A look back at: SaGa Frontier

Wonderful, I managed to finish seven entire stories worth of one game. One rather hard RPG too, then again every SaGa RPG is way tougher than its contemporaries. Seriously though, does difficulty make the game good or bad? Endgame bosses definitely are tough enough to scrape through even a middle-leveled party with ease, although with the right techniques, usage of combo attacks, and the always fun DSC, it's possible to turn those tables right around. I'm still not a fan of the encounter system that started with the Romancing SaGa games, but it's a little easier here.

Now emphasis on "easier", because I know how hard it is to survive encounters that easily do triple digit numbers of damage, and some scenarios are made harder than others. I always go for the Grail card first if I do the Arcane quest, since I mentioned how annoying the monsters are in the swamp for that scenario the more I leveled up. No bosses in that quest apart from Suzaku for the Shield card, and that's excepting the dragon bosses and the optional Suzaku recruit. I guess apart from the combos and the other stuff that I mentioned in the full review, the other thing I like is something not present in SaGa Frontier that I hated in the first Romancing SaGa, timing constraints in accordance to levels outlawing the presence of some events. Although some characters are not able to do some quests, either due to mutual exclusion or to character constraints, they at least make it not impossible to do the majority of them. That's the beef of SaGa Frontier, the sidequests. Sure, the main quests are generally good, but spending time doing the sidequests and getting the unique treasures is always welcome.

I'd love to see more out of this game though. Why so much cut content? Why does Squaresoft have a horrible habit of rushing things? They did that with the entirety of Disc 2 in Xenogears, and they cut loads of content for a release for this game. Asellus was supposed to have more storyline in dungeons that are now fully optional, for instance. Fuse's entire arc is cut completely too. Of course, I don't want to complain here, I'm happy with what was given. Especially since I probably would've taken another month just to do more quests, and on home stretches I tend to try to hurry up. Given that I decided to empty an entire memory card for seven saves and system data, I guess I have got my work cut out for me with this game.