Those who know their JRPG history will know that Dragon Quest I helped lay down the foundations for the genre’s future, mainly by streamlining ideas from popular western RPGs at the time. But what if JRPGs didn’t go down that route? Akatoshi Kawazu’s SaGa series is a glimpse into JRPGs that take more direct inspiration from their western brethren, with their own distinguishing twists.
Among these games is Romancing SaGa, which was remade as Minstrel Song for the PS2, then remastered for modern platforms in 2022. To my knowledge, aside from the addition of French, German, Italian, and Spanish localizations and a different primary text font, this new International release is the same remaster.
But for the uninitiated, Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song is a tricky beast to describe, and even more difficult to fully grasp. At its core, it takes the idea of getting distracted by side quests to a logical extreme. You pick one of eight characters, play through an introductory segment, and are then left to explore the world at your own discretion. Minstrel Song is not a game you play for a main story.
Progression is multi-faceted and complicated. Because there’s no linear narrative to follow, Minstrel Song’s world changes and evolves by a different metric: the number of battles you win.
As you defeat more and more enemies, your event rank — represented in this remaster with a clock — will increase, opening up new side quests, closing off others, and making monsters stronger. The ultimate goal of Minstrel Song is to complete as many side quests as possible and use the rewards to develop and gear up your team, while fighting enemies to gradually run down the clock to open up the final dungeon.
The turn-based combat has aged quite well. You input actions for every character at the start of a round before watching it all play out with relatively fast and snappy presentation. Standard stuff, then, but it’s got a few unique twists that make it unmistakably “SaGa”. In addition to HP, characters also have LP, or Life Points. These go down by one whenever a character is knocked out, and if they run out, the character leaves your party.
And instead of MP, characters use BP for their attacks, which recharges every turn. As for the attacks themselves, you’ll learn new moves for your current weapon type at random during combat, with stronger enemies boosting the odds that you’ll unlock a new move.
While characters earn stat boosts semi-randomly after each victory, your other spoils of battle — money and jewels — are utterly pitiful, meaning that excessive grinding is inefficient and potentially detrimental, since enemies also get stronger and you risk locking yourself out of some side quests.
How do you get stronger, then? Partake in the many side quests scattered around the world. These quests, far from being trivial distractions, are your main source of money and jewels. Money is crucial to buy and upgrade good equipment, while jewels are spent to unlock and level up character classes and skills.
Though not exactly the pinnacle of storytelling, these quests deserve praise for at least sending the player through a variety of interesting misadventures. You’ll do things like search for treasure, fight vampires and mummies, and explore ancient ruins. And while new quests and locations are gradually unlocked, you still have a lot of freedom to explore the world at your leisure.
All of this, on paper, makes Minstrel Song sound like a great, non-linear sandbox RPG experience. And to an extent, it is. But it’s also dead set on getting in its own way, whether by hindering the player via obtuse mechanics and quests, or stonewalling them with absurdly punishing difficulty spikes. This is a game that often feels at odds with itself.
While new quests consistently open up as your event rank rises, good luck actually finding and progressing them. The game does tell you to check pubs, and you’ll find a few that way, but you’re otherwise never directly told when and where new events become available. The next step can sometimes be just as obtuse.
The idea behind this is to let yourself get lost in and immerse yourself in Minstrel Song’s world, but unfortunately, it’s only enjoyable if your idea of fun and immersion involves aimless wandering through large empty maps or uninteresting towns.
The obtuseness also lends the game a surreal feeling, and not always in a good way. If you’re not struggling to find something to do, then chances are that random stuff is happening to you, unprompted, without much warning or narrative sense. I vividly remember wandering around a town early on, only to bump into a guard who then tossed me into jail. Another time, I returned to a major city only to walk headfirst into a pirate siege.
I also said before that excessive grinding is a bad idea. The monsters, however, have other ideas, as they’ll relentlessly charge at you the moment they see you, and most of them are faster than you. Avoiding them practically requires the use of proficiencies — or overworld non-combat skills — that are needlessly complicated to use. If you’re in a dungeon with tight corridors, expect the problem to be even worse, because Minstrel Song lacks any form of manual camera control.
The feeling of self-contradictory design also extends to combat and party-building. There are lots of recruitable characters and classes, and it feels like you’re encouraged to experiment, but the scarcity of crucial resources means you’re punished for doing so, because you’ll be spread too thin and left too weak to take on certain bosses. Worse, if you kick someone out of your team, you’ll need to backtrack to their designated spawn point if you want to add them back.
The end result is a mess of confusing mechanics that all but demands first-time players use a guide. To the remaster’s credit, a few quality of life additions make the game more accessible. The aforementioned event rank clock lets players see precisely how far they are into the game, a turbo mode lets you fly through exploration and battles at up to triple speed, and you now start the game with a new rechargeable smoke bomb to flee normal encounters without spending LP.
But there are still a host of other annoyances that seem designed to waste your time. You can’t reread some NPC dialogue with exiting and reentering the area, fast travel sometimes spits you out into overworld sections filled with enemies, changing out your overworld skills halves their remaining uses if you’re outside of town, and upgrading class abilities requires you to go to specific towns instead of every mentor having the same skill upgrades available.
At least the presentation holds up. The art style is certainly a choice, but the game does look crisp and clean running on Switch and Switch 2, even in handheld mode. The voice acting is fine for the most part, but the music is absolutely fantastic.
Switch key provided by PR for this review
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