also i should mention that the romancing saga remake is only a quality game if you really enjoy the nostalgia of terribly messy, incoherent game design from earlier generations of games. objectively speaking, the romancing saga remake is a atrocious game, but you can forgive it because they were legitimately trying to give the game the feel of an early 90s rpg that gets magically transported to an early 21st century console. it's like they were able to unlearn absolutely everything about contemporary game storytelling and presentation and make some that technically could have worked fine in a text-only presentation. in this regard i guess you could say the game is phenomenal, because it aims to do something absolutely ridiculous in a totally inappropriate context and manages to pull it off with an alarming accuracy. i don't know how the hell they thought an english-speaking audience could possibly enjoy this game, but i'm glad they took a chance on it. it is the only thing of merit they've made in a long time.
but i think somebody who cannot still enjoy playing the more obtuse, garbled nes games would have absolutely no use for this game. i can still go back and play translated versions of the the old romancing saga games, and really most of the old classic unintelligible games where it's really just this mess of pixels than some comprehensible experience.
to tie it in with this thread, i honestly think square-enix would be better off if they just tried to unlearn everything they think they've learned about visual media presentation over the last ten years and went back to making totally ridiculous games that nobody fucking understands at all.
Of all the people who wouldn't appreciate Romancing Saga on GW, I thought you'd be the last. Are you sure you're not confusing it with Unlimited Saga? I was only able to play it for 15 minutes, not even because I didn't want to, but because I actually had no idea what was happening on the screen in front of me and what exactly my role was in making it happen. I'm also pretty sure you're confusing Breath of Fire 5 with Breath of Fire 4, which I've never played. As far as I can remember, there were almost no minigames in BoF5, although I could be wrong about that because I haven't played it in years. Still, I can't imagine how you can fit tons of minigames into a game that takes at most 10 hours.
Anyway, Romancing Saga isn't a game about the content, or rather the originality of the content. It's weird saying that because uh, games with unoriginal content are generally pretty awful. It's about the way in which the content is used. Romancing Saga is a game that is completely unafraid to show you as much or as little of itself as you're willing to find without telling you how to find it. It's a game about exploration that, because of it's lack of a cohesive narrative, forces you to explore. It's actually pretty unbelievable how much content there is in this game that you'll just
never see on a single playthrough, some of which is kind of interesting. But it's not really supposed to be interesting, it's more supposed to be a proof of concept: there can be a completely freeform game where you explore and the world changes with the passing of time.
The main story (there isn't much of one) and the little stories the game tells don't matter. It's how the stories interact with one another and add definition to the world that matters. There's one quest at the very beginning of the game where a little boy is trapped in a cave and you have to save him. If you don't ever find this quest or you don't do it, the little boy dies and you never see him again, but if you save him then he'll be around and his mother will thank you and he'll tell you how scary the cave was. The world will change without you or because of you depending on how you choose to interact with it. The stories and quests are just tools to demonstrate this principle.
The front end of the battle system is pretty easy and actually pretty excellent once you figure it out. It's the stat gains and skill gains that are the most mystifying aspect. I think the problem is that we've been conditioned by games to expect definite consequences for definite actions. For instance, in most games if you punch a dog 100 times, you'll gain a point of strength. In Romancing Saga, if you punch a dog, there's a 1 in 100 chance that
anything will happen, and I think the fact that there is no definite consequence that bothers most people. But it shouldn't. It's just not how it works and it doesn't really matter. Things just happen and it is part of why the game is interesting.
So yeah, you're right that it's not a good game. But it's also not a bad game either. It's not really anything, even a game. I look at Romancing Saga as an analysis of the entire series, a sort of end-of-chapter review that goes over the key terms but doesn't go over anything new. And it's okay that it doesn't elaborate the terms because that's not really what it's supposed to be doing. To get the most out of the game, you sort of have to look at it as this wild, mechanical beast that can be reasoned with but never tamed or fully understood. You're never going to understand how you gain stats or how time passes or why certain events unlock and if you're trying to do that then you won't get anything from the game. It gives you enough to be able to play it (unlike Unlimited Saga (and probably a lot of other games in the series)) but leaves you clueless as to how or why things are happening in the background.
That said, if The Last Remnant wasn't the dumbest game ever, it probably would have been the principles that Romancing Saga laid down in actual application.
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