SaGa Frontier (1997)

Man, SaGa games are hard. Actually, it's not even that this is hard, it's just silly that enemies can one shot you in one turn in your very first fight in some scenarios. Looking at you, Asellus.

Otherwise, SaGa Frontier takes a turn into the modern with some quirky twists missing from previous installments. Each character's scenario ranges from fun/okay/there's a plot, to terrible/amIreallyjustdoingthesidequestsagainandthat'sit/there's no plot.

So far I've completed Red (pretty good), Lute (ugh), Rikki (meh), Blue (meh and LOL come on guys), and I'm about halfway through Asellus. Asellus' story is okay so far, except for her being terrible and with no HP to start, and the random-encounter-but-have-to-kill-to-move-on boss hunt in the middle. Saving the best two boss themes for last.

I also have to admit, I bought the remake right before starting original flavor, so I've had no qualms with exploiting the game's money cheats in this playthrough. As soon as I'm on my own, I use the junk shop glitch to get swords to sell for about 10k credits, then Takonomics my way to the best purchasable gear, run through Sei's Tomb for the Mizukagami, and then I'm good to go for the rest. Sure, I'm probably bad at the game and I don't care to grind my life away, but I think even with this stuff, it's still very challenging. Especially the last bosses, good to know SaGa bosses are still kicking my ass in the year 2021.

For whatever reason, I can't find a page for the Remastered version on Grouvee, so I'm posting on this one. I've been playing the Switch remastered port and completed 2 stories so far. The premises for these have been great, but they still really feel like chunks of story were either left out entirely or very poorly translated as the endings leave a lot unanswered or otherwise seem to contradict earlier events with no explanation.

And while the addition of a menu option to read summaries of story events and what to do next is very helpful, at times the next sequence triggers are still very vague and hyper specific in order to progress which feels frustrating and unintuitive. I'm still enjoying this game, but issues like these do keep it from rising to the potential it had to be a real stand out.