Review for Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend. Game for Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 15/12/2020
Square Enix is renowned for making a fortune thanks to its long history of role-playing games, ever since it was simply called Square. Among its various historical series not many know SaGa, whose very first title came out in 1989, establishing itself as the first JRPG to land on Game Boy. Those were very different times, it was difficult for a new IP to make itself known outside Japan, especially if it belonged to a genre that was still so little widespread. To prevent the title from falling into anonymity, Square therefore chose to associate it with his best-known series and export it to the West under the name of Final Fantasy Legend, and he did the same with his two sequels.
This little historical parenthesis was needed to explain why you shouldn't expect Final Fantasy in this collection. Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend precisely collects the first three chapters of SaGa released for Game Boy, and although they are still old-style games, they have some characteristics that differentiate them from the classic JRPG.
The stories of the three games are quite simple, as you might imagine for products from many years ago with objective format limitations. So expect classic adventures in which the group of adventurers set out to discover the world by exploring places shaped on various themes: elements, cultures, historical eras; as well as of course the classic caves, forests and castles, halfway through with the ultimate goal of saving the world.
The games are self-contained and narratively we can see a gradual improvement towards the third chapter (certainly the most refined of the three), which also involves notable NPCs.
Although basically those contained in Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend are classic JRPGs with turn-based battles that are also rather simplistic, the area in which you might find yourself lost is that of character development. After choosing the starting character from the different races available, the player will have to recruit three more from the guild, forming a party to his liking. However, there are not the classic experience points to accumulate for the typical Level ups, but each race will become stronger in its own way.
In the first SaGa, for example, humans can become stronger only by buying specific items in shops, while the bestial races can do so by eating the flesh of the defeated monsters, which will also lead them to change classes as appropriate; then there are the mutants who can even get stat increases and spells randomly. The second chapter also introduces robots, which can be equipped with specific equipment.
In short, wild farming is not enough to develop your party, but several factors must be taken into account. Among these is also the fact that weapons wear out with use, so doing a lot of fights (and believe us if we tell you that the encounter rate is not particularly lenient) can be risky for your finances. And above all, you must be very careful to avoid having your characters die, since not only resurrecting them requires a payment, but after a certain number of times it will not be possible and the character will be lost forever, forcing you to enlist another one and start his development all over again.
These mechanical details come smoothed and improved in the third chapter in which the intent of the developers to follow the most classic footsteps of the genre and make the experience easier and smoother is clearly perceived: the classic experience points are introduced, the deterioration factor for weapons is eliminated and auto-targeting finally introduced now present in any modern JRPG, which makes sure that if an enemy dies before a subsequent attack hits, it is automatically routed to another opponent instead of failing (a feature that we would have appreciated in the other two chapters too) . Some characters can always change by eating the flesh of the enemies, but if we don't like the result, it's easier to get them back to the way they were.
While this may seem like a simplification of the original ideas for this series, it actually makes it more affordable and less frustrating, even considering that certain design choices are quite confusing to the point where the mechanic of eating enemy flesh is even capable of downgrading a character by mistake.
And here we connect to what is arguably Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend's biggest flaw. The chapters that compose it are games of other times, contained in limited formats that had to be optimized to the maximum for the actual game; there were no tutorials, any explanation on how to actually play was contained in the legendary instruction booklets contained in the package. Explanation that especially for the first chapters of SaGa, with its particular mechanics that govern the development of some races, are definitely necessary to play without unnecessary confusion. This version for Nintendo Switch instead it does not provide any information for players, who will then be forced to search online. The lack of a simple digital manual for you to consult is foolishly serious.
Apart from this, compared to the original versions Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend offers an updated and fixed localization, the possibility to customize the background and to zoom the playing surface, and also the possibility to select a mode that allows us to play while holding the console vertically to vaguely emulate the original Game Boy experience. Far more useful, finally, are the options to speed up onscreen action (keeping the rhythm of the music unaltered) and theauto-save when the player exits the game.
Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend can be a good buy for nostalgic players and for those particularly interested in the less noble historical exponents of the genre. Its mechanical details could represent a breath of fresh air for those looking for something different from the usual, as long as they also have enough patience to deal with it. Apart from this segment of users, it is difficult to recommend this collection of titles that are really affected by age. Despite being sold at a budget price, there are simply better retro games on the Nintendo hybrid console, be it the Collection of Mana or Romancing SaGa 3; not to mention the remaster of SaGa Frontier coming this summer.
► Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend is an RPG-Adventure game developed and published by Square Enix for Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 15/12/2020
