saga frontier has the same monster system from the gameboy games and it’s at least slightly more intelligible
I was 10 when FFL was first released in the US. I remember being really disappointed in the game because it was so different than the first FF. Looking back, there were a lot of really interesting concepts in the game like mutants and monsters but I don’t think they worked out well. And after reading your post, the ideas seemed like they weren’t executed properly. i wouldn’t mind going back and replaying the game again. It is a shame that Square has remade the older FF games multiple times but they haven’t fixed and rereleased FFL.
there’s a wonderswan remake from ~2002 if that counts
I didn’t realize it was remade for the Wonderswan. Nice to see that you could see what your monster would change into before eating a piece of meat.
And apparently it fixes the bugs and made the FFL systems more like FFL2.
Honestly, I feel like Pokemon kind of streamlined the monster system into something palatable for the average gamer. You get the coolness of “monsters” and an excitement similar to loot when the pokemon learns a new move or evolves.
It just doesn’t have the conceit of a single being transforming and the narrative concept that coms with that.
I think to make the monster system work, the player would have to be able to accept or reject new moves, like in pokemon. And you’d have to be given some notion of a) what the merits of each type of monster are, and b) what meats cause those transformations–either as information in the game or in the instruction manual. This could be clues, but it might just have to be an outright chart. I think JRPG’s players want to make decisions about the growth of their characters or at least guide it. Kawazu seems to be more into “natural” systems that you observe and try to interpret. Even FF2 has an element of that.
At the same time I can respect and relate to the idea of trying to make game systems follow some logic. Like, “Why should monsters drop money? Shouldn’t the characters have to skin them and sell the meat or something?” “But that doesn’t really fit into this style of game?” “But it makes so much more sense. Let’s just do it and see what happens.”
That’s how I’ve always assumed Kawazu’s process went.
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Okay, that’s a definite improvement. But do you also have some sense of what the difference is between monsters?
I guess you’re actually becoming monsters in the game world that you might have fought, so the iddea is that you remember fighting a Big Eye, so you’re like, “Yeah, I’d like to play as one of those.”
Any major differences from what we’r describing here?
I could never get into Saga Frontier back in the day. I was intrigued by the multiple storylines gimmick, but I remember finding them all kind of boring and not even being able to get started with it. I think with two of the plot lines I ended up not knowing what to do fairly early on, which is pretty likely, considering the source.
Um, nah. it’s a shallow and boring imitation (w/ cute Adventure Time dialogue). And Zelda 2 is already terrific. i dont think it needs fixing on the level of FF2, which kinda already got “fixed” over the course of the SaGa series anyway.
the FFL2/SaGa 2 DS remake is really fuckin good btw
I’m in the camp that finds it too hard and too clunky to be “great.” As wtih the FFL games, I want to say it’s a hidden gem for what it attempts to do. But really I just feel like it fell prey to the typical failures of the day without rising above them and ultimately lacked the polish that made other games of the era classics. I side with the plebs on Zelda II. You have to tap a next to a table to find an invisible mirror with no prior indication in the game that you’re playing a “Press A against everything” game.
Wait wut.
Didn’t even know about that!
Oh, i kinda glide over the misguided adventure gamey FAQ mandatory stuff b/c i uh, play most games w/ an FAQ nowadays (esp old ones). fair enough. i think the main action itself is hella tight tho. the simple stand/duck to block swordplay is really satisfying for me. also felt the ballyhooed difficulty was a lil overstated. i suppose it could do w/ some light sanding but i also genuinely think it holds up.
the AT game is, like i said, very cute and the way it wears its inspiration on its sleeves is part of the cuteness, but in practice it’s really shoddy and unexciting, which is kinda how i feel about wayforward games in general!
Seconding that “it’s really good” part. I’m not a big fan of some of the additions, a lot of which of which make you backtrack a lot for items of dubious value, but it looks great and takes away some, but not all, of the randomness of the original. The game keeps track of monster transformations, so it’ll eventually begin telling you what monster you’ll transform to once you eat meat. It also made the final boss even more difficult to defeat, making it a beast no matter how much you micromanage your stat growth. Here’s a thread I did about it on the old SB.
Ooooh, I hadn’t realized someone translated the wonderswan version of saga 1: http://www.romhacking.net/translations/1614/
I’m all over that. To be honest I didn’t much care for the DS version of saga 2; the battles felt like they were slowed down a little too much and the areas seemed too vacant. I think I mostly just want to play these games in very limited resolutions and tile sets with ample fast forward. as mentioned I preferred the first game even back in 1996 though.
As for frontier, there’s definitely a few of the chapters that aren’t worth playing at all. fwiw I’d probably recommend Red first (fairly linear and has a lot of unique content; actually hangs together on its own) then Blue (open-ended but doable after Red, and really easy to become overpowered) then T260G (linear like Red but with mostly Mecs), then Riki if you want the pro metagame experience (relies on knowledge of the monster and combo systems), then stop.
I like it because the world design and music are extremely weird – it’s kawazu on the playstation pretty much going all out – and because the chapter system means that each character’s playthrough is only like 3-5 hours, which is a great length for revisiting an old jRPG; the battle system is comprised almost entirely of difficulty spikes and weird exploits such that there’s virtually no grind, your mages will learn the best spell in any given branch after 90 minutes, etc.
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update: I played wonderswan saga 1 for 10 minutes and that’s enough. frontier really does hold up a lot better than the rest of these.
Yeah, you know I only just played Legends for the first time a few months ago. And then I played Pokemon Blue for the first time right after it. It’s really obvious how much the one influenced the other. Some really neat ideas here that haven’t reaaaaly been adopted elsewhere, wholesale, and that maybe under today’s logic would be considered broken. But they make the game so interesting! I’ll, uh, go over this more shortly. Sort of rushing around, right now.
With few exceptions, the best license games often have the feel of somethig made by completely capable hands that would actually be quite cool and ambitious if they had twice as much time to work on it. The first Avatar: TLAB game for the DS is like this. It’s an isometric action/adventure game with systems that work but nothing to do with them. Like, the fightig works well and could be really fun with some concepts added, butthe came is mostly fetch quests. It was a Tose game, and I think they are capable of more. But–y’know: these days I think license games are too rushed to be satisfying.
Kawazu’s games always have too many obscure systems, but they’re generally easy enough that you can abandon your need to control and just plow through them with whatever limited knowledge you can manage to learn. (Like “axe good -> keep using axe”)
This creates an experience similar to playing your first RPG at 8, overwhelmed by the mechanics. It’s pretty rad.
In fact learning about the mechanics from outside sources is almost like cheating and will make any SaGa game too easy. I remember really getting unto Unlimited Saga and spending like half a day reading the mechanics faq on gamefaqs (its mechanics are as mad as they sound) The game became extremely easy afterwards, without me even using any obvious overpowered option. I just simply had a general grasp at what was going on and was probably not supposed to
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