I've just "completed" the game by finishing Emilia's story. From the little I read about Live-a-live when the remake was coming out, I believe the structure of the two games are similar. I have not yet decided if I plan to use New Game plus to revisit Emilia's story and view the other ending, try a different character, or the character that was added in the remaster who was supposedly cut from the original.

I had no experience with this game prior to the remaster, but realized when researching it that I had played one other SaGa game: Final Fantasy Legend II, although I was too young to enjoy it when I found it at Gamestop.

I have a basic grasp of what's going on with maybe half of the game's mechanics. I think it would be fun to really bury myself in the different races/character types, but I'm not sure that's how I want to spend my time when so many other games exist and I don't feel like summers and holidays are endless like I did as a kid. GameFAQs has a decent amount of info on the game, but don't expect to have all your questions answered easily like some larger titles. I believe you will have more fun if you don't seek out strategies, just answers to things that are unclear as you encounter them in game. If you have questions, I can try to help out. The autosave kicks in after every battle or room change, and your HP is restored after every battle as long as you still have LP with that character after battle. (When you faint you lose one LP, and each character has somewhere between 5-10 from what I saw. You can be revived if you still have LP in battle, and if the enemy targets a downed character its attacks will always do one life point of damage with each hit). All of this means there is very little time wasted when you are wiped, and with the built-in zoom functions in the game, you can also grind your way past difficult strategy pretty quickly if you want.

I'll probably put my thoughts together in a review after I complete a 2nd story, but I've knocked off the second of my 2025 Alphabet Challenge by my standards with the first story completion. This took me around 12 hours, and I did 3 side-quest dungeons.