I feel like the lack of dungeons is too integral and well done to not be a conscious choice from the getgo? Was it really this way because of a budget restriction? The way the game works without dungeons feels like even more work, because they had to add a lot of unique interesting events to keep you busy to compensate for the lack of dungeons
They really cut corners on the PCs since they nearly all seem to share like 2 character models with the same animations and there are even entire palette swap PCs!
I feel like where the game is really hurt by the lack of budget is the low number of enemies - it really feels like you’re fighting the same monsters for the entire game, that you’re not making any progress, that combat is not meaningfully changing. Even if that’s way less true than in most other RPGs! Other SaGa games used cheap tricks like reusing the same enemy sprites for stronger enemies but adding little touches to make them more threatening, this one could really have benefited from it.
I really love Scarlet Grace though and go back to it time to time. right now I’m roughly in the middle of a Leonard playthrough after having completed it with Taria and Balmaint. Leonard absolutely owns… i should have picked him first