SaGa Frontier Remastered has great upgrades that positively add to the original gameplay experience, especially if you loved this title back in the late 90s. If you have never played this, it might seem like an overwhelmingly difficult game with a mess of great ideas that had not been completely sorted out. It was certainly ahead of its time and groundbreaking in some areas of gameplay.
I love RPGs. I have a long history with them growing up in the 80s and 90s. Starting with the Pool of Radiance for the Commodore 128 which led me to become twitterpated in the late 80s with Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System. I know a good RPG when I see one and I am confident in my expected structure of them.
Today, you have clicked here for the JRPG SaGa Frontier Remastered review.
This game from Square Enix broke a lot of new ground for the role-playing genre back on March 31st, 1998. Director Akitoshi Kawazu put together some wild concepts that had not been sorted out quite yet, but certainly was the future of the genre. We are going to get into those right now, as well as the remastered game.
New stuff means remastered! And some of the old stuff is not bad to begin with either.
Taking a game out of 1998 and placing it on a system in 2021 is a tough sell without an enormous amount of remastering (see Capcom for details) or remaking (see Final Fantasy VII for details). Trying to tug at the heartstrings of PlayStation owners from the 90s, Square Enix did a good job with putting enough money and resources into SaGa Frontier and improving upon some areas that could make the game more enjoyable without tarnishing the original pieces. For this remaster, you get an HD upgrade that fits nicely on a 16×9 screen, QOL improvements, you get some new stories involving Fuse, and further improvements on the original stories for the seven characters included in the game. On the story side of things and how the game functions, the remastering is impressive, especially when you see that the core gameplay was pretty much untouched by the remastering portions.
The biggest improvement that has everyone crowing right now, outside of the obvious Fuse storyline, is how you can speed up the game. Like I said above, I did not play this originally in the 90s (I was a Sega fanboy – I was certain they were going to turn things around with the Dreamcast), so after playing it now at normal speed I get why people are thrilled with this. The speed is not just for dialogue, but it’s for movement in battles and around lands. There is so much stop/go with the game that this was a must when it came to the remastering. They did a good job with it.
It also excels with some of the original elements of the game. One of the biggest is how incredibly customizable and diverse your character can be depending on the type of character you choose. Each character can hold a certain number of items. Those items can range from armor to weapons to attire that helps boost levels. The game is flexible in how it mixes and matches things, which means you have a buffet of choices in how you can shape your character’s offense and defense. Typically in JRPGs, especially during the 90s, what you could add/subtract to your character was incredibly limited in scope. It is far more open here and it makes for a fun time when it comes to equipping your characters on their journeys. In other words, it is deep.
Anyway, the new improvements make the gameplay better, if you enjoy the original gameplay design (and there is a lot to enjoy) or you are a fan of the game from your 90s experience.
Has the gameplay aged well?
The simple answer for this is ‘no’. The game is a bit of a mess on the surface if you have not played it ever (like yours truly). I suspect that in 1998 this game was just mind-blowing. You can pretty much start anywhere you want in the game, go alone or with a group (the latter is far better), grind out for powerful gear, and choose multiple paths for your story to unfold. It has a Skyrim-lite essence about it, though with extraordinary limitations. Back in 1998, most RPGs still ran on linear stories, kept pushing the player from point A to point B, and were far more focused on completing the main quest, rather than offering up new places to explore while you are spiraling towards the end. SaGa Frontier really broke some boundaries, laid some groundwork for epic opuses, and showed that the world of an RPG could be much bigger than a singular path.
You might be thinking to yourself, “That all sounds amazing! What is wrong with you?” We honestly do not have enough time to answer that last question, but let us definitely break down the aged parts here.
The biggest flaw in this game is how all the information is constructed and how it does not contain a lot of push for the player to find direction. I spent the better part of two hours trying to figure out where I was supposed to be before Blue (my character) finally got back on track. Apparently, I had missed one or two sentences of explanation from a random person in my starting village that caused me to aimlessly wander around trying to find a jumpstart to the story. I refused to go to Google for help until I was desperate. Once I was back on track, the game led me to four other teammates, and I got the true start of the story. This is a big issue with this game and apparently has been since its launch back in the late 90s. While the freedom of doing what you want is great, the game still must give players direction or at least a firm reminder that they should be doing the main quest. The biggest confusion for me was the fact that almost every land in the game is accessible to players from the start. Each land has a series of pointing icons as well, which say ‘go here’. Those icons also contributed to my confusion on what the heck I was supposed to be doing. Long story short, pay attention to the dialogue but ignore the pointing icons, well mostly.
The second biggest issue of the game is how the difficulty tends to ramp up and down like an unpredictable firehose that has no one grasping it. You will run into a lot of enemies through the SaGa Frontier journey, much like most turn-based traditional RPGs used to do to gamers, but without any algorithm to control the difficulty of the enemies. Your difficulty arc is unpredictable at times, which will cause you to save a lot during gameplay because you are going to die a lot. You will save so much that you will feel like you are playing Fallout New Vegas without its first patch. Please understand that this is not some snarky reviewer comment that I think is clever – this game frustrated the shit out of me because of its random acts of difficulty. For example, when I finally found my crew, upgraded weapons, and defense, I decided to return to locations I soloed to see if I missed anything. Some of the enemies I faced before were on the level that they should be, while some were incredibly overpowered for the level. Those powerful enemies had not been there before and, if I restarted my save file, would most likely not be there again. It was a hodge-podge of how powerful of an enemy was the game going to throw at you this time. It was wildly random, and it made progression in the game rather not fun. I did not know what to expect from map to map, but I did know that eventually I would be killed by something I had never seen before. That was the only guarantee during gameplay.
In addition to difficulty, the game also went full 90s when it came to enemy respawning. Should you clear one part of a map and progress to another part, the previous part you left would completely repopulate with new enemies. What is the point of clearing one place only to have it repopulate again? It is so frustrating to think about. For an RPG that visibly shows enemies on the screen, it does not make much sense. Gamplay-wise, this means that you are going to have to be very conscious of magical ability points (JP) and how much of them you have left, and…if you saved or not. You do not want to save your progress if you are low on magic abilities, but you need to save your progress if you hope to survive. The random draw of enemies will make saving the best option, even if it means you will have to replay your way through several of the same maps until you find the random enemy drop that allows for you to succeed. The saving grace here is that after each battle your health replenishes completely. I have never seen that before in an RPG, especially from this era. That one element helps with difficulty, but not much.
Anyway, as a side note to the above, please understand that I firmly get that games will gradually become more difficult as you become more powerful. That is a common theme in almost every JRPG. But the way SaGa Frontier did it was just a random crapshoot. That said, that does not mean that taking down an enemy that was overpowered against your level does not equal out to fantastic rewards and upgrades. It totally does and it helps with justifying the difficulty. It meant that it felt like an unpredictable chore of luck to get through random enemies, which will keep you on the edge of your seat for most of the gameplay experience. Who likes playing a game nervous? I don’t.
Conclusion
SaGa Frontier Remastered has great upgrades that positively add to the original gameplay experience, especially if you loved this title back in the late 90s. If you have never played this, it might seem like an overwhelmingly difficult game with a mess of great ideas that had not been completely sorted out. It was certainly ahead of its time and groundbreaking in some areas of gameplay.
