I Played The WORST JRPG Series of All Time

I played the worst jrpg series of all time and in this video I'll be showing you every little Annoying moment mind-boggling design Choice as well as one game that might be the single worst jrpg ever made and the series that I'm talking about is the Saga series now I'm sure plenty of you disagree with this but after having played every game in the series over the course of a few months I can confidently say that I've never in my 30 years of playing jrpgs played a collection of games this bad and by the end of this video I think you agree with me so let's begin with where it all started with the Final Fantasy legend Trilogy on Game Boy now if you're wondering why are you playing three Final Fantasy games I thought you were playing the saga games well the first three saga games were rebranded as Final Fantasy games for the West as Square felt like they might have more appeal this way as much as you want to gift wrap a turd at the end of the day it's still a turd so let's start with Final Fantasy legend 1 to begin there's very little story setup and then just throw you into the world with very little explanation I'm used to tutorials but there is no guidance here you're just in level like okay figure it out you know I talked to this guy he says something about a guild I don't get it the first door I go to is locked there's item shops that I can't buy anything from because I don't have any money and then another guy said there's a town to the southeast so that's where I decided to go along the way I get into some combat and it's about as basic and as archaic as it gets attacks have uses to them like in Pokemon but they don't refill after you rest at an inn and there's no XP either the way you level up is really strange you have to buy upgrade items from stores and these can be really expensive so I eventually get to to this town and there's a shield missing from the statue and I went to a nearby Castle but they won't give me the shield so I have no idea what I'm supposed to do now I'm totally lost and so I looked up a guide by the way I'm only like 10 minutes into this game and I already have to look up a guide it turns out that you can add three other party members so that makes it so much more easy but that's three more mouths to feed when I go to buy items to level them up now I can revive characters at this Heart Building however when I want to restore HP at the in I have to spend one gold for every HP that I recover that's insane it's not like other RPGs where it's like a flat feed so this is really wild already not to mention this game is a total grind Fest there's so many random battles it's just not that fun so far so I upgraded a few characters I went to the first dungeon and interestingly monsters can change into the other monsters if they eat meat so some characters that you can have in your party or monsters and if they eat other monster meat well they can become something else and these mutant seem to get random stat increases in abilities now there are harder enemies in this dungeon but it's not too bad I beat the sword King I guess and then I died on my way out yeah I think I'm done with this game like I said there's no guidance basically no story and it's incredibly grindy and I get it what should I expect from a Game Boy RPG that released in 1990 but nonetheless it's so arcanic and just not fun at all next we'll move on to Final Fantasy legend 2 at the beginning there's this big long text scroll something about Magi and symbols of power at the beginning I can create a character now what's nice is there is some setup and there is some context for what I'm supposed to do at the beginning my father leaves when I'm a young child but then as as time goes on I want to find my father now as I go on my adventure I can bring three characters with me and what's nice is so far it's not obtuse it's kind of straight forward now I do have one piece of Magi from my father and apparently if I search for more I'll find him along the way somewhere so I leave town to go on my adventure and our teacher this squidman guy joins us now in combat weapons have uses and they break and you'll need to buy new equipment but having this guest character this squidman teacher to help supplement damage and healing is so nice it makes everything much more forgiving again so far exploring is much more straightforward it's hard to get lost there's really only one place to go no matter where you look now here's where things change up and kind of change permanently for the rest of the series stat increases here work like Final Fantasy 2 where the more you use a weapon or the more you get attacked or things like that you get these random level UPS so for example you'll get only HP increases or only damage increases and then you'll randomly get new abilities as well now you can also buy stat increases like Final Fantasy legend 1 but that doesn't seem to be the main way to Str your team but mercifully the game also revives any party members that have died in combat with one HP a small touch that goes a long way to making the game less frustrating now after making my way through this cave to the other side our teacher the squid guy leaves and now we're on our own with a town in sight and well over 9,000 gold I should be okay so when I get to town I think I see my dad no it's just a guy wearing a similar hat and after asking around someone told me about a shrine to the West so that's where I went there I met a Healer named key who says they've seen my father but doesn't know exactly where but they do mention something about relics where Magi might be and then they give me this sort of cryptic clue I need to go four steps to the East and three to the south from a big rock to the South now this is the right kind of egg at least I have some clue as where I'm supposed to go so I go to the Rock follow directions and then I go to this new secret area very cool I love this kind of vagueness now in the dungeon I explored and then I found four Magi and I can equip them and I assume they gave me some kind of stat increases but it's pretty unclear menus were very primitive in the Game Boy days so it's kind of hard to tell exactly what stat changes happen so when I went back to key and told her what happened I'm going to this new character aura's base and so key will join me as a guest character now on my way to aura's base key left and then a character called Mass joined me so we seem to have these random guest characters that come and go all the time so I go to aura's base barely beat him and then I'm starting to get a feeling for what this game is going to be like so I kind of just leave it there Final Fantasy legend 2 is so much better than one it's still vague at times but way more guidance more forgiving by iing Fallen enemies and I get much more money not to mention the constant flow of guest characters that help supplement the damage and healing again I got to admit these retro style jrpgs aren't really my thing but if you enjoy them then Final Fantasy legend 2 might be one to check out and now we're on to the last game of the trilogy Final Fantasy legend 3 in the intro they mentioned that the world's been flooded and monsters come with this water that's flooded the world and so you're a group of young Heroes and you get sent back in time to prevent the flood from happening and then the world can be brought back from ruin and then what's really wild is as I'm leaving there's a character named Fay in the game which is trippy because I named one of my characters in Final Fantasy legend 2 Fay it's a very very weird coincidence at first I thought maybe the data transferred over but I don't think that's the case unfortunately this game falls back into the design philosophy of not telling you where to go or what to do so I fumble around what I think is my ship and eventually I land outside this Temple near town and there are some new twists in combat and there's some interesting character progression here it's much more of a traditional RPG where you get experience points to level up and with weird is enemies drop meat or parts and if any of your characters consume them they transform them regardless if they're a mutant or not and so main characters changed into all kinds of beasts and one even turned into a robot which is pretty cool here spells also use up mp instead of just being used and then breaking and weapons seem to work the same way as well but they don't break eventually I made it to this nearby town and got stuck pretty fast there was nowhere to go and there were constantly pits in my way every time I would try to just walk over them I would fall down back to the first floor and I thought I was going nuts when I found out I can jump now I know these games don't exactly have tutorials but letting me know I could jump when I couldn't jump in the other two games would have been really nice to know now after making my way through the tower I eventually got a spell called float it turns out this ability is something I can use on the Overworld which allows me to explore even more places that I couldn't before after flying around for a while I stumbled Upon This Town in a cave I think I met this gal who gave me this ability to travel to the past so now we have an already directionless game and now we're adding time travel on top of that man man I'm screwed so I end up flying around aimlessly for like 20 or 30 minutes and then I just gave up the directionless nature of this game comboed with time travel meaning you basically have to explore the same area mindlessly twice was pissing me off to no ends and I just couldn't take it anymore I applaud the Developers for trying something ambitious on the Game Boy but I think they flew too close to the Sun with this idea of the three Final Fantasy legend games two is easily the best and most playable by today's standards but fair warning unless you're really into old school jrpgs like this it still won't be that that fun next we move on to the Romancing Saga Trilogy now I need to explain this Trilogy and how I'm going to tackle them so Romancing Saga 2 and 3 got these beautiful remasters to Modern consoles however Romancing Saga 1 never did it did however get a remake on the PlayStation 2 which got its own remaster subtitled minstral song in 2022 that said there's a fan translation of the original Super famicom version courtesy of trans Dimension and DDS translation so I'll be tackling that one first and then tackling the remake for comparison sake so rancing Saga opens up with this Exposition about three Gods battling out for dominance eventually a human hero was called upon to use 10 gemstones and sacrifice themselves to steal these Gods away shot in the dark we're going to have to find those gemstones aren't we now after the intro you're shown a character select screen with an option of eight characters four male and four female here Begins the series storytelling roots of multiple main characters that all cross paths at various points through the game if you love The octopath Traveler Series here's where its history originated from now there's really not much context but I went with Hawk the pirate because well I like Pirates and after starting the game no Direction no setup nothing I'm just on a ship in the middle of the ocean after fighting some sea monsters and plundering some treasure from traveling ships I eventually found my way to the pirate Coast where apparently there was a meeting that's been waiting for me a pirate Captain talks about being more Savage and killing ship passengers to instill more fear brutal but hey I'm down for it after sailing around for a while I came back to the captain and now apparently I'm a trador he tells all the Pirates in the room to attack me and when I say all of them I mean all of them of course I can't beat them all so I Die game over and start over thankfully I wasn't that far yet so I get back to the same spot and I just can't escape there's just way too many enemies and their movement patterns are so erratic that I can't avoid them not even 30 minutes into the game and it's already impossible I'm sure this bodess well now there's seven other characters so maybe I just chose poorly so I went with gray I ended up in a city called bruel and I have to choose which character I want to stick with now I decided to stick with a girl who wants to go to a town called esir the only problem is I don't have enough money to take a ship there so I guess I'll go around and try to fight some monsters or get some side jobs I leave town and head to an area called Lin I go everywhere talk to everybody and nothing this game is just starting to piss me off all right one last try let's try Albert all right his story is at least a little more straightforward team up with my sister to fight some monsters in a cave to the east I'll right a clear goal I love it guys what the hell look at how many enemies there are and it's not like they're easy oneman fights sometimes there's six or more enemies I really Tred tried to be careful and maneuver my way around and just get to whatever was at the end of this cave but I couldn't do it I am totally baffled how a game this poorly designed could be released as the fourth entry in a series and also a year after a game like Final Fantasy 4 I mean this with every fiber in my being I don't know how anyone had the patience to finish this game it's just completely unfun thankfully it got a remake on the PlayStation 2 by then Final Fantasy 10 had already been out for 4 years so surely there was some kind of quality standard eternally at square right right so once again the game gives you the choice between the same eight characters for the sake of seeing how things have changed let me go with hawk again so right off the bat I have to say the game looks pretty great for a Playstation 2 title sure the character proportions are a bit odd but the actual art direction is nice and the music is pretty fantastic as well unfortunately it still drops you into the middle of the ocean with no direction as to where you're supposed to go or what you're supposed to do thankfully I have an idea of what I'm supposed to do if the original game is going to be any helpful guide one thing I noticed about combat is that the game refills your life after every F that's so nice if I have to deal with that onslaught of pirates like the original game this will be my Saving Grace so right away I made my way through the caves docked the pirate coast and I'm probably supposed to attend the meeting so let's go do that sure enough there's the meeting and he tells me to be more brutal and kill people on the ships we board so after going around and fighting some more in the open sea I come back to the pirate Hideout by the way great map right as I expected I get called a Trader and the whole room of pirates attacks me this is just as ridiculous as the original game it took me the better part of like 15 to 20 minutes just to get out of this room even with the game sped up with the remastered version but because the game refills your life after each fight it was just a matter of time now I'm in uncharted waters as this is further than I've ever gotten the original which admittedly isn't that far then sadly my ship sinks and I'm marooned at this town called gondo and after exploring around enough I'm noticing this new stat called LP basically every character has a set amount of LP and when a character dies they lose one LP when they lose all their LP they're gone for good brutal I'm having an okay enough time I guess I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing doing I'm not really finding anything all that interesting or cool combat is inoffensive if not a little Mindless I'm basically just mashing attack each fight at some point I found myself in a battle that I was clearly not prepared for and got wiped out thankfully I didn't save that long ago but I'm just bored and I don't know where I'm supposed to go so let's try another character just to try someone new I decided to go with Claudia so she's a ranger who grew up in a forest and for her party member she gets a wolf and a bear sweet so this witch lady tells me there's monsters at the entrance to the forest here's where one of the game's many fatal flaws comes into play you can't control the camera making exploring an already confusing area even more confusing it's hard to tell where you can go or where you've been and where you're supposed to go eventually I found the monster that I'm supposed to fight and it was attacking this guy named gon the name's Sean now after saving him he says he's a guard in a nearby City so I go visit him he introduces me to one of the other playable characters gray and guess what they don't tell you anything about what you're supposed to do next I'm just mindlessly exploring the town talking to everyone and I just I can't stand this game I seriously don't get what's supposed to be fun about these games I understand the appeal of something that's directionless but rewarding something like say Elden ring but mindlessly talking to everyone just to be given your next objective isn't satisfying or rewarding to me it just feels like lazy bad game design next up is Romancing Saga 2 this is much more than a remaster it feels like a remake in the style of the Final Fantasy pixel remasters menus are clean text is easy to read very nice job on this visually so I start off in a cave as the king with a few of my soldiers but after getting back to the castle it turns out that one of the characters was my son so I brought him to toughen him up I guess but I also have an older brother that's more of a soldier and this character is more of a diplomat now after taking some time to explore the town and getting to know the common folk I go back to my dad and head out on yet another mission with my brother left to watch over the town while it can be mildly directionless you're at least given some hints environments aren't that big if I just talk to everyone eventually I'll be given some kind of hit as to what I'm supposed to do next one complaint I have however is that again there are just way too many enemies exploring dungeons feels like a never-ending Gauntlet and it gets tiring by the end combat is more or less the same where you have abilities with uses but these can be refreshed after resting and we are back to the Final Fantasy 2 style progression where you have random setat increases and you randomly learn new abilities after using a particular weapon for a while it's not a bad system per se it just feels unsatisfying to me now eventually I defeat the boss head back into town only to find that my brother is having his final moments at this point let me just save you the play-by-play of every little moment and give you a more highle overview of the game mainly because I ended up playing this one for way longer than maybe every other game previously combined this seems to sort of be a family lineage system notice that each save file has a year tied to it once you either find enough money or complete certain objectives time moves forward and you can purchase things to further your kingdom these can be things like an orchard new armor new weapons and I also read something about some kind of magic Academy there doesn't seem to be one golden path it seems like this game is sort of a series of side quests that you can do however you want and to be totally honest with you I was really enjoying the game the flow of the game is something like this you unlock access to a new town you talk to everyone and then you find a way to complete whatever this new objective is I dug this it felt rewarding to find the person and then figure out how to solve the problem however I eventually ran into this game's fatal flaw and it's why I ultimately ended up getting stuck once again the game has an LP system basically when you die you lose one LP and if you lose all your LP that character's Gone Forever including the main character however Gerard never died in my game but I did see walkthroughs with different Kings so apparently you can keep going even if the main character dies where this becomes a problem is changing out party members so in the game it's capped at five characters per party but you can't remove them you have to wait until they lose all their LP at least as far as I can tell now that may not seem that bad on the surface but many side quests require specific characters for example these martial art guys need me to kill the Slime but it requires a magic user and I didn't have one so I purposely killed off one of my characters which just feels wrong not to mention timec consuming and annoying however the one I got stuck on was breaking into this Castle now there's a guy at the pub that said maybe if I found the Thieves Guild they could sneak me in now the quest to find the Thief was one of the coolest things in the game there was so much detective work but eventually you finally find the Thieves Guild and it was one of the coolest series of events i' had seen in a retro jrpg however I simply could not recruit the guy I watched walkthroughs and I did exactly what they did and the dialogue triggered for them and joined their party for the walkthroughs that I watched but for me the thief just wouldn't join my party my only theory is that my party was full and so it left him no space to join and if that's the case wow that has to be one of the worst design flaws I have ever seen in a video game it Tru pained me to quit because I was really digging it but if I was going to be constantly forced to painstakingly kill off characters just to progress there was no way I was going to do that next up is Romancing Saga 3 arguably the most popular of the trilogy here we're back to eight characters and you can choose one to start I'll choose Ellen for no real particular reason so the game starts off with a storm and a lot of these characters are huddled in an inn stuck with the storm shortly after however a woman barges in demanding a horse it turns out she's lady Monica the sister of a nearby Marquee so we all wait out the storm and decide to help her in the morning now visually it's very similar to Romancing Saga 2 it looks really nice and plays great too if not a little bit annoying with the same quirks of the random level UPS now once I reach her brother she tells me of a potential betrayal and we now need to seek the aid of a nearby Lord for the upcoming battle I appreciate that the game is at least clear with where I'm supposed to go and what I'm supposed to do so I reach the Lord he tells us of a treasure in a cave to kind of kill some time again very straightforward thank you and the battles feel tiresome I can avoid them because you can see the enemies on the map but whenever I fight it's always a big group of enemies now eventually the Lord and the Marquee team up and everything's hunky dory so with our mission done the party kind of scatters to the wind I could see where this sort of thing would be interesting and I could see where playing different playthroughs could be interesting to see where everybody goes next I decide to boarders ship and travel North but along the way I noticed there's this NPC that has bright pink hair and it caught my eye and it turns out I can recruit her now to be honest she's pretty weak but considering my party at this point dropped down to two characters every little bit helps but to be honest by this point I was kind of getting bored it was getting grindy the story wasn't all that interesting and I kind of just decided to put the game down personally I liked Romancing Saga 2 way better with the progression of time and building your kingdom but rancing Saga 1 is definitely the worst of the three if you like retro style jrpgs you might dig Romancing Saga 3 it's solid but nothing amazing next we move on to the pair of games I've been dreading since the beginning of this video Saga Frontier 1 and two now these are the few games that I've actually played before this video I remember being thoroughly unimpressed with Saga Frontier 1 back in the day and my only memory of saga Frontier 2 is renting it for a weekend getting lost really early on and then just never coming back here's hoping things are different this time around so after doing some mild research I decided to go with Amelia for Saga Frontier 1 apparently she gets access to other towns much earlier than other characters which should make things easier so the brief setup for her is apparently her husband was murdered by someone named Joker no not that joker and she took the fall for it and now she's out to find Joker simple but compelling story I like it so the game begins with Amelia in jail and then it shows a few flashbacks of finding her husband at her home but then the killer escaping as well as her being interrogated by the police shortly after it cuts back to her in the prison cafeteria with one of the guards announcing that they're holding some kind of Escape event essentially they're letting the inmates get out if they can get to this one part of the jail by the time limit but it's pretty dangerous one of the other fellow inmates notices that Amelia is new and suggests that they team up together as she's confident that her and her other friend can get out so they quickly team up and one of the series fatal flaws rears its ugly head almost immediately confusing level design I mean just stop and look at this screen there's like five ways you could go and none of them are obvious so after fuming my way through this Maze of sewers Vents and garbage shoots I eventually made it to this boss guarding the exit of course it kicks my butt first try but after equipping more healing items I beat him and find my way out now some quick thoughts on the combat it's pretty much the same it's turn-based combat but there's really nothing special for the most part I can do some team up moves if I use the same abilities but again these trigger pretty randomly and I could never really count on them again depending on which weapon you use you can get new abilities with that weapon if you use it over and over again and you also get random stat level ups and random new abilities now I am playing the remaster so thankfully I can speed through combat and apologies ahead of time if the fast forward speed gets you a little nauseous while watching now after after defeating this scorpion centipede thing and making my way to the exit the guard upholds his promise and lets the three of us out and not knowing what to do next Amelia finds her way back at her old home only to be ambushed by Joker thankfully a random guy is nearby to help you and even rescues you he then brings you to his Hideout where your former inmate friends Annie and Lisa are there hanging out this guy named Rufus tells me that they're essentially Vigilantes doing the Dirty Work that the police can't or won't he also wants to stop Joker and ask for your help and after taking some time to think about it Amelia agrees and is immediately thrown into the deep end with a mission attend a fighting tournament that joker will be attending in attempt to Ambush him man I got to say so far this is fairly straightforward the game isn't unclear as what I'm supposed to do yet now after competing in the tournament we spot Joker and chase after him he escapes through this secret door in one room and after fumbling around for a while I just could figure out what I was supposed to do it turns out there's a switch on this pot that opens up a staircase that isn't clear at all in fact I wasn't even sure I could interact with it as it's part of the pre-rendered background anyway long story short he escapes and we need to come up with a new plan so our next brilliant one is that joker is supposedly going to be at this CD Casino so Amelia will disguise herself as a bunny girl to see if she can track him down luckily she does and follows him to this sort of like private pole dancing room place and I try to catch him again but once again he escapes and now I find myself in a massive base of some kind and need to escape immediately I run into these two girls and we get attacked by a unicorn it wipes us out and I need to reload my save thankfully I wasn't that far back so I give it a a second try but when I get to that same spot I couldn't find them so I tried to just explore rounds on my own and that was a bad idea the boss is basically impossible if you do it on your own you need to recruit those two characters so I reload my save again and ran up those girls as well as this redhaired character then I proceed to grind a lot and I tried the boss again with a full party and I still couldn't withstand its brutal attacks so I grinded for another hour or so tried again and I just can't beat this thing I don't know what I'm supposed to do or how I could have prepared better but I'm just not going to sit here and bash my head against the wall for hours grinding overall Saga Frontier wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered but I'm still not a fan of its leveling system confusing level designs and just the massive trial and error process you have to go through not to mention those crazy difficulty spikes also it is not a looker I feel like it looks horrible by any standard that said it does have a kind of interesting story some cool moments like the fighting tournament and also you can change your character's outfits which is pretty cool also very rare for the PlayStation one once again it was just very poorly designed next up is Saga Frontier 2 now this is one of the few games in this video that doesn't have a port to Modern Hardware so I'm going to play it on original Hardware so apologies if the footage doesn't quite look that good now right away what grabs you are the visuals Saga Frontier is easily the best looking game in the franchise and still holds up well to this day has a sort of storybook quality to it there's just something about the handdrawn watercolor look of the background with pixel characters they look so incredible now as for the story it seems like we're going to go back to the Romancing Saga 2 design philosophy of following one character here named Gustav over the years who eventually becomes a ruler in fact we follow him right from his birth all the way up until he's much older but one of the first big story moments is he goes to his Coming of Age ceremony however he fails to produce Ana a sort of energy in this world while holding a sword and the King thinks he's an illegitimate son so you and your mom are cast out of the Kingdom years pass and Gustav has become a bit of a troublemaker as he feels like he's burdened his mom and also just feels useless he doesn't have a lot of friends outside of one boy named Flynn who also can't produce Ana so starting out the game is very light on gameplay you can kind of move your character around but it's very focused on story and pretty hard to get lost eventually Gustaf learns to be a blacksmith and practices with a sword since he can't produce magic eventually you do get into some combat as Gustav as he wants to test his skills and explore a nearby cave combat hasn't changed that much it's turn-based where you randomly learn new abilities and get random stat level UPS weapons do have uses before needing to be repaired however it seems like you can kind of heal freely overall combat is much more forgiving though and easier than past centuries but man the design of the dungeons hasn't gotten any better as it's easy to get lost now as the years go on in the story Gustav eventually weasles his way into a position of power in a smaller part of the country and it gets really interesting you see how he deals with various characters and how his part of the country changes and grows there's also these new large scale is battles basically it's just a series of regular battles but it kind of gives it more of an epic scale now I got to be honest I was actually actually starting to enjoy this game it had an incredible art style Amazing Music a pretty compelling story bite-sized story segments that were really digestible but I came to an impass once again eventually one of the story segments switches to playing another character and for a while there was this side story for a character named will Knights available that I kept putting up because I didn't know who that character was that was my biggest mistake eventually you're forced to play as him when you begin you recruit a few characters and then you explore some nearby ruins these ruins are maybe the most confusing dungeon I've ever been in in a jrpg I got lost for hours and what's annoying is I needed to do that side quest that I kept putting off before to do something when I tried looking up other people's walkthroughs they all did that side quest so their setup looked way different than mine and I couldn't even follow them so once again I'm forced to quit because I have no idea where I'm supposed to go and there's nothing that can help me funnily enough a friend of mine who played the game said they quit at the exact same spot so I was happy to know that I wasn't alone this bummed me out because I wanted to keep playing but sadly that wasn't going to happen and now my friends this brings us to the worst game in the entire series and maybe the single worst jrpg I've ever played in my life unlimited Saga this was the PlayStation 2 game and the ninth game in the series so you'd think they would have figured it out by now but instead they made one of the most hilariously barebone games I've ever played let's dive on in oh look at that it came with a preview of Final Fantasy 102 that was kind of them now like many of the other games you have a choice between a variety of characters I went with vent because I don't know now Venus is a carrier basically a delivery man and he's tasked with delivering a letter to This Guy's daughter in another town I will say that the character portrait art is really nice it has a unique style to it but that's about the only positive thing I'm going to say about this game so don't get used to it now after you leave town you're met with this screen now take a minute and really look at it what do you think you're supposed to do the game doesn't tell you anything so you're left to figure it out on your own I assume that I accidentally opened the menu so I'm pressing every button trying to close it but nothing works I'm so confused after fiddling around in the menus for so long I guessed that triggered a fight and this is somehow one of the worst first battles you could ever expect in a game I'm attacking with my spear the only weapon I have equipped and I'm doing a variety of attacks with it and they all just keep missing I don't get it eventually I switched to a fist attack and it knocked down these enemies but they almost killed me because I kept missing with the main weapon I have equipped so after fiddling around on the first screen for literally 10 plus minutes I finally tried using the analog sticks in get this what you're looking at is the world map no I'm not kidding you hop along like a piece on a board game barely animating you just mindlessly hop from tile to tile fighting battles stepping on spikes you can't avoid and running into dead ends it's a blast I eventually made it to the carriers Guild was met with a bit of story and then I'm off on my next task I'll spare you the details and just say that what I just showed you is all the game has to offer this totally boring map to explore decent turn-based combat that has all the same quirks this series is known for and totally uninteresting storytelling I really don't understand what they were even going for with this game it's like scenix told the team ah yeah you're budget for this game is like 100 Grand good luck it was not well received in the west at all currently sitting at a 45 on Metacritic it was so bad in fact that outside of the Romancing Saga 1 remake in 2005 it basically killed the franchise with 14 years between its next release in 2016 that's really bad and while the last two games in the series aren't as bad I feel like they should have just ended the series there and at the beginning of this video I said it might be the worst jrpg I've ever played no it definitely is and I've been playing jrpgs for a really long time so to come across a new worst jrpg is really something all right next up we have Saga Scarlet Grace here I'll be playing the remastered Ambitions version originally this was a Japanese only VA exclusive talking about sending a game out to die now the initial impression is pretty positive this cinematic opening has some nice stained glass looks and it's setting up the world but but then it gets weird before starting the game it asks all kinds of weird philosophical questions like what do I think about ships and what do I think about fireworks it's like okay I think this is supposed to help recommend me a starting protagonist but of the four I decided to just go with Taria Taria is a ceramist or a Potter all her Pottery is starting to warp and she feels like it's her fault so she decides to leave her shop to her apprentice and go on a journey of self-discovery Lucky for her as soon as she leaves town a massive Phoenix appears and she theorizes this could be the origin of her problems so right away Scarlet Grace has a brand new unique art style it looks really beautiful honestly kind of like a pop-up storybook Vibe like as you explore the world pieces just sort of pop up it looks really cool thankfully it seems like we've got a little bit more of a higher budget game here than unlimited Saga now oddly you think I could just walk up to the Phoenix and that' be how I would progress in the game but apparently I need some more party members first so I go to a nearby town and recruit a team of six characters like okay wow this game is just one convenient situation after the other so now now that I have a team let's head back to the Phoenix oh my God a tutorial what is this are we playing a saga game so this battle system is a complete rehaul and frankly one of the more interesting turn-based battle systems I've ever played it works like this you start out with a limited number of star points on your first turn character abilities require a certain amount of star points so you're initially pretty limited and some abilities even require a few turns to charge up then in each subsequent turn you add more star points and then you can do more attacks or do higher level attacks for normal trash enemies this can be a little tedious but with boss battles this is incredible it forces you to be really strategic and thoughtful so for example you could do your charge moves in the first round since you can't really do much damage anyway the other thing is I like knowing the attack order and it shows you here which really helps when determining what abilities you want to choose in fact some of your attacks can even delay enemy attacks adding further strategy as far as leveling goes there's a lot of the same annoying carryover with random stat increases and new abilities but they seem more frequent and just a little bit less annoying also the main character at least with Taria here gets something called flux after each battle which can level up current abilities and when leveled up they can cost less and do more damage and after fighting the Phoenix it flies away and we chase after it and in a nutshell that's kind of the general game Loop we follow the Phoenix but usually there's something blocking you from getting to the Phoenix like some kind of enemy Mist a rock a town something so we need to figure out how to get past it get to the Phoenix it flies away rinse and repeat this game is much more about maintaining your team than deep story as the game goes on you'll find different materials and this is what you'll use to upgrade your equipment really you have to be here for the battle system which thankfully is pretty great but honestly there's really not much more to this game besides that there are some little puzzles and side quests here and there but really it's all about the combat thankfully though the game does have a great art style on the Overworld to be honest I ended up playing this for quite a while like close to 10 hours or so but at one point I felt like I had seen enough and just decided to move on overall it's not amazing but pretty dang solid if you just want to grind and great battle system you might dig Saga Scarlet Grace now finally this brings us to the recently released Saga Emerald Beyond now full transparency I only played the demo with this one because basically it starts at the very beginning and then it carries over to the full game so I thought if I enjoyed the game I'd just buy the game afterwards but spoiler alert I didn't finish the demo so I played on Nintendo switch which only allowed me to play as AA aing a witch and training it's kind of a cool story setup though she lost her witch powers and she needs to get them back and she disguises herself as has a high school student named yha isumi and she's aided by her talking cat now I just got to say right off the bat the budget for this game is hilariously low let me break down the general flow of this game from what I played of the demo so there are these green or Emerald I guess portals that appear which are the main story scenarios and the main story battles now there are other portals that serve as side quests around the town and for my character here it was just collecting different kinds of cats super boring and basically it was all on this one small town map I could explore this map and maybe a minute or less it's not that big and again I never played beyond the demo so maybe it expands more maybe there's a lot more in the full game and I think there is cuz I watch some reviews for it but from what I played this is all there is so far but with Amia there's this stupid story formula that gets old really quick basically she'll hang out with her friend Ren some bad guide appears she runs away as isumi and then magically appears as AMA the witch fights off the enemy then Zumi returns just in time and ren is constantly like where did you go you just missed the witch again and this gets repeated at least three or four times and it's like Ren how dumb are you she's the witch thankfully the combat from Scarlet Grace carries over and it's pretty solid however it does have some weird user interface stuff with it and it seems just a little more confusing than it needs to be now again I'm not sure if it's just a small map so there's not as much to explore compared to Scarlet Grace the boring story or I don't know what it is but I was just not into this game at all also it seems ultr linear which seems like a weird complaint considering I was saying I was always getting lost in these other games games there was just very little room to do extra stuff like find random party members so I played for maybe 2 hours or however long the demo went for I didn't quite finish it but I was just incredibly bored now to my surprise it has a 75 on open critic I'm not sure what to make of that did only hardcore fans review this game or does it get better later on I'm not totally sure but it certainly doesn't leave a good first impression now if I were to rank them all it would look something like this with Saga Frontier easily sitting at the top and unlimited Saga easily sitting at the bottom now despite calling this the worst jrpg series of all time and I really meant that I want to tip my cap to the series Creator akosi Kazu he's been with Square Enix pretty much as long as I've been alive having worked on the first two final fantasies creating the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Subs series and basically worked on every Saga game and what I'm about to say might sound like a back caned compliment but I mean this sincerely despite Saga never really being popular especially in the west he believed in it he's been working on the series for over 30 years and no matter how low the review scores got or how cut back the budgets became he had a vision and kept pushing forward I really admire that it can't be easy to put your heart and soul into something for that long and only have a relatively small audience so to Kazu son I commend you for all your hard work and perseverance even if your games really aren't for me now this is what I considered to be the worst jrpg series of all time but to see what I think are the absolute best jrpg series watch this video next

Channel: The Gaming Shelf

Views: 35,676

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Id: CNujrD4-zZI

Length: 35min 51sec (2151 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2024