SaGa Frontier
Nov 9, 2019 18:24:43 GMT -5
Post by Chainsaw Bilqis on Nov 9, 2019 18:24:43 GMT -5
I loved playing video games, but I was never the best at them. I improved as I aged (but now that I am so much older I feel I've gotten worse again due to dwindling reflexes haha), plus games from the 16-bit and 32-bit era just were not as hard as those older "scary" NES games from when I was very small. But I was still not good at blazing bullet intense action shooters and stuff.
I fell in love with 16-bit era JRPGs for many reasons: the stories, the sprite-work, the music, the secrets, and one other thing: they were easy haha. You could basically grind without repercussion and the combat was turn based giving you time to think, so it took a lot of the pressure off. JRPGs were just games I could enjoy after school or on weekends going at my own slow pace instead of worrying about if I had to scratch my nose with one life left on a final boss in a game with no save files.
But exploration of course, looking for those secrets or finding different paths or things to do, that was king for me when it came to the genre. When Chrono Trigger came out I was pretty amazed by the New Game + aspect of it, the multiple endings, etc. In Earthbound I ended up bypassing a whole section I was not supposed to, FFVI even had secret characters! Really enjoyed that stuff.
Then after all the Gamefan hype, FFVII came out. I really enjoyed it, no doubt. The new paint on the genre was cool, the cut-scenes, the "darker" localization, etc. Everyone was raving about it at the time, and I too still think it is a great game. But even then there was something in the experience missing for me. When it came to the game-play, for me it was just more of the same. I guess at this point I was used to JRPG battle systems, their good and bad points, so no fault on FFVII (as the easiness of these kind of games was one of the things that initially appealed to me), but all these magazines and kids from school were talking about it like they'd never seen anything like it, etc. The sense of exploration in FFVII was also there, but lesser so for me compared to VI for example, perhaps it was because I was growing older, I don't know, I just felt that it was more linear than what I was used to from the 16-bit era (I am one of those who preferred World of Ruin to World of Balance).
Anyway, the battle system was and is my least favorite part of FFVII, for me it was just "there" (also I think the "Popeye arm" graphics of the main game are more charming than the more realistically proportioned battle graphics which looked bland to me even back then)...Vincent's horror movie monster Limit Breaks still look awesome to this day though.
So, at this point it was feeling kind of like a , hmm, could it be JRPG burn-out? Just like the passing of the torch from 2-d to 3-d, I felt that while everyone else was so hyped up by FFVII and 3d "reinvigorating" the genre, I was feeling somehow the exact opposite, like it was the end of the kind of games I truly enjoyed in terms of exploration combined with me not even having fun with the battles anymore. Maybe if I had missed out on the 16-bit SNES titles and went in blind with VII I would have been much more amazed with it haha. Still a cool game though, do not get me wrong (and I have to also give it credit for a certain aesthetic style I love about PS1 games which I will try to detail momentarily). And my worries about the future of JRPGs would be unfounded considering so many great ones eventually came out on the PS1 haha. That was just how I was feeling at the time.
All of this finally brings me to SaGa Frontier, a game that was being advertised as a true "adventure" via "brochures" haha, promising the exploration I was looking for (and it would also introduce me to my favorite JRPG style battle system, finally turning my at-the-time unenthusiastic "how many battles before I grow another level so I can move on" attitude about JRPGs into "I can't wait to get in another battle" haha).
To Be Continued :B
I fell in love with 16-bit era JRPGs for many reasons: the stories, the sprite-work, the music, the secrets, and one other thing: they were easy haha. You could basically grind without repercussion and the combat was turn based giving you time to think, so it took a lot of the pressure off. JRPGs were just games I could enjoy after school or on weekends going at my own slow pace instead of worrying about if I had to scratch my nose with one life left on a final boss in a game with no save files.
But exploration of course, looking for those secrets or finding different paths or things to do, that was king for me when it came to the genre. When Chrono Trigger came out I was pretty amazed by the New Game + aspect of it, the multiple endings, etc. In Earthbound I ended up bypassing a whole section I was not supposed to, FFVI even had secret characters! Really enjoyed that stuff.
Then after all the Gamefan hype, FFVII came out. I really enjoyed it, no doubt. The new paint on the genre was cool, the cut-scenes, the "darker" localization, etc. Everyone was raving about it at the time, and I too still think it is a great game. But even then there was something in the experience missing for me. When it came to the game-play, for me it was just more of the same. I guess at this point I was used to JRPG battle systems, their good and bad points, so no fault on FFVII (as the easiness of these kind of games was one of the things that initially appealed to me), but all these magazines and kids from school were talking about it like they'd never seen anything like it, etc. The sense of exploration in FFVII was also there, but lesser so for me compared to VI for example, perhaps it was because I was growing older, I don't know, I just felt that it was more linear than what I was used to from the 16-bit era (I am one of those who preferred World of Ruin to World of Balance).
Anyway, the battle system was and is my least favorite part of FFVII, for me it was just "there" (also I think the "Popeye arm" graphics of the main game are more charming than the more realistically proportioned battle graphics which looked bland to me even back then)...Vincent's horror movie monster Limit Breaks still look awesome to this day though.
So, at this point it was feeling kind of like a , hmm, could it be JRPG burn-out? Just like the passing of the torch from 2-d to 3-d, I felt that while everyone else was so hyped up by FFVII and 3d "reinvigorating" the genre, I was feeling somehow the exact opposite, like it was the end of the kind of games I truly enjoyed in terms of exploration combined with me not even having fun with the battles anymore. Maybe if I had missed out on the 16-bit SNES titles and went in blind with VII I would have been much more amazed with it haha. Still a cool game though, do not get me wrong (and I have to also give it credit for a certain aesthetic style I love about PS1 games which I will try to detail momentarily). And my worries about the future of JRPGs would be unfounded considering so many great ones eventually came out on the PS1 haha. That was just how I was feeling at the time.
All of this finally brings me to SaGa Frontier, a game that was being advertised as a true "adventure" via "brochures" haha, promising the exploration I was looking for (and it would also introduce me to my favorite JRPG style battle system, finally turning my at-the-time unenthusiastic "how many battles before I grow another level so I can move on" attitude about JRPGs into "I can't wait to get in another battle" haha).
To Be Continued :B