Romancing SaGa (Minstrel Song)

I finished Romancing SaGa (for PS2) over the weekend with a final game time of about forty-five hours. I chose to play it because I wanted to challenge the game to explain itself well enough to me for me to enjoy playing it, and because I wanted to challenge myself to really enjoy a SaGa game. Both of those ended up proving successful.

It was hard to start this entry. I’ve placed a lot of expectations on this game and on myself, and while every bit of effort I put into the game paid off, it’s difficult for me to put into words how satisfying it was to have really dug into the game and enjoyed it for what it is. At the same time, there are some aspects of the game that feel like open holes, like something might be missing. I suspect that these are what would cause the average RPG player to lose interest quickly.

Romancing SaGa is a completely player-motivated game. The only fixed point shared by the game’s playable scenarios is the final boss. The only fixed points shared from game to game by a single character’s scenario are a few character-specific quests. The game leaves everything – quest choices, character skills, party lineup – up to the player, and expects the player to take an active role in exploring the game’s systems and world.

Once you finish the introductory quest (or series of quests) for a character, the game leaves you feeling nearly as high-and-dry as if you’d just stepped off the prison ship into Morrowind’s Seyda Neen. But the world is not empty of things to do or places to see – not at all. The player is encouraged to see the world and to move from city to city, discovering rumors and stories and legends all the while. Some NPCs may give bits of information that are simply for flavor; another might know part of a rumor while still another has heard a different piece. When important rumors are heard, they’re automatically stored in a quest journal that categorizes all relevant information the player has come across. Some connections between rumors and quests may be obvious, while others are obscure (indeed, sometimes a little too obscure for my taste). In either case, enough exploration will always yield the next step in a chain of hints. Fetch quests end up being the end result of such a chain more often than not, but they don’t feel out of place or antiquated here. They feel at home – they’re just the way the game does its thing.

This sort of gameflow is the aspect of the game that’s most likely to throw off somebody expecting a more rigidly-structured RPG. Sometimes there may be dry spells in which not many hints are found or no quests are triggered for a while. While another adventure, another key to a mystery are always out there, it can sometimes be frustrating to have to shake out towns for relevant information or to check that one NPC you missed for a trigger. If a player is used to allowing a game’s narrative to answer the question of “What do I do next?”, it may be a big leap for that player to ask that question of his or herself. That’s what enjoying RS is all about: the player deciding where to go, what to do, what hints to follow, which characters to train in which areas of expertise, and so on. RS gives back everything a player is willing to put into it, but if a player isn’t willing to forge his or her own path through the game, I could only see it being unfulfilling.

I found RS to be satisfying to play on a basic level. Battles load quickly and move quickly. Animations are short and cute. The player selects party actions for a turn all at once, and then they play out all at once, with enemy actions in between. While the player makes choices in the battle menu, party members ready their weapons or magic. This occurs completely in the background, so there’s no delay while animations play out. When the turn’s actions finally do play out, they all move at a brisk clip, with one action occurring right after the other and no time wasted. The camera doesn’t even linger on an enemy fading into nothing when it dies – it moves right on with the next action. The animations are well-tuned, too, and most attacks are fun to watch, and satisfying even after they’ve been shown ten or twenty times already. There’s a combo system at work, and learning which attacks are most compatible with which and in which order is fun. The more advanced Vortex and Fulcrum combos are well-explained and extremely fun to pull off. Finally, the SaGa series’ trademark “Glimmer” or “Spark” is present here, and it’s just as thrilling a way to gain player skills as ever.

Dungeons are more interesting than most in the genre because of the addition of PC RPG-style “proficiencies.” These are abilities that individual characters can learn and level up, and each is used for a specific task. Find Chests finds hidden chests on the map. Disarm Traps lets the player see which chests are trapped and attempt to disarm them. Find Traps locates hidden passageways. Find Ore and Mine let the player find and collect metals and materials (which are used for blacksmithing). Climb and Jump allow passage of obstacles. These skills are reminiscent of Unlimited SaGa’s skill system, but thankfully the accursed Reel, by which USaGa randomized every action, is not present here.

The game really does explain itself better than any SaGa yet. Each town has an NPC that’s a member of the Volunteer Brigade. These NPCs have a list of explanations and tips that are opened up one by one as the player advances through the game. The basics of playing the game and using each of the game’s systems are covered. In the case of the game’s more advanced, less obvious systems, while the path to success is never completely spelled out, just enough is told so that the player has a good idea of how to do well at them.

The only element of RS that’s completely under the hood is the Event Rank. It’s an variable that measures your progress in the game and is increased by the player fighting in and winning battles (the more difficult the battle, the faster it increases). It controls which Volunteer Brigade tips are available and scales the difficulty of random encounters. In addition, some quests are only available within certain ranges of the ER. Completing a quest, unless you’ve managed to avoid monster encounters entirely, will have the effect of increasing ER at least a little, as if time has passed in the game’s world while you’ve been busy.

When I started the game, I knew (from my reading others’ impressions and strategies) about the Event Rank and I thought that it would be to my benefit to keep it as low as possible for as long as possible, so that I could do more quests and squeeze as much as I could into the time I had in that scenario. However, I’ve realized that that’s not really how the ER is intended. The free-form arrangment of quests and the multiple scenarios to play in SaGa games have collectively been coined the “Free Scenario” system. With RS, I’ve finally realized what that term means. The general game and story flow of a Japanese RPG is generally termed the ‘scenario.’ The order of story events and the game structure that links them is set by the designers. In RS, all of that is set by the player. RS isn’t simply like a Western PC RPG that lets you do any and all quests in the game during a single playthrough. RS is a Japanese RPG that lets you decide your own scenario as you play. The scenario that plays out is unique to the choices you make. Since it’s so difficult to complete all of the quests in the game on one playthrough so as to be not worth the hassle, RS can easily supply a unique experience for each repeat playthrough. Because of all this, I think it’s in the general player’s best interest to not know about Event Rank at all, and this is why it’s perfectly acceptable for this element to not be explained.

Something else I knew about the game beforehand was that all of a player’s choices with regard to character building and quests taken would be ultimately tested by the game’s final boss battle. And, indeed, having finished the game I can see how this is true. If it can be said that Romancing SaGa offers a course on how to play itself, then the battle with Saruin, the game’s ‘ancient evil revived’ figure, serves as the final exam. There are many boss battles available to the player throughout the game, but Saruin is the battle that tests all aspects of a player’s strategy and knowledge. The player is expected to use the basics the game teaches about its systems to synthesize party lineups and form long-term strategies. While it’s certainly possible to so completely misuse the resources the game provides for you that you don’t have a chance against Saruin, the systems are intuitive enough and hints are clear enough that successful strategies become apparent early in the game.

Everything about Romancing SaGa comes together so well – the worldview, the backstory, the graphical style, the cities, the battles, the (gorgeous) musical score, the skill systems – that I hardly had a chance to stop and wonder why I was spending so many hours on a role-playing game while I’ve got a full-time job and other games to worry about. It’s so engaging and fulfilling when played the way I like to play RPGs – actively, making my own choices and finding my own way – that I can scarcely imagine going back to a more traditionally-structured RPG while my time is still as precious as it is. I have finally made my peace with SaGa, and I hope in the future to find the same kind of fulfillment that I’ve find here in other games in the series.