A look back at: The 7th Saga

More grinding! More grinding!

It certainly says a whole lot when the game you're playing ends up being considered the 4th hardest RPG for the SNES. Yes, The 7th Saga doesn't pull punches at all, from the get-go all the way to the end. It's certainly one of the hardest ones here, but I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to call it the hardest. The battles are indeed tough, especially for the squishier characters. Getting a partner may or may not be helpful depending on the circumstances, and technically they are rivals as well. One thing The 7th Saga gets right? Actual encounters. This radar mechanic makes grinding better than walking in place multiple times, so standing put near a town and waiting basically mitigates a lot of stress. Plus there's some good in a few auto-activate items saving my hide multiple times. It's the times where you fight enemies which utilize strong attacks or spells that can really hurt.

How ironic, the good part of The 7th Saga is its hard gameplay. And I will admire the way they made seven unique playable characters, each with strengths and weaknesses. But as you may soon see, everything plot-wise is in the premise. The premise is the entire plot, get seven apprentices to find the seven runes, offering some stiff competition like this was some sort of reality show. Once they get moving? Well, you are just following your main character, possibly even including an ally and fighting other apprentices. That's it. Hell, what are the other apprentices even doing anyways? Sure one goes mad and enslaves a town and you have to kill him, but seriously, anyone else actually doing plot things besides whomever the player chooses?

As if the plot couldn't get worse, it actually somehow does. Cool, so Lemele isn't even a good guy, who would've thought? Well technically that's not Lemele anyways, but still, Gorsia is a big bad without a whole lot of anything, really. Ooh, time travel, like that's something we see everywhere. Also losing all the runes and having to eventually get them back because Gorsia's final fight is a puzzle boss fight. To really make this a terrible plot? Oh I don't know, kill the main character anyways. Okay, so the main character ends up being reincarnated as Lemele, but this plot is just so inexcusably bad. For an extremely difficult SNES RPG, it honestly shouldn't have ended like this.