User Reviews (1 - 11 of 14)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

If you liked Saga Frontier.....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 36 / 41
Date: October 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you liked Saga Frontier, you'll like this as well. The game is pretty much set up in exactly the same way. You start out the game, you can pick between 7 characters, and each has an individual story. Unfortunately though, the story is like saga frontier, good for some of the characters (BUT THE GAME DOESNT GIVE YOU A DAMN CLUE AS TO WHERE TO GO NEXT). However, the reason I rated the game 4 stars is because of its other qualities. I thought the battle system was awesome, I love the learning new attacks randomly, with the little lightbulb just like saga frontier. Also, combination attacks are really cool as well. The point is that the battle system isnt bad. Also you can see the monsters which is a plus.

~I'd recomend this game to anyone who just wants to have a good playing experience, but isnt looking for TOP OF THE LINE. I hope this review was helpful, all the reviewers out there giving it 5 out of 10 or 6/10, its much better than that, ive seen some pretty crappy games in my time, and although this one isnt the best, its by no means, the worst.

-ONE LAST NOTE: If any of you played "unlimited Saga" (which was the saga game that came before this) This one is nothing like it fortunately, square brought back classic style and it suites the game well.

Non-Linear Madness

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 26 / 34
Date: December 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Squaresoft (or Square-Enix) has had a long-standing habit of releasing a majority of its titles on a certain console right before its major release in Final Fantasy. They follow tradition again, and release Romancing Saga, Dragon Quest VIII, Radiata Stories, and Kingdom Hearts 2 (soon to come) only a few months before FF 12 will hit stores. In the past, this hasn't been a bad thing. Square has always been able to put originality in all their games, to try things that other games haven't. With this formula, they've been able to stay on top of the RPG market. Now, though, that's fading. Since PS2 released, only about half of the games Square has released has been any good, and the releases are too far between for anyone to really follow Square.

Romancing Saga is one of those titles that just isn't that good. Or, to be fair, it isn't up to Square's usual standards. Though visually it's a beautiful game, the story is difficult to follow because of just how non-linear the game-play is. After the first few quests for each character, you can go in nearly any direction you want, and more than fifty percent of the quests actually advance the plot of the game. They are simply ways to get what is needed to progress. Plus, actually finding quests can be difficult. Talking to everyone gets hints and will unlock some quests, but knowing what to do after that can be very irritating.

The in-game features, such as the battle system, are recycled from previous games. The actual battles can get so difficult that even minor creatures are bosses, and you can't avoid fighting them or else your characters will stay weak or won't have the abilities to compete with the even tougher enemies to come. There are ways to make your characters stronger, but that involves spending either money or jewels, things you only get from quests or battles, and quests are long and with small rewards, while battles reward so little as to seem almost pointless. I will say, however, that gaining the new abilities and finding newer, more powerful characters to recruit can be fun for a while. Once you get a good party together, though, do everything in your power to keep it that way, because it can be frustrating training weaker characters to fill the place of your older characters. To be honest, I'd recommend picking up a Gameshark or an ActionReplay to play this game, because the constant battling and building becomes tedious and boring. Usually, I hate using these cheats, but since I did so I was able to find enjoyment in the game.

Though this formula worked well for the other Saga games (at least one, the original Saga Frontier), it no longer works here. It seems to me it was a quick money-maker for Square, as they know that Square fans are loyal. But constant mediocrity has left me a little jaded of this powerhouse company. Likewise, I can't recommend this game to the average gamer. Only veterans of the Saga series will find anything in this game worth playing.

SaGa as it should be

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 15
Date: January 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is far more faithful to the SaGa Frontier series than Unlimited Saga. Romancing SaGa features eight possible players, each of whom is eligible to do nearly all the sidequests before attacking the game's final boss.

As any good video game sequel does, Romancing SaGa (RS) keeps the best features of the previous games and revises potential weaknesses. There are eight possible main characters, like in the first SaGa. The play is amazingly open-ended, making it incredibly different from the typically linear RPG. So in essence, many of the advantages of the first game have endured.

Also, the game has good graphics, some good sound/music, and an in-depth form of character progression. Using a "gems" system, the player buys certain skills that make them better using certain weapons or spells, or finding treasure, or climbing mountains. Unlike the first SaGa, any skill you have discovered with a player can be used in battle.

There are different habitats and sometimes the game has the potential for a little redundancy that can plague any dungeon-crawler. However, the use of Proficiencies, battle skills, and the tempering of weapons and armor keep you guessing and make the game's strategic elements more prevalent. Calculating the remaining uses you have with a weapon and the remaining Life points of a character in a dungeon maintains a significant degree of excitement in the quests and adventures.

The game has potential for literally hundreds of hours of play and also has replay value as each character's journey may have similarities, but also significant differences as well. Each character has a different type of development and no two games are the same. If you are looking for a sound RPG investment, this is it.

Can you feel the love?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 15
Date: October 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is avant-garde. Why just play an RPG when you can make one. The entwinement of one character to the next is miles beyond Sony's predecessor Saga Frontier. But perhaps even more intriguing than the open-ended adventuring with EIGHT different playable characters is the romance involved. The Final Fantasy series has the most timeless music ever orchestrated into a video game (with all regards to the inspiration of Nobuo Uematsu). With the accompany of this man's infectious melodies, you never knew what love was until you played Final Fantasy. But in Romancing Saga, all the love can be found right at your fingertips. Using your own series of algorhythms, you control the pace of battle. No matter where you wonder to, your story will continue to unfold. This is the game you've been dreaming about. Are you ready to journey into the unknown? Ask yourself, is the love there?

Awesome game - For those who like the style.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is everything it promises to be, and more - But what it promises is not for everyone. There are several points that are extremely well done, but only a certain kind of gamer will enjoy.

Firstly, the world itself. It is rather large, but moreover, it is ~alive~. It changes. The various characters in the world follow their own paths, and events will happen in the world, whether or not you are present. This is great, the world feels like it's a changing place. However, it has the disadvantage that you cannot complete all of the quests in the game in one (or even several) play through. If you're the kind of person that needs to complete every quest and side quest, probably shouldn't play this. If you like the living world, you'll love it. I remember completing one quest to help someone do some grave robbing, and from that point forward, he followed me from town to town, trying to sell his Mummy. :-D

Scaling. The monsters automatically scale to the relative power of the party. It makes "power leveling" a non-issue. If you like becoming the most powerful party on planet, you'll be disappointed. Furthermore, the time spent 'grinding' means you'll miss that many more quests. That said, bosses seem to not scale in the same way, so you have to gauge how much time you spend leveling with the difficulty of the bosses. You can walk straight to bosses way too difficult for you, though, so you have to be careful (I got juiced by a massive hydra deep in some dungeon after less than 3 hours of play)

You can't do everything. Seriously, you can't. Even with a party of 5 uber characters, you just can't do everything at once. The Proficiency system in R.S. forces you to only have a subset of your adventuring abilities accessible at once. For example, you're going to a dungeon, so you want to have the 'find chests' skill, and since you're concerned about locks and traps, you need 'pick lock', 'find traps', and 'disarm traps'. You also think there might be some walls to climb, so you equip 'climb' as well. That's it. You find a treasure map, or a rich vein of ore, or a pit you want to jump over, and you'll have to go back to the dungeon again later with a different set of skills to handle it. It makes you want to do more in the world than you possibly can. If you decide that the reward on the other side of the pit is worth getting, that means that the game world will have continued on while you made another trip back to the dungeon.

Quest Notes: Quests are extremely open in this game. You don't get a map pointer that tells you where to go or what to do. you have to figure it out. Sometimes, you won't know where to go, or what to do to complete a quest, and you'll fail it - the game won't wait, events in the game continue whether you join in or not. Still, if you just want some action RPG with a linear or well defined system to tell you what to do next, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Complexity: This game has a lot of complex features. Proficiencies, Techniques, Abilities, Classes... there's a lot of stuff for you to look at. It can be pretty overwhelming. If you prefer relatively simple Action RPG esque stat systems, you won't find it here. There's just a vast amount of information about each character, and tons of ways to advance each one. Fortunately (or so I think, anyway), you don't have to fully understand it to enjoy the game - Progression is more or less automatic as you're fighting, and you can easily just pick a couple of skills for each character to train up without losing anything. I'm not the kind of RPG player who makes in depth technical guides for games and considers them a necessary tool to play the game. (on a side note, have you seen the one someone did for all of the formulae and stuff for FFXII? some people have WAY too much time on their hands!) Lots of complex stuff, if you want to study it, but it really isn't necessary to understand it all to play.

So, in Summary, you need the following to enjoy the game: 1) some experience in playing an RPG. It's complex enough that this should not be your first jump into the genre. 2) an appreciation for a world that's vast enough that it doesn't let you do everything. Tangent to that, a tolerance for missing out on large portions of the game the first time through, because you certainly will. 3) Ability to enjoy a game without needing constant direction. I know I like a mindless Action RPG as much as the next guy, but this certainly is not one.

That's it. you have those 3 traits, I bet you'll really like this game. If you're not sure you qualify on any of those accounts, you may be disappointed.

Oh, one more thing. If you remember Romancing Saga 3 for the Super Nintendo (available only as a fan translated ROM, I seem to recall), this game is extremely similar in it's scope and style. If you liked that, you'll definitely like this.

MARVELOUS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 16
Date: November 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Okay, I've been following people review for Star Ocean (the game was really linear and people were asking for less linear game), and after Radiata Stories which was a linear+sub quest... but people were complaining. Now, it's a FULL NON-LINEAR GAME WITH QUESTS. Anyway, Romancing Saga may not be the best game in graphical ways but it sure have a lot of details and gorgeous colors. Yes, the big head seems a little weird but it change from all the others RPG. Too, the complexity of the battle system don't bother me. Again, people were complaining that Radiata Stories was too simple in the battle system... and now... Arw... ! Anyway, it's like a traditional RPG and it got its style. The voice are beautiful too and the world is very complete. I hope that some of you won't listen to those who always find a trouble in a game because Romancing Saga is very interesting. Anyway, it's up to you to judge it.

Strike 2 for the Saga Series

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: December 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Romancing Saga is a mediocre RPG with bad graphics that attempt to be artistic combined with obscure objectives and long boring dialogs.

The combat system is pretty standard fare as far as console RPGs go. It is turn based, and starts you out with a good variety of options as far as what commands you can execute in combat. The music, while uninspired, ranges from atrocious to something that sounds like Aerobiz for the Sega Genesis.

If you have a friend who will let you play at his house or let you borrow it for a while, and you are a fan of RPGs in general, you may find a little amusement out of this game. Otherwise, I would not recommend wasting your time as there are plenty of better RPGs out there.

Too many characters, not enough sense, boring & played out RPG

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: February 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

What a mess this game is. There's hardly one element of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song that rubs against another element without creating some kind of distorted havoc. The latest train wreck by acclaimed producer Akitoshi Kawazu, the closest thing videogames have to an Ed Wood, Minstrel Song represents two years in production during which the team played a score of better games and came away not understanding a whit of what made any of them good.

If you haven't followed the Final Fantasy SaGa games for the original Gameboy, Akitoshi Kawazu was given a promotion and his own team of producers following Final Fantasy II's success. Games came out for the Gameboy and in Japan, for the Super Famicom. The SaGa series seems to take a backseat to Final Fantasy, but shares the same first name. Believe me, the games could not be any different. It shows in this PS2 game. Romancing SaGa is as wishy-washy as it is dirty.

Let me say the art of this game is really beautiful. Well, the characters in Minstrel Song are huge-headed veritable monsters of people who run with Muppet-like bobbling waddles. Sometimes the graphics glaze over into a fine and utterly amazing hard-edged watercolor-and-pen-drawn visual style that resembles a breathing painting. It'd be nice if the entire game looked like this, and it'd be a perfect explanation as to why the game sold so well. Only it doesn't, and it isn't; the game most of the time resembles an RPG with a mildly moving three-dimensional camera that follows characters with larger heads than usual. The occasional interludes of the moving-watercolor style make one wish the game had some other underlying ingenuity which it clearly doesn't.

The story of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song is that there's a mythical world, and it's in danger. Eight brave people from eight different nations each rise to eight different challenges and set out on eight different quests with eight different goals, all of those goals in the context of this world where things are, they say in the Bible, "going wrong." The game uses LifePoints in place of Hit Points and the entire structure leaves a lot to be desired. The game almost tries to defeat you at every turn; I have this feeling that the game makers strived to create challenge but instead made the gameplay disturbing and depressing at times. I don't want to spoil things, but the more you learn of the games "innovation" you become more annoyed of the complexity and the really hampered battle system.

Many of the town have NPCs that aren't relevant to your character and their story at all. Because of the way the game is set up, you could spend hours talking to these NPCs and it doesn't do you one lick of good, then figure out that your present choice of character is unrelated to what the NPCs are talking about. It's almost as though these NPCs were placed here to confuse you. If you're lucky enough to have the correct character for this group of NPCs, the story moves forward. Otherwise, you're left scratching your head.

The voices in the game, for the most part, are brassy and obnoxious. Old men speak lowly and slowly and humbly and rumbly, with gravel in their throats and pain in their syllables. Girls talk like kids in rooms full of helium. The heroic males all speak with this overbearing and honestly shocking lisp that makes them all sound like cartoon homosexuals. It's safe to say someone found this funny. After a while, I found it ridiculous, insulting, and tiresome. Albert is particularly an offender. The poor guy can't pronounce an "S" to thave hith thoul. This is all well and good; that the game escalates and repeats thentences where he would have to articulate himself resembles torture.

Storywise, the game would be a real winner if the gameplay were sensible and the interactions between your character and NPCs amounted to something. This game is obviously not character driven yet the whole point of replaying it is to see how each of the eight characters finishes their particular quest. After forcing myself to play through the game two times, I have no desire to play through with the other six characters.

There is enough here for you to get an idea of the disappointment at the game in general. The graphics look nice, but they can't make up for the absolute lack of a coherent story. I give this game 2/5 stars.

frustrating, confusing, boring

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 13
Date: February 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

after watching the trailer i thought this game would be a beautiful and fun epic, but it is far from that. the graphics are weak, story is very weak, and theres really nothing that sets this game above anything else. save your money and time for ffxii.

Romancing Saga looks good

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: August 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I own most of the Square(Square Enix) games and this one looks as good as the rest. I took it for a test ride, and didnt see anything to complain about. Unfortunatley, I didnt get too much time logged in on it, for i have games coming out the wazoo, and not enough time to play them all 8).

Review Page: 1 2 Next 

Actions