Sigma Star Saga (2005)

Well, I'm not going to be finishing Sigma Star Saga. It's just too frustrating.

For those that don't know, Sigma Star Saga is this weird hybrid game, where you walk around on foot in an RPG like fashion (with very basic puzzle solving and combat). Then, you will randomly be 'summoned' to a ship to do a side scrolling space shoot 'em up stage. Yeah, randomly, just like random battles in old school fantasy RPGs. During the shooting battles, you gain XP, which increments your level, which makes your defense and attack power stronger. While wandering around the overworld, you can find ship upgrades that allow for some customization, namely how your bullets fire, the shape/effect of them, and what they do on impact.

These base concepts were intriguing to me. I like scrolling shooters, and playing one with RPG elements sounded really neat. Sadly, there's basically no soul to it. No sense of satisfaction. The experience based leveling system results in very incremental increases that are hardly noticeable. You end up hoping to level up just for the health regeneration that comes along with it, but as you get higher in level, these helpful moments get further and further apart. The ship upgrades you find are really exciting on the rare occasion it's something that's actually better than what you had before. The problem is, that rarely happens. I got sick of finding them because they were often stupid and made the game feel unnatural and too difficult. Why would I want my bullets to shoot out in whatever direction my ship was flying? I have no idea.

But what really made me quit was the way the save system works. You are wandering around a planet, dealing with these inescapable random fights for quite some time between save points. The straw that broke the back for me was when I literally leveled up somewhere around 4 or 5 times, but then just couldn't find any healing items and got hit with battle after battle until I died. Bam, all the way back to the save point in that old school way. No progress retained. Nothing.

I don't recommend this game at all.

Platform:

Gameboy Advance version.

Graphics/Sound:

This game looks and sounds amazing. I mean wayforward is always a save bet when it comes to graphics. All the sprite work they do looks amazing. Here, considering the gba limits, the soundtrack is also impressive and has a lot of atmospheric and memorable tracks, and also the sound effects are great. The style between the smup parts and the top-down parts might feel a little disjointed, though, even moreso because of the huge difference in screen size to character sprite ratio.

It's a mix of a top-down action adventure/rpg interjected with side-scrolling shmup battles. Interestingly as far fetched as this might seem it's not the first game that did a crossover like this, but it's the only one I know which did it in exactly this manner, with random battles. At times I felt the amount of random encounters was a little high and/or the variety of those wasn't high enough, so the game seemed to recycle content a bit much. But what made me go on was the story. It's got one of the best story progressions any game I played, it made me continue the game just for the story. As the game progresses it's also a bit more varied in terms of gameplay besides the story as the variety of weapons, tools and locations increases.

For shmup affiliates this game, especially the smup sections of it, this game will be easy bordering to boring. For newcomers to the genre this is game thats easily enjoyable without too much of a challenge. But anyway this game is more about the story than about letting you die. That said you can still screw up and have a really sad ending.

The game is amazing. While at the start the pure gameplay is not too interesting, the story and how it's narrated will get you hooked pretty soon, and make you play just to see what happens next. One might argue that there isn't enough influence by the player to how the story progresses, but I didn't mind. Definitely recommended.