SaGa 3: Jikuu no Hasha - Shadow or Light

The second Racjin remake of the early SaGa titles was also a notable one for overhauling the original in a number of ways, reintroducing a lot of SaGa's trademark elements that were mostly left out of the initial release.  But does making it into more of a traditional SaGa work in the third game's favor, or does this simply end up losing the element that made it distinct?

The SaGa games on the Game Boy (localized as "Final Fantasy Legend" despite being from an unrelated series) were ultimately not the most well-received of Square's library, but they nevertheless proved to be quite successful financially.  The original was Square's first game to sell over a million copies worldwide (being released in close proximity to the Game Boy's launch), while the second was a more polished experience that introduced a few new elements but kept the quirky setting and gameplay of the original mostly intact.  The third game, on the other hand, was not developed by Akitoshi Kawazu (who was busy working on Romancing SaGa for the Super Famicom), and so it was handed off to Square Enix's Osaka studio instead, who opted to make a more traditional RPG in most respects. As a result SaGa 3 utilizes more linear progression, experience points and levels, non-decaying weapons and a more traditional magic system.  It still garnered some fans, but ultimately was overshadowed by the first two games and ended up being the last SaGa localized until the Playstation 1 era rolled around.

But years later, after Racjin's remake of the second game proved to be a successful one, Square decided to commission them again to create a remake of SaGa III on the DS as well.  This time, however, the game would be overseen by Kawazu, and perhaps as a result of that, it re-incorporated many of the series' iconic elements.  The experience point system was ditched in favor of semi-random stat gains, weapons and spellbooks now decay with use, and skills are now semi-randomly "sparked" during battle, with a much higher chance of learning them during challenging fights (particularly bosses).  Transforming into beasts and monsters via meat also retains something of a random element too, gaining and losing traits (which can be good or bad) and skills they have at the whim of the RNG.

That idea may bring dread to fans who got used to the later, less randomness-based SaGa titles, but they did add some new twists to each of these elements to keep them from getting too irritating.  One notable change is that stat gains are actually applied mid-battle (not afterward), which can potentially help to turn things around for a fight you're struggling in.  They are given out with a bit more logic, too - utilizing weapons that utilize a particular stat (Strength for swords and hammers, Agility for bows and rapiers, etc) will give it a higher chance to be raised, and fighting tougher enemies will give greater odds for HP boosts - a significant improvement over the original games where they were largely random.  Skills make some more sense - spending more charges on a weapon, usually in exchange for greater damage and extra effects (debuffing enemies, for instance).  One can also repair weapons and spellbooks to restore used charges, which isn't cheap, but can spare the player from constantly having to replace them.

One of SaGa III's defining elements remains largely intact, though.  Each of the four playable characters begins as either a Human or Esper (Mutant in the localized FFL3), though by eating meat or installing parts from certain enemies, they can change form.  One part turns them into a cyborg, two turns them into a robot.  Eating one piece of meat will turn them into a beast, and another into a monster, while doing the opposite will roll the process back one step toward their base form.  Strangely, though, Espers can become Human and vice versa via this process now too, so characters are now fully malleable.  They can also retain traits from transformations, keeping some skills, elemental strengths or weaknesses, resistance to status effects, and so forth, all semi-random depending on the enemy types they take meats/parts from.

Another strange change is that each form has their own particular weapon proficiencies, and they will only power up if they're used by that particular form; Cyborgs, for example, wield heavy axes and hammers, humans use swords and katanas, and Espers wield bows and rapiers (in addition to all magic types).  Other races can still use weapons they're not proficient with (and will retain any skills they learned whilst in the form that utilizes them), but they will not gain proficiency with them.  So, unlike the original game where form changes were mostly done out of convenience - to gain a particular resistance or skill for a boss fight, generally - here it's a more integrated part of the game, encouraging the player to shuffle characters between all of the various options to fully customize and empower their party.

Some changes from later SaGas (and the remake of 2) return as well.  Encounters are still visible rather than random, and touching an enemy who is nearby another one can cause a "chain encounter", basically forcing you to fight multiple battles in a row, though you also reap greater benefits from doing so, having a higher chance to spark new techniques or gain stats.  Attack animations can be skipped via the Fast Forward feature, which helps to speed up combat in general.  After a certain point, a new mechanic also becomes unlocked; namely the Time Gear mechanic.  Basically, you fill up a gauge on the screen by taking actions in battle, and once at least one of the five pips is full, you can spend it at any time to create a time-duplicate of another character who repeats their last action at the end of that turn.  This can prove handy at times, letting you sneak in a heal before the next round begins, or to tie into another prominent mechanic - combos.  As in SaGa Frontier and later games, certain moves will combo with one another if each characters' turns are adjacent on the time bar, dealing extra damage and potentially doing a powerful finishing move if certain sequences of moves are completed.  Enemies can do combos too, however, so keeping the party's speed on point quickly becomes key to surviving in the late stages.

The remake also adds quite a bit of new content to really set it apart from its Game Boy predecessor.  In addition to the usual Square remake mainstay of a monster compendium (handy for finding particular skills or resistances you may want on your own characters), a number of sidequests now exist in the game.  These usually entail hunting down a particular monster at a specific location, granting extra money or items for completing them.  One can also find passwords (which let you claim free items, and can be sent to friends so they can claim them too).

I can certainly say I was pleasantly surprised by SaGa III's remake.  I was a bit worried when I heard it would re-implement a lot of the series' trademark randomness, fearing it would turn into an irritating grindfest with frustrating combat as the original games often were.  Thankfully, though, that isn't really the case - while you still have to grind quite a bit to get the most out of your characters, it's made more interesting by the reworked class system, and the improvements to combat and the user-friendliness in general helps to offset the frustration factor associated with the usual SaGa tropes of awkward balance and near-constant status effect spamming.  The updated presentation is honestly quite nice too - I like the updated character designs quite a bit, and the redone music sounds excellent, bringing an epic and energetic feel to the original tracks.  It's still very much a frustrating old SaGa game, but it is at least an interesting new take on the original version.

• Developer: Racjin
• Publisher: Square Enix
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Released: 2010
• Recommended Version: N/A

Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land

One of many original games released under the Wizardry label by a Japanese company but one of the few to get a release in the west, Tale of the Forsaken Land is what one would expect from the name - challenging first-person dungeon crawler action.  But does Racjin manage to still manage to make that format fun in the Playstation 2 era, or is this just a forgettable game made to cash in on a popular name?

Wizardry is a quintessential early computer RPG franchise - one of the very first to emulate Dungeons and Dragons in format and design, as well as the first to feature color graphics and a party-based experience.  While it would soon be outshone by games like Ultima and the Gold Box series (mostly because its engine and graphcis started to look very dated in comparison), the franchise still trucked on for over a decade, getting its final entry in 2001 with Wizardry 8.  Sir-Tech's last surviving branch dissolved not long thereafter, though, and the franchise mostly came to an end in the west.

However, Wizardry found a very different life in Japan, with numerous spinoff games coming into existence under a variety of companies as late as 2017, very few of which were ever localized for the rest of the world.  Tale of the Forsaken Land is one of the few that was, released in 2001 by then-niche RPG publisher Atlus and developed by Racjin, a fairly unknown company that has a few cult classics to their name (probably the best-known being the Snowboard Kids games for the Nintendo 64).

From a quick glance, though, it's plain to see that the feel of the Wizardry franchise was kept alive for Tale of the Forsaken Land.  As in most of the western games, the game is primarily centered on a single dungeon, there is a hub-town that one interacts with via menus, it takes place in a first-person perspective (albeit now with 3d graphics for enemies and the dungeon itself), and even the familiar character creation elements return - the same classes, stat requirements and alignments come back once more.  Basically, if you played any version of the first few Wizardry titles, you'll feel right at home here.

Other iconic elements of the franchise quickly show themselves too.  Leveling up only occurs "between adventures", IE in town, so you'll probably want to make frequent trips back to rest and power up before getting too far in.  Spells are broken up into distinct levels, which each get their own number of castings between rests, so you'll want to save them for when you're in particularly tough battles.  Enemies often appear in large groups, and like your own, have a front and back row, with the latter largely being out of reach unless you have ranged weapons or spells to attack them (or clear the front row first).  Enemies will often kill a character in only a few hits, making upgrading armor and shields frequently to get more defense and evasion a key part of strategy.  One can also freely change classes between ones they have the stats and alignment requirements for, with a few more powerful ones (Ninja, Samurai and Knight) having particularly high requirements, but a strong combination of abilities.  And of course, a big part of the game is finding unidentified items that may be magical or otherwise rare/expensive, taking them back to the shop for appraisal, and then selling or equipping them accordingly.  They seem to spawn randomly on any given floor, too, so retreading dungeon floors in search of more loot is often a worthwhile endeavor.

Tale of the Forsaken Land does quickly take steps to make itself distinct, though.  Technology for those old floppy disk based games didn't allow for a huge amount of storytelling within the game itself, but being a PS2 game, that's obviously not a problem anymore.  To that end, there is a running storyline throughout Tale of the Forsaken Land, with a lot of characters to meet and recruit and side-quests to undertake along the way (often going hand-in-hand with one another).  In addition to joining you for quests, characters do have distinct personality traits, and staying on their good side is often necessary to keep them in the party; some will get angry with you if you battle friendly enemies, for example, while others hate particular enemy types and will like you more if you kill a lot of them.  This also quickly ties into a major mechanic called "Allied Actions", which are parties your group can collectively take once their trust in each other is high enough.  These include things like Double Slash (two allies attack a single enemy in tandem, getting a bonus to accuracy and damage), Hold Attack (one character immobilizes an enemy while the other hits them - great for enemies with high evasion) or Warp Attack (removes the entire front row from the fight for a turn, causing any attacks targeted at them to miss).  A lot of these aren't particularly great, but some prove to be extremely powerful and are well worth getting.

Something else new is the spell crafting system, which is a bit of an odd beast but adds quite a lot of depth to the game.  One can find stones within the dungeon that teach spells or, if they already have that spell, upgrade it to make it more effective.  Enemies frequently drop items that can be used in their own right to recover HP, cure status effects or deal damage, but oftentimes these can be taken back to the shop in town to craft new spell stones or Vellums.  Vellums are essentially rarer and more powerful spells, often requiring you to find a recipe and then craft them from three (often rare) components.  They tend to be quite useful, though, so it's often worth the effort it takes to track them down.  If you're finding a lot of a particular stone, you can also disassemble it back into its base components to craft something else if you wish, so this does end up being a pretty big component of the game's strategy in the long run.

Some elements of the game's design are also relatively strange for first person dungeon crawlers of this type.  One thing that surprised me is that encounters are actually visible in the dungeon - enemies appear as a hazy outline that you can evade or outmaneuver if you don't wish to fight at that time.  I was somewhat surprised to find that opening chests isn't solely for the thief class, either, instead being governed by a minigame where you have a few seconds to push a sequence of buttons; in fact, I started the game as a Cleric and got a personality trait related to successfully unlocking chests, which felt a little bizarre for a D&D-like. Thieves do still play an important role in disarming traps, though, so you'll still want to have one (or a Ninja) around for that purpose.

For an early PS2 game running off a CD, TotFL has quite a distinct aesthetic too.  While the dungeons and enemies are in 3D, the game does make use of detailed 2D sprites for story characters and cutscenes, and they all work well with the game's dark setting and overall bleak mood.  Music fits in with this too, keeping the atmosphere dark and foreboding, yet urging you to move on to uncover the story's mysteries.  The translation in the game is somewhat clunky, but it works well enough to keep the game moving and never becomes distracting, so I didn't mind it too much.

So, does Tale of the Forsaken Land live up to the legacy of the Wizardry series?  I certainly think so.  It maintains the challenge and dungeon-oriented elements of the franchise while working in some components of Japanese RPGs as well, emphasizing characters and storytelling as a key part of the experience.  Both components are balanced quite well, presenting a game with a lot of depth and challenge and a good narrative to keep the player motivated even when it can be frustrating to make progress at times.  It may not be the Playstation 2's most highly-regarded RPG, but I certainly think it's one worth a look for any serious fan of old-school dungeon crawls.

Developer: Racjin

Publisher: Atlus
Released: 2001
Platform: Playstation 2
Recommended Version: N/A

SaGa 2: Goddess of Destiny (Final Fantasy Legend 2 remake)

Square's reimagined version of the second SaGa game makes several tweaks to the original.  But is there enough of a change here to warrant another look, or is this an example of a "remake" that serves as little more than a glorified paint-job?

SaGa 2 ("Final Fantasy Legend 2" outside of Japan) was the logical followup to the first; the original game proved to be a runaway success due to its timely release on the Game Boy platform, so a sequel was inevitable.  So one year later came the second game in the series, which did away with several of the annoying traits of the original (such as the limited lives system) while introducing a few more of its own.

One improvement comes in the game's class system.  While the familiar human, robot and mutant races return, they have seen some overhauls.  Humans now gain stats from combat, which makes them a much more viable (and less expensive) class to use than in the original.  Mutants are largely unchanged, gaining and losing abilities at random (though you do have a degree of control over that now - the last slot on the menu is the volatile one; you can swap skills into other slots if you wish to keep them) and gaining statistics through combat, though at a somewhat slower rate than humans.  Monsters are also relatively unchanged, though the DS remake allows them to carry over abilities between forms (changing from a Medusa to another monster type will sometimes let them carry over the Stone ability, for example).  There is also a new class introduced in the form of "Robots", whose stats and abilities are entirely governed by the equipment they use - equipping armor will boost their defense and HP, for example, while equipping weapons will boost their other stats depending upon the type.  Equipping them with a weapon or shield will also immediately cut its total uses in half, but unlike other characters, they can restore these charges by resting at an inn.  They are also innately immune to most status effects, but owing to their low Mana, tend to be vulnerable to magic.  They're effective tanks and powerful fighters, but you can't let them do all the damage or you'll severely gimp the rest of your party (and be left in a bad spot later on when enemies start spamming powerful magic).  You'll have to do quite a bit of grinding in this game, unlike the first one.

The game's storyline centers around the players gathering the 77 Magi (or "Relics" in the DS version), which are said to be ancient artifacts that grant their bearers special powers, and which some have abused to become new gods.  The player can also utilize Magi to some effect - some grant bonuses to stats when equipped (such as increased Strength or resistance to a particular element) while others simply serve as a means to complete puzzles - one allows the player to see in a bright dungeon, for example.  The DS version expands upon this by adding several new functions to the player's repertoire as they find Relics - the ability to dig for treasures on the world map, see enemies on the minimap, destroy weak walls to find treasures, and avoid damage from lava tiles to name a few.  This does add a nice sense of progression to the game as the skill set expands, as well as encouraging exploration by letting the player return to earlier areas to find items they couldn't reach on their first visit.

Following up on this, the leveling system seems to have been overhauled somewhat.  Namely, the player must now use items that correlate to a given stat in order for that character to receive gains.  Using agility-based weapons now boosts Speed, using strength-based weapons boosts Strength, and so on.  Somewhat unintuitively, equipment that boosts one's stats also stunts their growth, so grinding is best done without any stat-boosting armor or Magi equipped.  One must also face enemies that are relatively on par with the party in terms of overall strength to receive gains, so grinding against weak enemies is not an option either.  But even with all of this in mind, the random nature of stat gains can make these sessions extraordinarily long and frustrating.

A welcome change in the DS version of the game is the elimination of random encounters.  The Game Boy version of SaGa 2 was even more notorious than the first with its encounter rate, with battles against huge groups of enemies occurring very frequently, sometimes as little as every single step the player takes.  The DS version trades this in entirely in favor of visible enemies on the map, allowing the player to avoid them.  This does carry a risk, however, as if a player narrowly avoids an enemy but gets touched by another one, all of the nearby enemies will join in the combat as well, which can at times result in the player facing upwards of twenty enemies in a single fight.  And should they be faster than your party or get a surprise attack... well, you're generally reloading your last save, no matter how strong your party is.

As in the first SaGa game, the overall balance of this one leaves something to be desired.  Absorb spells still do massive damage, and any enemy with a full-party attack skill is a massive threat for much of the game owing to the lack of full-party healing options.  Encountering a group of enemies with such skills is pretty much an immediate death sentence as well, particularly late in the game when they do several hundred points of damage apiece.  Training one's speed to keep ahead of enemies, as well as having enough hard-hitting enemy group skills/spells, quickly becomes an essential part of the overall strategy, as the late game essentially boils down to "whoever gets the first turn wins".

The DS version does attempt to address this balance in a few ways, notably with the addition of a sidequest is added where the player can find the eight Muses over the course of the adventure.  One can also gift them with items they find (generally in hidden chests), which will grant them substantial bonuses to "MP" and allow them to unlock more powerful attacks to use.  One can also unlock the Arena of the Dead, which allows them to face more powerful versions of previous bosses in order to gain levels and items.  Completing the Nasty Dungeon and talking to the character that appears outside will put the player into a battle with very powerful enemies; completing this unlocks the Opaca of Souls, which pits the player against several powerful groups of enemies in a row, with victory granting numerous powerful and rare items.

MP is another new mechanic in the DS version.  After rescuing some of the Muses, the player can venture to the Castle of Fate in order to purchase Threads of Fate themed after emotions - Love, Hate, Strife, Friendship and so on.  Using these allows two of your characters to unite their attacks together for additional damage (slightly similar to the combo system from SaGa frontier), and will also affect the relationships between your party members, which in turn can unlock new events and sidequests that will allow the player to find extra items.  Clever use of these in battle can also allow players to break the usual turn order in order to defeat problematic enemies; for example, if one character gets a turn before an enemy group, they can use a unite attack to allow a second character's attack as well, and the bonus damage may just be enough to allow them to defeat that enemy group before they deal out massive damage that turn.

While SaGa 2 on the DS does make some improvements over its predecessor by adding new features and eliminating random encounters, it's essentially still the same game at its core.  The difficulty and overall balance remain very uneven, there is still a heavy emphasis on stat-grinding, and the added mechanics and areas mostly feel like they were simply added to give the game some token new content rather than well-integrated new features that enhance the overall experience.  Fans of the original will probably find something to like in the new content Goddess of Destiny provides, but if you found the original game too frustrating, this one probably won't do a lot to change your mind.

Developer: Racjin
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform: Nintendo DS
Released: 2009 (in Japan)
Recommended version: N/A