Are there empty rooms all over the place too?
Will have to report back! SaGa had pretty nice dungeon layouts so I’m probably safe, though it did have an area with mean walls you had to figure out to walk through, heh.
One more little update, SaGa 2 has been so much more fun than FF2 that I feel I may have done the series a disservice by associating it the way I did, haha. You can see many of the FF2 ideas get developed here though. Some characters level their stats based on what attacks I use, but it’s a lot more minimal with just a few different categories and so far smoothly naturally levels without worrying much. There have been 3 different guest party members already but they take a bonus 5th slot and you aren’t expected to raise their stats at all; so far they’ve all been useful. The last dungeon even delighted in long zigzags and “pick the right hallway” in a way that felt a little like FF2 layouts but still more playful and fun, maybe it’s just that the battles are so much snappier.
It’s been a delightful little game, just wanted to share my excitement because there aren’t too many places to talk about SaGa and I think this series is more the evolution of what FF2 tried to do than future FF games are, in many ways.
Kind of a tangent but I also feel like I’ve been lied to all these years about SaGa games having bad or little story. Seems like they’re just not quite as character focused and are economical about telling it through environments, gameplay, etc without throwing 100,000 words at you. Both of the original Gameboy SaGas I’ve played take you to these exotic bizarre worlds constantly, right now we’re Magic School Bus shrinking ourselves down to go inside one of those previous guest party members’ body because the villain infested him with microscopic monsters. SaGa 1 has a whole post-apocalypse modern city type world where the unkillable monster that destroyed everything chases you around the whole time. It’s so consistently interesting.
Wow, where did you find it?
I bought it from a listing on one of the auction sites (through Buyee). Was 1800 yen to buy directly - surprisingly cheap, but then the service and buying fee added an extra 1000 yen on top. First time I’ve used one of those proxy buyer services, but was pretty easy overall. Shipping wasn’t too bad either since I just went for one of the cheap airmail options (wasn’t bothered about the shipping time)