Recently, I’ve been trying to work through some issues I have with the way I approach playing & beating video games. For the longest time, I’ve felt like I need to make sure I see every possible piece of content in a playthrough of a game – and that drive to avoid missing anything often leads to me turning games into a checklist of tasks and a monotonous guide-assisted slog. Sometimes, missing out on an item or a boss in a game can be punishing – but punishment and frustration aren’t bad things to experience when gaming. Like any piece of art, entertainment might not always be the goal. Like real life, you’re always bound to miss out on something, somewhere. Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered has ended up becoming the perfect exposure therapy for me to remind myself of and embrace these qualities, and enjoy this one-of-a-kind open-ended RPG experience with no hesitation or remorse.
[Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered International] Now out Physically and Digitally on PS4, PS5, and Switch. New localization options (French, German, Italian and Spanish), and option to select the Japanese dub with Eng subtitles. No save transfer from the previous release.
byu/VashxShanks inJRPG
I love a non-linear story, and I love a story with an ensemble cast who slowly come together in unexpected ways. Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered is built on both those qualities – you have eight different protagonists to choose from who each start in a different part of the massive world of Mardias. You have vague knowledge of the fact that there is a massive evil stirring somewhere in the world, and that there are ten mysterious objects scattered across Mardias that could potentially be gathered to fully revive this evil.
When you pick your starting hero, though, you aren’t given any immediate quest related to this or any clue on how it all connects back to you. You’re simply thrust into a living world, and given the opportunity to explore it and take things one step at a time until you come across companions, and clues, and quests, and eventually an ending.
I love this so much. It can be a little daunting at first, but it really gives you the tools to tell yourself your own story as you play the game – there is no consistent pacing, or expected encounters, and it all kind of plays out like a tabletop RPG campaign. I especially loved the feeling of unexpectedly encountering characters that can be recruited to the party. Alongside your eight primary heroes, dozens of other characters live in the world who can join your quest. Sure, there are probably some incredibly optimized playthroughs you can put together if you follow a guide on where to recruit the best party members. For me, though, it was so rewarding to stumble upon each of them, and even sometimes lose some of them, in a natural way.
The combat encounters and gameplay that tie these moments of immersive and emergent storytelling together are, admittedly, pretty basic. Battles are standard turn-based RPG encounters, with the most unique wrinkle being the fact that you’ve got weapon durability to be concerned about as you adventure. There are a lot of new abilities and skills for your characters to learn as you progress through the game, and plenty of equipment options for putting together specific character builds and battle styles. Honestly, though, it wasn’t the thing that kept driving me to play the game. If you happen to feel otherwise and have a passion for the battles, though, there are a wealth of optional bosses and extra challenges to dig into.
There’s also a lot of new content in this remaster compared to the original PlayStation 2 release. A huge amount of it is quality-of-life stuff that makes the simple act of playing way, way smoother. Almost all of the extra non-QoL content is relegated to endgame and additional playthroughs. As a newcomer to the game, this didn’t stand out to me much. Reading about the content in detail, though, it seems like the kind of thing only a minority of players will ever encounter.
One element is an expanded story arc for a particular newly recruitable character, Aldora. Seeing that content to it’s conclusion, though, requires making specific choices across three playthroughs. There’s also a set of new ultra-difficulty bosses that, similarly, you’ll need to be pretty deep into your first or 2nd playthrough to be prepared to fight. It’s definitely a significant amount of new content, but the main game doesn’t feel any kind of lacking despite all of these elements being so deep into the game.
There’s a few elements of Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- that I wish were remastered just a bit better, though. For one thing, the lack of camera control is a frequent issue. Without full control over the direction of the camera, it can be a headache to navigate the more complicated dungeons of the game – especially when the camera ends up moving on its own and muddying my sense of direction even further.
The visuals of the game are also just a pinch away from perfect. I appreciate the weird, almost bobblehead aesthetic of the character models, even though I’m sure some people will end up fully disliking them. There’s a weird disconnect though, where the high-fidelity and resolution combined with the stylized models and just-slightly-blurry textures don’t all fully come together too well. It’s mostly the kind of thing where I imagine the fuzziness of the original version and the CRT you probably would have played it on tie the magic of the art style together.
Flaws aside, Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- is an incredible experience. It bucks traditional game design ideas that seem like no-brainers or bare minimums. However, the lack of a traditional main quest or even a standard linear story make for the kind of game that you end up falling so deep into that it ends up being your own story that you end up crafting, instead. Hopefully this remaster helps this game get seen as the classic it deserves to be.
