'SaGa Frontier Remastered' Review - A Wonderful Hot Mess, Remastered
I don't know what has been in the water at Square Enix the last few years, but I'm happy for it. The 8-bit and 16-bit Final Fantasy games can only be re-released and/or remade so many times, I suppose. We've received localizations of classic games I never thought we would see like Romancing SaGa 2 and Romancing SaGa 3. We've seen the latest SaGa, SaGa Scarlet Grace, get a release on new platforms and in new regions. Even the classic Game Boy games that kicked off the SaGa series (unbeknownst to those of us in the West at the time) got reissued on the Nintendo Switch. And now things come full circle, after a fashion. SaGa Frontier Remastered ($24.99) sees the very first game in the series that was localized under its original title make a return, hopefully to a warmer reception than last time.
What happened last time? Well, it's complicated. To start with, SaGa Frontier is a SaGa game, with all that implies. It's a very, very quirky series by nature, often confusing players with esoteric rules and non-standard systems. SaGa Frontier was the seventh game in the series, and as such it was built with the idea that the players would have a basic understanding of the off-beat nature that characterized SaGa. It's considerably harder to get into than almost all of its predecessors. Western players didn't have that context, of course. We missed out on the three Romancing SaGa games, and while the Game Boy games had their devotees they were also a bit closer to a familiar JRPG structure.
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Score: 3.5/5
