Excellent
1)SaGa Frontier
2) Final fantasy legend / SaGa 1 (I’d recommend the Wonderswan one)
3) Romancing SaGa 2
I like
4) Final Fantasy Legend 3
5) Final Fantasy Legend 2 (GB)
6) Romancing SaGa 3
7) Unlimited SaGa
Unpleasant but sorta admirable
8) SaGa Frontier 2
Eh
9) Last Remnant
10) Final Fantasy Legend 2 (DS)
11) Legend of Legacy
12) Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song
I should elaborate in a giant post but I’d say that most of the games in the SaGa series suffers from two major sins: you’re stuck not knowing what to do and there are too many braindead random battles. The lower games on the list suffer more severely from those flaws without bringing enough charm to compensate
Fully 3D SaGa are my least favorite because they exacerbate these problems by having giant sparse N64-like environments
The Game Boy Sagas feel like the game you understood in dreams after hearing your friends describe Final Fantasy; you can be elves or robots or monsters that evolve by eating the flesh of dead enemies! and it’s a hundred tiny scenarios as you travel up the planes through one of those Jungic symbols etched in the brain, a tower to heaven. The art is the most iconic form of tree, mountain, river tiles, perfectly full of gaps for you to fill in with your imagined renderings.
When these games get a higher fidelity art budget I find the grab-bag approach starts to clash and you have to enjoy it for that reason. SaGa Frontier is grotesque in a way it digs into; Legend 1 & 2 are comfortable in the way the pieces shift representation in context. The DS remake of Legend 2 reveals it, removing the possibility of a robot with a mom making sense in favor of drawing it strictly. It’s much weaker for it.
I love how every character in FFL3 is on a spectrum from Monster to Robot, with Human right in the middle, and as they eat monster meat they become more monster-like and as they attach robot parts to their bodies they become more robot-like
I think it’s
<——————————————————->
Monster - Mutant - Human - Cyborg - Robot
SaGa II DS doesn’t have random monster encounters and neither does Minstrel Song so I’m really confused by the criticism of those two as suffering more severely from those flaws when I think they suffer the least from those flaws.
I think all this could be said about every SaGa game though, the Gameboy games are the only SaGa games that have random encounters (edit: US too I guess) and that don’t punish grinding, and they’re super breezy and are a bit more focused on resource management. Every post Gameboy SaGa discourages grinding by scaling up random enemies way faster than your stats
The way Minstrel Song has a bunch of quests that open and close depending on the power of the team is cool on paper but mean that you spend a lot of time aimlessly wandering without much to do because you’re not at the right level, and exploration is neither rewarding nor interesting
Plus it frankly lacks the weirdness some other SaGa games have
The really wild thing is that monsters are incarnations of enemies you can fight and level up into different monsters like Pokemon, while robots don’t level up with XP at all and you make them stronger purely by buying robot parts
My most OP character in the endgame was a robot I poured all my gold into. The speedrun uses a gold underflow (get an enemy to steal more gold from you than you have) and then spends 10 minutes buying max robot parts for several characters.
FFL3 really has a different aesthetic that admires simplicity, symmetry and consistency (both with the technologic-ness continuum, and also with the past/present/future world map), instead of the wild chaos and hostile opaque mechanics of SaGa 2. It makes sense in context that FFL3 was made by a B-team that went on to make Mystic Quest
you can’t turn a robot into a monster but Frontier has the same system, where robots get stronger purely by dumping parts into them (they can wear as many suits of armor as they have inventory slots that aren’t taken up by anything else, so you can just load them up with all of your obsolete gear to boost their HP) and monsters have to very carefully eat other monsters to overwrite the right combinations of abilities to trigger morphs
It’s pretty much exactly the logic in the schoolyard game I played when I was 8, where we had to beat each other up using special powers and evolve to the next stage if we win, but the progression was something like: