romancing saga 1 (sfc) thoughts

[highimpactsex]

when i decided to undertake the saga journey, i thought the series was just the "galaxy brain video games engineered by the madman who gave us final fantasy 2". but after going through 30-40 hours of this nightmarish buggy game with kino moments, i realized i was playing a work brimming with sheer genius.

it's jank, but it is doing something more radical than i or many western game critics gave it credit for. i thought RS1 was doing things that jrpgs and crpgs can ever dream of.

it was giving me my own journey. my own story to tell.

a hostile world

so i think most people picking up rs1 (or its remake, minstrel song, for that matter) might have the wrong impression this should be played like a jrpg: "Ah, this game is by Squaresoft. Should be like my Final Fantasies then. All I need to do is grind, level up, and experience the story."

but once they pass the prologue section for the protagonist they choose, they're now at the mercy of the open world. the game offers no clear avenue on how to proceed. they're stuck in the town. every npc mentions some obscure town/dungeon that gets added to the world map if they exit the town. that's it, that's all they're getting.

okay, maybe they need to exert more effort: they go around, looking for more towns. they might notice pubs may have characters they can recruit, but they might put it off. when they return after exploring a dungeon (dismayed at the gold cap being 9,999 which is easy to reach and definitely not aware you have to sell something to get a "jewel" to get 10k or more gold), that npc they wanted to recruit is long gone.

now, they really have nothing to do. what are they supposed to do besides look up a guide? even with a guide, the flags feel so arbitrary and random. around this moment, i expect many people to drop the title and call it a kusoge. the very few who trudge on are probably weirdos like me.

and i can empathize: it's a really easy conclusion and it's even one i had, despite already playing the first two saga gameboy games. it was a very different experience from what i expected. i knew a thing or two about so-called "free scenario" games from playing free rpg maker games, but this was still Just Weird to me.

my first few hours of the game were incredible. i picked aisha (cuz cute girl), found myself roaming this giant field swarming with enemies, and i just died because aisha sucks lol. she's a support character with no aggressive abilities from the getgo. i aborted this run and looked for someone else to play.

i ended up with sif, a valhallan warrior, with some absurdly good stats. the problem was the minute you step out of town to do the necessary quests, you're in this giant snow field with a million enemy symbols coming straight at you. there's congo lines of enemies forming on this one bridge between you and the wider map.

i immediately dreaded playing this game. i thought, "Am I seriously going to fight these ten enemy symbol encounters at once?" i must've signed a contract with the devil because i actually hate playing games that force you to battle these many enemies.

i'm a firm believer of playing games in the style i like to: underleveled, as few enemies as possible, and a deep knowledge of the mechanics to bend the rules to cheese the game.

so my first impression of romasaga 1 wasn't that great. it felt like it was forcing me to play and fight every fucking enemy on the world.

painfully dank mechanics

what's more: i knew that fighting every fucking enemy was a bad idea. starting from romancing saga 1, the more enemies you fight, the more you will increase your Battle Rank which means the set of enemies you might encounter will be consistently stronger. this means the usual dragon quest "fight slimes forever" does not work; you cannot grind until the endgame.

so you are doing an arms race against romancing saga 1: you need to get stronger before the new set of enemies comes along. there are Degenerate Ways to cheese this according to some wikis i read, including abusing the frame or two you have from opening and closing the menu to cancel the enemy encounter. but that doesn't sound very fun... so i tried my best to avoid as sif and just ended up fighting at least twenty or so enemy encounters.

but once in a while, kawazu laughs at me and rolls from the encounter table a strong ass enemy team that can wipe my party in a few turns. i had to reload my save (thankfully, you can save anywhere) and hope that i don't encounter that annoying enemy team. supposedly, kawazu included these tough enemies because he thought it'd be funny to troll the player (i agree, it IS funny).

as a result, the first few hours of the game were quite miserable. i wasn't sure how to mitigate the losses because, like the gameboy saga titles except 3 and final fantasy 2, there was no exp system. your characters' stats grow from just participating in the battle and perhaps doing well. there's also a weapon proficiency system that seems rng too, but it's obvious that there's a chance their weapon proficiency will increase if they used it at least once in the battle. i've not seen a case where my characters just level up their weapons without using an action. all these systems confused me and i wasn't sure if i was enjoying the game.

and i was thinking, man, i would have quit this journey if i didn't know saga frontier had yuri. i don't know if readers will understand but once you reach a certain age, you do a lot of things to reach yuri. even if it's painful.

the eureka moment

but 3-5 hours in, there was a moment that made me click with the game. i already have albert in my team and i visited the crystal city while searching for things to do (i was reloading saves and checking out different maps of the game). i stumbled onto a sequence of events where albert got to meet with the prince dude there and the dialog was like:

Albert: I escaped from my kingdom that has fallen to the monsters. Tell me about my parents, did they live?
Prince Dude: lol they died, their ashes are in the shrine next door, also i don't know where your sister is.

uh okay, i'll just head to the shrine to see if albert gets some more story. but nope, all you get is "albert's parents are RIP in here".

i genuinely thought i bugged the game because i picked up a quest from Prince Dude later before visiting here. so i loaded up a save -- but no, that's the end of the story for albert and his parents. suffice to say, i was very confused and looked up a guide to see if i was missing anything: this included reading up on albert, any terms like the name of the god that the shrine memorialized, and so on.

nothing. uhhh okay.

if you go back to meet the Prince Dude, you'll get a quest where he is like "aight, we want you to get this aquamarine thing in this cave called the crystal lake. good luck." i thought that was very funny and just assumed maybe this will continue albert's storyline like how you might read more events if you do certain quests in bioware's good crpgs like baldur's gate series.

so i did the crystal lake dungeon and was very amused by this giant map of nothing but water and enemies. entering the cave, i tried to avoid as many enemies as possible. then, i encountered this enemy.

it did not end well.

regardless, i got the aquamarine and i laughed when i realized i had to backtrack my way to the entrance of the cave and finally exit the crystal lake by foot. romasaga doesn't want any of that "QOL" business. did i also mention that enemies respawn whenever you exit a map and escaping from battles still add to the encounter number? the whole gameplay experience was surreal.

then, i met the Prince Dude and he was like "thanks for the aquamarine, see ya." no new events for albert, his parents, or anything. did i get anything in return? some nice equipment, sure, but that was it.

as i remained baffled by this quest just ending like that, i searched desperately for things to do in the crystal city. there must've been some flag i missed. the story can't just be like this, right? "Get the McGuffin in Epic Cave at Crystal Lake." it can't be just that, right?

then, it finally struck me.

i talked to voxandra, the saga vtuber who made me play these games in the first place, how romasaga 1 was a fucking trpg. and she was like yep, isn't that radical?

IT SO FUCKING WAS.

the dark souls of jrpgs

i was playing the game wrong. instead of playing the game like it's some jrpg, i should be playing it like a crpg -- like elder scrolls but good and challenging. but even that's not accurate enough: this is a trpg copypasted into a super famicom rpg.

all the quests i've been doing are as superficial as the stuff my friends and me did on one pathfinder session eons ago. here's the quest: grab the aquamarine -- how will you fare, my adventurers? the mechanics of this quest and so many others are obfuscating and barebones at the same time, which lead you to developing unique builds that coalesce into strategies. the game is all about expressing yourself through these mechanics, the same way a trpg player is going through a rulebook to find the character they want to roleplay as.

and the campaigns are just an excuse to test your party's mettle. there's no Real Story or Epic Cutscenes (before the aquamarine mission, i did this quest in reuniting aisha with her uncle and the walkthrough said this would be a heartwarming scene -- it literally just goes "uncle, i found you" "thank goodness you are alive, will you be staying with us" "no, i need to be with the party" "ah, please take care"), so it's all about preparing for this ultimate evil you keep hearing about: saruin. the world is clearly fully realized, but you don't have any real exposure to the setting. all you're doing is just adventuring around and taking boat rides to different towns to see what's happening.

all the mechanics started clicking in place for me: the reason you're in an arms race with the Battle Rank is to prepare you for the final boss fights. the game is training you to git gud. but also, it encouraged you to experiment and try new things like equipment, party members, and so on.

my mind started expanding. romancing saga 1 was the first of many titles to give you so much freedom that it becomes daunting; if you consistently game over, it's really because you fucked up somewhere. but at the same time, being able to master this means you can express yourself through the mechanics and play it in any style you wish.

this game is tough as balls, but what makes this game especially rewarding to me is that there are no wrong answers. in retrospect, i should've stuck with the aisha protagonist because i would've found it cathartic to finally get out of this messy prologue and see her become powerful. indeed, any protagonist you choose is a valid option to start out your romasaga 1 journey. no one is that terrible or powerful that they shouldn't be used against saruin and his minions for a fun experience.

instead, it's all about training them and seeing them grow through the battles. they can wield and adapt to any weapon you wish, even if they shouldn't. you want to let claudia, an archer, wield an axe? the game allows that for some reason. most games wouldn't and romasaga 1 doesn't let you know if your choices aren't optimal. but if you're stubborn, you can stick with what you have.

your answers may softlock you if you do things too off-base, but if you know how to prepare beforehand, you can totally do this. in this sense, it's a bit like how from soft games allow you to go with whatever build you wish -- just in a turn-based rpg setting. you want to be a sicko and play a sorcerer in dark souls 2, even though most magic only hit a single target in a game swarming with enemies? from soft says go ahead without any judgment. you might even want to do that as a challenge run. likewise, romancing saga 1 is meant to be replayable because all it's doing is offering a toolset for you to experiment with. it is also reported that kawazu balanced the game in a way that the third time playing through this game would be the most fun.

yes, kawazu is totally normal.

so the issue is getting through your first playthrough. this is a tough task already complicated by how jank and buggy the game is. but once you're done with it, you could iunno go apeshit and do what this person did after playing it twenty times: a No Save & No Damage run. this 20-40 hour experience is meant to be replayed over and over again, so you can see the events you missed and get even smoother experiences fighting saruin.

taking the player expression train

but what really impressed me more was how this was your journey. i've mentioned already that you can't really make any mistakes and even the ones that may softlock you are still things you can do, just with some preparation. but what truly won me over was how personal this journey was for me.

because you're hunting down the events, every quest becomes motivated by your own agency as a player. if you weren't interested in the quest, you can ignore it and do something else. it's not like other jrpgs and even some crpgs where they offer you quests like you're in some restaurant and waiting for the waiter to give you your steak; no, you have to cook your own quests up because you're cooking for yourself at home. and as i said, the quests that the game even offers you are closer to suggestions like trpg campaigns than something narrative-driven. kawazu will never tell you what to do. you are creating your romasaga journey by playing the game.

which means the things you do stumble upon and finish become meaningful to you and you alone. what you experience through these events are generating elements of your story, not some finely tuned novel. it leads to some very interesting player moments for me at least.

after finishing a quest, this monarch who's obsessed about his knights wants to thank me for my valiant efforts. he decides to knight me.

it's a pretty banal moment when writing about it because it's like any other knighting moment in video games. but when i got knighted, i thought that was COOL. it felt like i was being rewarded personally for my actions in saving this guy's daughter. it's not like this quest is different from any other "save the damsel in distress" deal, but because i had to search for it and put in my time risking to fight these monsters (remember, BATTLE RANK!), i thought i was being knighted by the game myself.

and it was then when i realized i had a strong connection to these playable characters. i didn't just see them as my avatars in a trpg world but as the characters i'm roleplaying as. instead of me making these people move to save the princess, it was my party and me becoming mario the plumber.

this was a honestly refreshing experience, especially since i was playing as a barbarian woman.

in many video games i've played, your avatar is always written as if they're gendered male. i'm thinking of blue archive here for example where the game may give you options to present yourself as a woman or nonbinary, but the girls always say you're into some of the Most Guy Stuff imaginable. it's always amusing to me when i see the player character break my IMMERSION and just do the most out of context thing possible.

but in romasaga 1, i never felt this dissonance once. i was always connected to my party and the game never attempted to "correct" the gender of my character or assume i'm playing the wrong characters in general. any journey is valid as far as the game is concerned. this is reinforced by the mechanical stuff in the previous section as well.

while the game may be hostile to newcomers, it is never hostile toward your identity or preferred expression in gameplay and story. after overcoming the hurdle of not getting it for hours, i never felt like i encountered something totally jarring to my own gameplay style and roleplaying preferences. instead, i just thought the game adapted to my thinking and i jived with its sense of humor.

and i think that's what makes saga as a series wonderful: player expression is king and y'all are valid, even if you choose to do the silliest options.

it's your saga, fam

it's perhaps no coincidence that the people i know who've gotten deep into this series are people who enjoy expressing themselves in unique ways: vtubers, trpg players, and so on. the games are mechanically challenging only to make you think about how you should learn to express yourself with their "grammar". romasaga 1, with all its low budget jank, is desperately wanting you to speak its language and embark on your own journey.

this desire to make players speak through the game is its greatest strength and weakness. there's much freedom to indulge in, but there's also little to do. i have to sometimes fight enemies in order to advance time and find new events to do. the weird flags and conditions are also questionable at best. but they are all designed to give you own tailor-made journey and everyone gets to have their own spin on how they beat the shit up of saruin.

this is a game series where you shouldn't play as optimally as possible. completionism is a bad mindset to have in this game; you just won't get everything the game has to offer because there's always backstories to read and new strategies to develop. you can replay it all you want and still find quirks to uncover, but it remains Your Saga -- if you will.

and it's tough to reach this stage of kawazu enlightenment but once i got it, i started to realize i was playing a game full of unrefined genius. romasaga 1 is the most fascinating and thought-provoking game that i sorta don't enjoy playing but remain awed by its ambition. there's nothing like this and i want to experience more of the saga series.

i want to write a proper Post on the saga games once i'm done finishing all the games, but i really wanted to talk about romasaga 1 right now. it's a really unique game that might be interesting to some people, though there are clearly better options in the saga series (i hear Saga Frontier is the most accessible). it's a revolutionary game that deserves to be remembered and this game has let me know ahead of time that i'm going to be one of kawazu's biggest fans at the end of this journey of sagas.