Up to Apollo's world in
SaGa 2 DS and absolutely loving it. Impactful changes and additions it makes:
- all the races get something new. Humans now have weapon proficiencies that increase effectiveness per weapon type with use; espers gain a class specialization that grants passive boosts to stats nudging them toward whatever niche according to their tendencies in combat; mecha have a damage boost with guns (maybe all weapons??); monsters can now inherit skills between transformations as well as turn into variant forms that possess different skills from the base form in question.
- exploration verbs have been expanded upon through map abilities. Excavating treasure, breaking obstacles and such.
- there are now dozens upon dozens of small side stories and events littered about the game. Fulfilling them isn't usually complicated--some talking, some treasure hunting, some battling--but finding them can be, which leads into...
- the party have interpersonal relationships between one another in tracked, codified terms: person-to-person (so six in all) and a collective group identity. These are used for triggering said events, where the collective team name and nature is what dictates what events are available, depending on if the party leans toward a positive or negative disposition overall.
- these relations are formed and adjusted through link combos during battle, which use a "Thread of Fate" consumable to shift any given pair toward a respective dynamic, for eight different ones total. They are both a powerful additional resource, and the means to exploring the game's content to its fullest by interacting with the system.
- Threads of Fate are redeemed from the Moirai sisters, using the currency of "Muse Points". The Muses are another new sub-system in the game, where meeting them through one's travels forms a connection where each of them begin overseeing the party's journey, granting blessings in the form of their personal currency if the party gains their favour. For each, it's accomplished by battling accordingly to their wishes and preferences; one might value a fast victory, while another prefers diverse use of skills. Through these incremental boons, as well as gifting the Muses personal tribute, they eventually reach an "MP granted" threshold where they lend their direct assistance to the party from then on, in the form of their divine intervention that occurs at random. Continuing to gather favour from them past that point increases the effectiveness of those calls for aid.
- there's a powered-up boss rematch arena, in which you can't build stats, but resources used during battle are also returned. Party dynamics are also given a blank slate, and what they end up at the end of each successful fight through Thread of Fate use dictates the reward given for each boss, for a wide variety of possible treasure.
There's more, but these are the things that stand out. It can't be overstated what a thoughtful remake this is, where all of these adjustments further emphasize the game's strong points instead of diluting them or changing the game's fundamental sensibilities. The original was structured around a treasure hunt, so there is now an increased bent on digging up resources along the way. The different character classes are now further individualized according to their niches. All of the design goes toward pushing the game's characteristics further instead of backpedaling on them in a way that's really admirable.
Something that frustrated me about
SaGa 3 was that despite having as anonymous a party as the other games, it chose to have the protagonist talk on behalf of the foursome almost exclusively; this wasn't the case for the first two games where everyone chimed in and even had little conversations and interactions throughout the narrative.
SaGa 2 in particular creates a tentative framing device bond between the party in that they're the protagonist's friends from school who join the adventure of their own volition, so taking that kernel of an idea and turning it into an integrated relationship management mini-game is absolutely the move to make with a retelling of the story, especially given how it interacts with the added sub-events. The positive/negative alignment isn't a contextless trigger point for each scene, but dictates how the party behave in those scenes where they overhear a rumour or decide to investigate a lead, from dynamics ranging from friendly cooperation to barbed rivalry. That these scenes reflect how you've actually played the game is just the kind of narrative integration of mechanics and inferred storytelling that video games at their best can do.
The Moirai and Muses likewise fit so naturally into the game's scope and themes that it'd be difficult for a newcomer to single them out as later embellishments. The reductive and sophomoric blanket rhetoric that people approach RPGs with when it comes to riffing on "killing God" stands in contrast with what
SaGa has historically been like, even in light of the first game being iconic for chainsawing God in half. Divinities exist in the series in myriad forms, motivations and aspects, and it's never a foregone conclusion how any game's given pantheon might interact with the presented world at large, narratively or mechanically. Evil gods, indifferent gods, capricious gods, benevolent gods... all have featured in the series in some way, and keep the scenarios fresh for their presence instead of collapsing into the perfunctory. That's how even the early and cartoonish feature deities in the second game read to me, and there was little to fault in the context of the early and cartoonish game they starred in. These later-stage roster expansions slot seamlessly into the game's hodgepodge polytheism while bolstering their presence through a perpetual "the gods are always watching" premise that is both narratively resonant and mechanically in keeping with the
SaGa pillars of unpredictable boons and great systems complexity mostly made invisible to the player in the moment.
Scarlet Grace's benisons were thrilling for much the same reason, in a context that this reads like a clear precursor to, and these kinds of throughlines are always delightful to discover within a series that manages to embody both wild experimentation and consistently iterative workshopping of ideas.
I think at this point the only possible concerns are the size of the maps in general, in context of the additional doubling-back and poking around there is in this version because of the event triggers and their related tasks. A small caveat for an altogether terrific retelling.
