Romancing Saga

aka Romancing Saga Minstrel Song in Japan.

Purchase at Play-Asia

The RPG genre has had few major evolutions besides better graphics and new storylines. You still craw through dungeons. You’re going to have random battles. And sandbox gameplay is pretty much out of the question. The Romancing Saga series has tried to break these conventions since it arrived on the Super Famicom. Now that the original title has been remade for the Playstation 2 does it bring an RPG revolution with it?

Let’s start with what Romancing Saga brings to the table, open ended gameplay. You start out by selecting one of eight different stereotypical heroes. Albert plays the role of the all around good noble’s son. Hawke is your average honorable pirate. Claudia is the female archer in touch with nature. Of course you can’t have an RPG without a female magician, Aisha fills this void. It doesn’t matter which character you pick all of them are equally uninteresting. The story doesn’t give any reason for you to care about your character’s journey. You don’t even know why they’re destined to save the world or for that matter, that the world is in great peril. The problem with this is because Romancing Saga just throws you into the world of Mardias. You’re placed in the shoes of a character you know little about, other than what the manual tells you and you’re supposed to figure the rest out.

It starts out as a failed experiment, but if you give the open ended system some time it grows on you. Players need to take the time to talk to everyone, literally everyone in hope that one of them gives you a small lead. Some townsfolk will give you side quests, others hints. But without the help of the random villager you’re going to be lost. Even with the clues you get there is no guarantee you’re going to be on the right track to finding the fatestones. If you ignore the main quest and barebones story, Romancing Saga is the closest thing you can get to free dungeon crawling.

Here’s where we come back to the traditional RPG, wading through dungeons to battle random monsters. During battles you have the standard fight, run and magic commands. What is different is how many sets of points you need to watch over. You have HP, which marks the vitality of a character. After all your HP drains it isn’t over yet, you just lose a life point. While HP regenerates after a battle, life points do not. That requires a good night’s sleep at the local inn. Life points determine if it is game over or not. Since the number of life points is rather small often times you’re forced into avoiding fights, but don’t think about running away that takes life points too. If you choose to fight you can strike with basic attacks to charge up your battle points. Battle points let you perform techniques, like special attacks. However, using your newly learned “double slash” technique also uses up your weapon’s durability points. Each sword, mace or staff has a set durability if these points drop to zero you can’t use the weapon until it is repaired. Here’s the problem with the whole system. When you’re in the heat of a boss battle you’re not going to be able to use your best techniques. If you use them too much your weapon will break just when you need it most.

Now if all if this wasn’t frustrating enough, there is the way that you level up or lack there of. Romancing Saga takes a cue from the NES Final Fantasy II, recently released in Final Fantasy Origins. Instead of getting experience your characters randomly level up, but while FFII is sensible Romancing Saga isn’t. How does fighting a lizardman increase your charisma? Then there are glimmers instead of a skill system. In battle you might get lucky and randomly pick up a new attack. If you aren’t a fan of all the randomness check out the magic users. They can learn new spells just by synthesizing new ones. If you take the time to try out different combinations you can learn powerful attacks. Fighting is already tedious, leveling up is even worse.

As a whole title Romancing Saga does offer some interesting ideas, like the sketch style graphics. This was a good idea because it gives Romancing Saga more of an artistic feel. Team attacks and the opening theme song are also great additions, but these bits just don’t make up for the problematic gameplay. The two biggest selling points in Romancing Saga, eight characters and open ended adventures aren’t fleshed out. Instead you have a RPG without a story and you’re left with a boring world to explore.

Import Friendly? Literacy Level: 0

The localized US version is perfectly playable and it is a fairly good localization of the original SNES game.

US Bound?

While Romancing Saga has been out in Japan for a few months, it has just been released for a US audience.

+ Pros: Eight different story lines to try out and “sandbox” gameplay in a RPG.

- Cons: A bland battle system with unbalanced leveling up. Then there’s the matter of an overarching story, or lack there of.

Overall: While the open ended gameplay is a good concept, it falls flat because players often end up lost or on an incorrect path. Romancing Saga almost focuses entirely on being open ended and it neglects all the other RPG mechanics like a solid story.

< Screenshots >

For more information about Romancing Saga visit the offical website. 

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