Romancing SaGa is remake of a 1992 Super Nintendo RPG that never arrived in the U.S., Romancing SaGa shows its classic roots in its story.

Now, eight adventurers answer the call of destiny to embark on a journey. Now the sad part is, you will not get much more out of this story, though the side quests have well developed stories most do not tie in to the main story.

Romancing SaGa is too vast to cover every thing in the game so we will focus on Claudia*. As you play the game you will be interdicted to 4 setting (types of environments), Dungeons, wilderness, battles, & Towns.

Each place you visit will be unique & have its own map. In towns you can usually find the map with a local member of the volunteer brigade. We will cover more on the volunteer brigade later. Now in general when in the wilderness or in dungeons you will find the map in Treasure chests.

Now back to the volunteer brigade, the volunteer brigade is part of a vast network of people & object to you through the game. They are there for the most part to have in game tutorials on simple thing; they also have the map of that town.

The main way to get between areas is the world map. The world map lets you go between areas in a land. To go between lands you will generally go to port cities & travel by sea. The other thing you will interact with often is the main menu. The main menu has stats, notes, and settings for battle, time played, quick save, options, positions & proficiencies. All the options are common to other games though they are organized better then most.

Interacting in the city/towns is run of the mill at best, but it is fully functioning so nothing to bad just camera issue which we will get to later. The dungeons are again run of the mill, but these places are will you run into battle. Battles, though fun and pretty easy to You can have up to five characters in your party at a time, and you'll often fight four or five enemies at once, so the battles can get pretty large. As you move around the environment, you'll see enemies roaming about, and if you bump into them you'll be drawn into combat.

The enemies are really aggressive, so even though you can see where they are, it's usually pretty difficult to avoid them. If you run into a tight cluster of enemies, they'll chain together, so you'll have to fight one after the other until you've beaten them all. Also, if an enemy hits you from behind, then it will get initiative when the battle begins. Once the battle starts you can choose battle actions for each of your characters. After you've given commands to your party, you can hit go and the round of battle will play out. Your characters can have multiple weapons equipped at a time, so if you want to you can attack with a sword one turn and a bow the next turn. It's all up to you as to how you set up your character. However, carrying a bunch of weapons does weigh you down, and since you learn new battle abilities based on the weapon you use, it's often advantageous to pick one type of weapon and stick with it until you've mastered it. As you use a weapon, you'll become more experienced with it and you'll learn new and more powerful attacks. There are dozens of different attacks in the game, and it doesn't take too long to learn some powerful moves. However, using those moves will cost you battle points and durability points. Each character earns a certain number of battle points each round of combat, and each move you perform requires a certain number of points. So you might want to use a weak attack during one round to conserve your battle points so you can afford a more expensive--and more powerful--attack the next round. When using weapon-based attacks, you also have to watch your durability points. Each weapon has a set number of durability points, and performing attacks drains these points. The durability points don't regenerate, and if they reach zero, you can't use that weapon again until you have it repaired at an inn or weapon shop.

Wait, there are still more points to keep track of as you battle. Oddly, your hit points are the least important points in the game, because characters regain all their hit points after each battle. However, if your hit points reach zero during battle, you'll be knocked unconscious and you'll lose a life point. If you take damage while knocked out, you'll lose even more life points. If a character loses all his or her life points, then he or she will leave your party for good. You can replenish life points at an inn, but that isn't too convenient when you're deep in a dungeon somewhere and your characters are hanging on by a thread. You don't get many life points either, and some of the generic characters will only have three or four life points at the most. It's nice not having to worry about stocking up on tons of healing potions to fix up your party after each battle, but it's frustrating to have to stop fighting in the middle of a dungeon to go find an inn so you can keep your party members alive. Also, it isn't only fighting that affects your life points. Running from battle costs you life points, and certain traps will take life points away as well.

Battles are made more interesting by the fact that you can perform combos when you focus multiple attacks on a single target. The combos aren't anything too special, and usually they just look like two separate attacks in quick succession. The combos do inflict more damage than the individual attacks, though, so they're definitely worth trying for. There are also healing and offensive magic spells in the game, which are handy because they don't cost any durability points.

As you battle, your basic battle stats like stamina, hit points, dexterity, and charisma will increase. You'll also earn gold and jewels, which take the place of experience points. You can spend jewels to level up your characters in their particular class, which will increase their level in each of the skills that pertain to that class. For example, a pirate specializes in the foil, hand axe, and hydrology skills. By purchasing a level in the pirate class, you'll increase the level of each of those skills. You can also level up skills independently. The skills are required to use proficiencies, which you can purchase with gold earned from battles. Proficiencies are skills that you can use when in the field, but not in battle. So for example, a dungeon may have a lot of traps, so you'll want to spend some money to learn the disarm-traps proficiency. However, merely having that proficiency doesn't protect you against all traps. You'll have to have a high enough level in your search skill to disarm advanced traps. But as mentioned earlier, skill levels cost jewels, which aren't always easy to come by, especially later in the game when the levels get more and more expensive.

All the points, skills, and proficiencies seem intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of battles, it's fairly easy to keep track of everything.

The artwork, back drops, scenery of this game is spectacular. Though the graphics come at a cost the camera control is completely nonexistent. The stories, characters & battle system more then make up for the lack of a camera system. One of the nice things is every land very unique to the culture & life style to the people there. The game interface is very clean & easy on the eyes. This clean interface helps to make the game easy to use. Which in any RPG this is a good thing since you will be spending allot of time in the interface and menu’s of the game.

Sound tracks can really set the mood of a & the sound track in Romancing SaGa really hit the mark from the opening theme song Menuett to the on going music , no mood is forgotten . The sound stack is also seamless now the voice acting is not as masterfully done, but for the vast size of the game this is forgivable. The dialogue of the game though captivating is at times to simple. This opens the game to more people bun can ruin the mood of a moment. Sound effects add a since of a realism & fury. Romancing SaGa is no exception, the sound effects blend nicely & seamlessly. This sound all around is above normal & is almost enough to make the game worth while.

Over all this is a well rounded RPG, well worth the money. Romancing SaGa is good game to add to any RPG fans collection. Though this game has its short fall none of them out weight the good of the game. But if camera control if a big deal to you in the game play department this title might not be for you. As an editor this was a big shortfall for me, but I still enjoyed the game, so at least rent it see what you think of it.

* Note: The game play settings will be the same from character to character, but to clarify references from in game scenes we concentrated on one character.

Romancing

SaGa

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