Romancing SaGa

The Good
Having been a long time fan of all SaGa games, I have a clearly biased opinion towards Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song (RS:MS from this point on)

Just like the SaGa games of the old, this one features a non-linear storyline, making exploration one of the largest components of the game.

the beauty of this game is not necessarily how the plot all comes together, but like all SaGa games, it's the scope of it's tale.

Make no mistake, RS:MS is not just about the story of the one guy you picked. It's not even about the 8 potential protagonists you could pick. It's a tale about the world itself.

True, you will primarily be playing through as just the story of one particular character. But as you do so, the game has a way of slowly trickling all the background lore to you and educating you on what has happened in the world of RS:MS.

Indeed, there is so much subtext and background material that you could easily make an entire other game using the background material here.

Even more interesting is the Event Ranking system, an attempt to make RS:MS feel like it's constantly moving, with or without you. How does this work? In essence, as you play through the game, your actions will advance the time counter in game, and as you do so, certain quests/plot lines become available or stop being available as you move along. And in some cases, some quests simply cannot be attempted without playing the right character.

So, the game definitely allows for a number of replays.

The same can be said of the games customization. You simply will not be able to experience all of the possibilities in one go. There just isn't enough resources in one single play through to get them all. And in this game, you can customize your entire character's skill set from almost the ground up. Want your big warrior guy to also double as a mage? No problem, just go buy some spells and some skill ranks for him and he's ready to go! There is no barrier of entry as far as skills go.

Another thing I loved about this are the visuals. Every city has it's own unique architectural feel to it that you can almost trace it's style back to some real world equivalent. The art direction in this game is impressive and very creative. No two cities look alike, and again, only helps with the immersion factor.

The Bad
The customization options, ironically, is also one of the source of problems for the game itself. Often because your character can be taught to do just about any skill game, there is really no reason to pick one character over another except for visuals. This problem is not so bad in the first play through as you'll be relying heavily upon the character's default skill sets to make it through the game. But as you get later and later in the game, your character choice will begin to matter less and less.

What makes this even more of a problem is that a lot of the non-player characters do not have a lot of story written for them, which effectively reduces some of the casts into just another warm body to grab and hold onto. This does not present a problem for me personally. But I can definitely see how people will find this problematic.

While you can say that about skills, your character stats, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. You have no choice as to how your character grows. While there is some dim association between skill usage and stat growth (using magic attacks makes it more likely for your INT stat to go up), said correlation is not quite clear. The characters themselves supposedly have "affinities" where they are more likely to grow in a particular fashion. However, the lack of clarity as to how characters grow makes all of this a moot point as growth is once again, almost random.

The black box methodology can be useful in helping players simplify the game and used to things. But this is one area where RS:MS screwed up. The game has a lot of nuances. A LOT. Things like formation, vortexes, combination attacks, etc, etc, are all there at the player's disposal. The problem is the game does very little in guiding you as to how to best utilize this. (Not even the great library area sheds any light as to how things work) Sometimes, this almost necessitates that you pull out an FAQ for reference, lest you want to be hopelessly lost as to how to learn or perform a certain set of commands.

The Bottom Line
A non-linear fantasy RPG that focuses not on the plotline of one, but on the weaving a grand epic the world itself.