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.

Tales of Zestiria Import Impressions (by Radiant Roar)

This is an incredibly detailed critical analysis of Tales of Zestiria‘s mechanics based on playing the import. The author is my friend Radiant Roar, who is a long time expert on the deeper mechanics behind modern Tales of games. There’s a few minor spoilers for certain party members and boss names in the post but is otherwise spoiler-free. This post covers the game’s mechanics and is not a critique of the game’s story. It’s definitely worth a read.

Here is Radiant Roar’s youtube channel as well. He’s made a bunch of great videos from various Tales of games.

7th Dragon 2020: This time it isn’t Godzilla

Last year I saw Pacific Rim and really enjoyed it. It had kaiju and space aliens and giant robots, what wasn’t there to like? And then earlier this month, I read Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is Kill, which featured aliens and mech suits and weird time loops. Yet another enjoyable story. (The film based off of this novel, Edge of Tomorrow, isn’t too bad either.) It would seem that I’ve hit a theme in my media consumption… This PSP RPG I just finished only followed in this bizarre theme of fighting off alien invasions.

It’s pronounced “EX-zillia”

The 13th game in a popular, long-running Japanese RPG series starring a female main character for the first time in the series’ history. Unfortunately, the game faced some issues during development resulting in some disappointment among fans. Eventually a sequel was released that fixed many of the issues in the first game while introducing a new male protagonist and a weird, somewhat bizarre plot.

Think I’m talking about Final Fantasy XIII? Nope! I’m referring to the 13th “mothership” title in the wonderfully prolific Tales of series, Tales of Xillia.

So, Tales of Xillia. What is there to say? I’ve been a huge fan of this series since 2005, so of course I had to get this game as soon as it came out. This is the ninth Tales game I’ve finished now? I’ve kind of lost count at this point. I love this series, and it’s slowly creeping up to the same level as Final Fantasy on my personal hierarchy of favorite game series.

Project X Zone: Dreams Do Come True

Before I go into detail about Project X Zone, let me first clarify something. I love crossovers. Video game crossovers, movie crossovers, book crossovers, cartoon crossovers, crossovers that bring together two completely different mediums. I love ‘em all. When Dissidia: Final Fantasy came out for the PSP 5 years ago, it was like a dream come true. Finally, after 20 years, there was a game that brought together characters from different Final Fantasy games. The fun fighting aside, it was even more fun watching the different characters interact even if the game’s plot and writing left something to be desired.

And that’s what I love about crossovers. Seeing characters from different “universes” interacting. Crossovers tend to highlight the similar themes across different stories as well as the differences between them. I find it all incredibly fascinating.

So when Project X Zone was originally announced, I was pretty excited. But considering the fact that its PS2 prequel, Namco x Capcom, was never released outside of Japan, I wasn’t very hopeful. I figured the game would have to be dubbed (ultimately, it wasn’t), and finding a voice cast for such an insane amount of characters would probably be crazy expensive. Plus, was there even demand for this kind of game outside of Japan? (Or in Japan, for that matter. Apparently the game didn’t sell all that well in Japan.)

The opening is only the tip of the iceberg

Better Late than Never: Etrian Odyssey IV

When I was growing up, I tended to play the games that my older brother purchased for the NES and later the SNES (and later the Playstation). My brother picked up Final Fantasy for NES, and so I would later play Final Fantasy II (IV) after he finished it on SNES. When I later learned of other JRPG franchises, I noticed the Dragon Quest franchise. I don’t think we’d ever played it. And if we did, I don’t remember it. My brother, in some conversation a long time ago by now, mentioned that Final Fantasy had appealed to him over Dragon Quest because in the former you could see your characters while you’re fighting.

And so we became two of millions of Final Fantasy fans.

This post isn’t about the Final Fantasy series, for once. Nor is it even about Dragon Quest. I just wanted to bring attention to the way Dragon Quest presents its battles for most of the series (up until IX, I believe?). You only see the enemy. You don’t see your own characters. Later on you’d get to see graphical displays of the spells you cast and so on. Such a way of presenting battles never really appealed to me.

The Tales of Series and Why I Think it’s Amazing

Ah, the Tales of series. This series of Japanese RPGs is like a comfort food and/or guilty pleasure for me. Anime art style? Check. Voice acting? Check. Some of the most classic JRPG tropes ever conceived? Check. Over-the-top flashy attacks? Check and check. Not to say that the anime art style is something I look for specifically in games. What I do like in a game’s aesthetics, however, is a disregard for reality in favor of vibrant colors and an imaginative world. The Tales series has both of these in spades.

Why I Love Xenoblade, Part 2

So in my last post I covered Xenoblade’s world, characters, and comprehensive affinity system. In Part 2, I’ll be focusing on the game’s battle system and music.

The Curious Case of Yasumi Matsuno

As someone who played and loved Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) back in the day on the Playstation and spends way too much time on gaming news websites, it was likely only a matter of time before I started hearing the name Yasumi Matsuno. His was the brilliant mind behind the convoluted (and unfortunately, badly translated) story featured in FFT that was unlike any other I’d ever encountered in the Final Fantasy series. Considering that FFT was Matsuno’s first foray into the series to begin with, it makes sense. Before that he’d worked on Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen and Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Both of these games feature heavy plots with a strong emphasis on political turmoil and strife. Another important feature in both of these games is a focus on moral choices made by the player.

While I haven’t played Ogre Battle, I’ve recently had a chance to try out Tactics Ogre‘s remake for the PSP. One thing that really stuck out to me in this game is how much can change in the story depending on what decisions I made throughout the game. The game features three moral paths that the player can follow throughout the story: Law/Order, Chaos, and Neutral. The Law/Order path is characterized by decisions in which one follows the orders of their superiors. The Chaos path, on the other hand, involves decisions in which one spurns the decisions of their superiors in favor of following what they believe to be their own justice. Neutral, I can only assume, is a mix of the former two. I went on the Law/Order path in my own game, which involved agreeing to slaughter innocent people. It wasn’t an easy decision to make and there are some interesting consequences. On the other hand, choosing to go against the main character’s lord in the Chaos path doesn’t result in a very rosy scenario, either. No matter what decision you make in this game, the main character will pay for it in some way. Some things will go well, while others will inevitably go horribly wrong.

Radiant Historia? Huh?

As someone who started seriously gaming during the SNES era, I’ve always been fond of the 16-bit Japanese RPG. The expanded capabilities the SNES offered allowed for more complex games, which also turned out to be somewhat less tedious than their NES ancestors. Final Fantasy IV-VI are an excellent example of this. And while RPGs on the Playstation benefited from enhanced graphics capabilities and a larger storage capacity, they were really just 16-bit RPGs on better hardware when you get down to it. Many of them, anyway. Games gradually evolved through the Playstation era and changed until you got the PS2 era when RPGs were noticeably different.