Everybody likes a challenge every now and again, and this article represents my self-selected challenge for GameSpite Quarterly 6: play Unlimited Saga (not “SaGa”!), comprehend its mechanics, determine why people hate it, and find something nice to say about it. Fortunately, this turned out not to be nearly as difficult as expected. It’s not a great game, but it’s an interesting game, and “interesting” is entirely too scarce a commodity in games these days. I can see where this is the sort of thing I’d probably find myself fascinated by if I had countless hundreds of hours to invest in opaque RPGs. As it is, please accept about ten hours of play and a few hours’ writing instead.
By gosh, you’ve almost thrown a craving on me to revisit this game. I didn’t think it was terrible when I played it last, but as pointed out, there are certain elements which tend to be off-putting.
The remake of Romancing SaGa is also a bit odd, but much more traditional in its presentation. I still don’t think it was overly well-received, though. The soundtrack was awesome, though.
If SaGa/Saga does one thing impeccably, it’s music. Kenji Ito and Masashi Hamauzu make the games feel much better than they really are with their glorious soundtrack work.
A spoonful of sugar makes the poison^H^H^H^H^H^H medicine go down!
I admire your persistence, Parish. As a fairly die-hard Saga fan, I will defend any other game in the series to the death (or at least to the mild injury), but US was just too much for me to take. Might be worth revisiting, especially since you can get it for something like two dollars.
If anyone ever asks me why I like GameSpite, I think I’ll point them to this article right here. It’s good proof that it doesn’t take a good game to make a good piece of games journalism.
Any game, good or bad says much about its creators, their ideas of their audience and the society it was released into.
Nice articel but I still think the game is a load of donkey dick and it was pretty low of Square to try to sell the game in Europe by including a FFX demo with it. I know nobody that bought the game that enjoyed it. I did only sink about 5 hours into it but it wasn’t worth it. I might be missing out on a great game, but I doubt it and if I am the game wasn’t meant for me.
hi there kurt
I love this damn game, and this was a great meditation on it, with a nice perspective of what it did right along with what it did…well, not WRONG, per se, but just weird and overwhelming. It’s an easy game to dismiss as an abomination, but it’s too inventive to deserve shrugging off without at least some sense of affection for what it dared to be.
…although…I hate to be That Guy, but I assume when you mentioned a mature, competent female warrior, you were referring to Laura, but called her Ruby.
I apologize for being That Guy. And really, a wonderful read.
This article has my stamp of approval. Excellent work, Parish.
Oh, and I am indeed a diehard Kawazu fan, and proud of it. He’s the David Lynch of RPG design.