’? I’ll leave that for another post in the future, most likely 😀

Final Fantasy‘s fandom really ticks me off these days, though. The fandom itself is a horrendous mass of impossible-to-please people who can’t seem to take off their rose-tinted nostalgia goggles for even a second. Everyone has different expectations of the series, but the commonality between everyone seems to be that their expectations tend to be sky high with each title. Naturally, this leads to the newest Final Fantasy game getting hated on relentlessly… until the next game comes out in the series, of course.

Actually, what I’ve described is an Unpleasable Fanbase (tropes will always be capitalized). A Broken Base is the product of a huge split in the fandom. Final Fantasy VII has the distinction of being the first game in the series to do just that. A lot of Final Fantasy fans fall into liking I-VI or VII and after. That’s oversimplifying things, but that is one major division in the fandom. Broken Bases, gotta love ’em.

This is probably a good time to wrap things up, now that I think about it. I don’t really expect much to come of this blog, but who knows. I may end up posting again some time soon if I somehow end up feeling like it.