SaGa Frontier (1997)

SaGa Frontier is probably the most enjoyable big ugly mess Squaresoft ever managed to release. Conceptually, the game is frighteningly ambitious: you choose one of seven characters to play as, each of whom has their own unique story (kind of), and are then set loose upon a massive sandbox RPG world. Thematically, the universe is about as wild and incoherent as it gets; you travel from world to world via spacecraft, each of which has its own unique flavor, ranging from colorful fantasy worlds to bustling modern cities to moldering ruins and garbage planets. Although several of these worlds are fairly small, they all hold secrets to explore and characters to meet, and many NPCs and events will react differently depending on which of the seven initial characters you chose.

Each character has their own special events and unique areas to explore, but by and large you are given free reign to sniff out treasure and adventure wherever you want, whenever you want. Along with your protagonist, you can build a party of up to 5 allies out of the many, many characters you can recruit throughout the world, and you can train them how you see fit. Human characters can be trained to fight with various melee weapons or firearms, or taught spells from a variety of extremely varied schools. Monstrous characters instead gain skills and stats by devouring enemies and absorbing their abilities. Mystic characters (the creepy elven vampire folk of this world) have something of a hybrid approach here, mixing human skills with monstrous ability stealing. Robots simply wind up having their stats determined by the spare parts you build them out of, and gain abilities by installing new programs or wielding particular special weapons. Players who enjoy building characters to their own specifications will have a lot of room for grinding and min/maxing here.

Unfortunately, the game has some major flaws that can't be ignored. First and foremost, you'll realize by the start of the first fight that the game is, frankly, hideous. While the overworld is made up of sprites moving along decent pre-rendered backgrounds, combat tries to mix 2D and 3D together, with badly animated, horribly warped sprites bouncing around a muddy polygonal arena. Some of the special attack and spell animations are kinda nice, but by and large you won't be playing this game for the visuals.

More substantially, the quality of the seven characters' storylines varies drastically. Thematically, they're a very disparate bunch, ranging from dramatic vampire romance to sci-fi alien invasions to Power Ranger-style superhero drama, but regardless of how you feel about each genre, some characters are just better written than others. Asellus, Emelia, Red, and T260G all have fully fleshed out (if strangely episodic) narratives. Blue's and Riki's tales are a bit more scattershot, basically sending you on an epic fetch quest with a big boss at the end. Worst of all is Lute, who has next to no storyline whatsover; there is a single unique character who'll join only him, and a single NPC who is worthless to everyone else but inexplicably throws a final boss battle at you. Beyond that, his existence is entirely without context. There's still an expansive world to explore, but it feels as though they wrote up a heap of good material, got bored halfway through, and scribbled out the last few remaining scripts when they ran into the deadline.

Combat is also a touchy affair, with serious balancing issues and a skill learning system that baffles any attempt at explanation. The random enemies you encounter in each area are determined by your combat experience so far, rather than by the area you face them in, but the bosses are all pre-determined and in no way scaled to your skill level; this makes it entirely possible (and honestly quite common) to smash an army of reasonably difficult foes, only to run into an absolutely unbeatable boss monster. Be cautious with your saves, and expect to do a lot of backtracking when you run into a brick wall.

Finally, the game has a weirdly obnoxious save system in place that made it a pain to play on the PSX. Playing all seven characters required use of an entire memory card (1 slot for System Data, and 2 slots for each character). This was by no means a deal-breaker, but it was annoying all the same. I had a lot of fun with this weird little critter, but I'd be lying if I said its flaws didn't hurt the experience overall.