SaGa Frontier — A Broken, Messy Masterpiece

Last year, I pitched a book-length treatment of SaGa Frontier. Since it wasn’t picked up (not a shock — this is not exactly a mainstream title!), I thought it would make sense with the release of SaGa Frontier Remastered to share the sample opening with y’all. Enjoy! -Matt

-1-
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun

SaGa Frontier is not a perfect game.

For those who have played it, this is not a controversial statement.

For those who haven’t, you don’t need to take my word for it. The game appears on no top-ten lists. There are no 40-year-old podcasters reminiscing over the days sat in front of it, Dualshock in one hand, BAWLS in the other. There is no vociferous mob demanding a remake. Hell, it’s not even the most beloved of the SaGa series. That honor likely belongs to the sequel, SaGa Frontier 2, a game no less mechanically perplexing, but which sports a more traditional and cohesive narrative.

So what, then, is the point of this book? Are you in for an epic takedown, a brutal dunking? The world’s first RiffTrax for video games?

My friends, the answer is a resounding, no. I’m not cruel enough to make that work. (This is a lie; I’m actually not funny enough to make that work). In truth, playing SaGa Frontier is one of the most cherished experiences of my childhood. Unpacking that, even to people I know, has proven challenging. Is it the story? Not exactly. The world is interesting, but the translation is iffy and the narrative is fragmented. The music, then? Sure, it’s great! Not really Uematsu-level, but catchy and sweet. The gameplay? Kind of! But you’ve really got to work through the rock to find the nugget of gold. It’s not for the faint of heart.

So why discuss, or even play, SaGa Frontier if it isn’t as good as a Final Fantasy, a Dragon Quest, a Phantasy Star?

Well. You should play it because it isn’t as good.

Let’s take a step back. Imagine a time machine — rusty, rickety, but fully functional — that can teleport your mind back in history, to the ancient spring of 1998. A fifteen-year-old Tara Lipinski has stolen America’s heart by taking gold at the Nagano Olympics. A young man named Barack Obama has just won his primary for reelection to the Illinois State Senate. And, far more notably, adolescent gamers (like yours truly) who had received Final Fantasy VII over the holidays are just finishing it up and looking to sink their teeth into the next big JRPG.

Final Fantasy VII benefited both from being the latest entry in a storied franchise, and from a glitzy marketing push unlike anything seen for this type of game before (some credit it with defining PlayStation as a hardware platform). This was obviously not the norm. To find another RPG to whet one’s appetite in the pre-Kotaku age, players had only a few choices. We could flip through gaming magazines religiously, though this was hardly foolproof; Japanese RPGs were not the most popular genre in the West, even in the wake of FF7. More likely, we’d just visit a brick-and-mortar game store — possibly Electronics Boutique, or a mom-and-pop with an appropriately subtle name like GameZTraderZ.

Once inside, there were two methods to find a JRPG. The first was to look for anime. If you spot a game with anime on the cover, and it’s not a Street Fighter, well kid, you’ve got an RPG. The second method was to look for the publisher’s name emblazoned in the corner: SQUARESOFT. In the flood of games suddenly localized to capitalize on the Final Fantasy craze, and with mainstream publications still unsure what to make of the genre, it was often difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. While Squaresoft in the PlayStation era didn’t restrict themselves to publishing only roleplaying games (Who doesn’t remember Tobal №1, after all? The answer is nobody! Nobody doesn’t remember Tobal №1!), players familiar with their Nintendo work recognized their name as a mark of quality. This was especially true in North America, where their lower budget projects (such as Live A Live and, most relevantly, the Romancing SaGa series) were never released. Nearly every one of Square’s games released in North America between 1987 (Final Fantasy) and 1996 (Super Mario RPG) are considered masterpieces to this day.

Funny enough, one of the major exceptions to Square’s North American acclaim were the difficult, eccentric and only moderately well-received spinoff games released on the Nintendo Game Boy: Final Fantasy Legend I-III. In Japan, these games had a different title: SaGa. Don’t worry. We’ll get there.

For now, let’s zoom back to that used game store where a certainly-not-fresh-faced youth has just laid eyes on Squaresoft’s newest release: SaGa Frontier. “A rich and deeply textured RPG,” the back cover proclaims, and nevermind that I have no idea what “deeply textured” means when applied to a video game. This sounded, as we said in the ‘90’s, sweeter’n a big stack of Spawn pogs.

Popping the disc on the spindle and loading it up, it’s immediately apparent that this is not Final Fantasy VII. Gone is the gritty, grown-up cityscape of Midgar. Instead, the opening animation bombards you with a swirl of color better suited to a Teletubbies episode. There are no breathtaking CGI cutscenes or fancy polygonal character models. This is a traditional, sprite-based 2D RPG, a step up from what one might see on the Super Nintendo, but hardly an evolution.

The differences with mainstream JRPGs become more pronounced when starting into the actual game. The player is tasked with choosing one of seven characters based on appearance alone. Guy with blonde hair named Blue? Guy with blue hair named Red? Weird squirrel thing? ROBOT? The choice is yours!

Now, if you had an Uncle Moneybags who bought you a new copy, you received a manual that gave you a little bit of background on the characters. What it didn’t give you is any idea how to play the damn thing. It provided an extremely basic overview of a few of the unique mechanics but spent most of its scant 30 pages providing helpful insight like the following:

Weapons Store: Weapons are sold here. This is a specialty store for heavy weapons.

(There is zero context provided for that second sentence, by the way.)

Surely the in-game tutorials gave some guidance? Oh, my naive 21st century friend. At best, some of the scenarios nudged you toward pertinent information. The mage’s quest points you at learning magic, while the monster’s quest kinda-sorta explains how monster-type characters work. The problem is that this information is ultimately relevant to navigating every character’s scenario, meaning you’ve got a patchwork tutorial at best. The GameInformer review puts it simply: “FF VII and Chrono Trigger have clarity. SaGa has confusion.” To be fair, this was something of the norm in the NES days. Throw the player in the deep end. Sink or swim, baby.

But I no longer lived in the 8-bit era. And thus SaGa Frontier didn’t last long in the Borgard household. After a week or so of fiddling, the disc went back in the case and the case went back to the game store, exchanged for … I don’t know, Wild Arms, probably? That one was pretty good!

And yet. For some reason, SaGa Frontier stuck with me. I found myself doodling the characters I remembered from the cutesy, colorful title screen, replaying the few hours I’d experienced in my head, imagining the stories of the characters I hadn’t touched.

Then I moved.

Moving sucks at the best of times. On the edge of middle school, for a nerdy kid who had never really been out of his hometown, its suckiness is impossible to exaggerate. Most geeks survive adolescence by finding their people. But at my new school in the frostbitten hinterlands of windswept Wyoming, everyone had already found their people. It’s easy to be the new kid when you can, like, shoot a three-pointer with your eyes closed. Harder when your most impressive skill is a No Materia run of Final Fantasy VII.

But the gates to some semblance of social life opened up when I heard a voice at a table behind me chattering away just before class started.

“I got this game called sa-ha, it’s so bad! I’m this crappy little robot and I have no idea what to do.”

“SaGa?” I asked, way too excited to hear a classmate talking about something that wasn’t professional wrestling.

“Oh, yeah. I guess so,” a lanky kid replied. “I’ve been calling it Saha.”

(Don’t laugh at him. The “G” is stylized, the random capitalization the result of weird romanization.)

He and I bonded over this strange, silly game that few other people had even heard of, plinking away at the baffling mechanics for hours after school, making some — some — progress. Message board-sourced “my cousin’s best friend’s brother told him that” rumors were as good as strategy guides. And though, in one Dorito-fueled all-nighter, we did manage to finish a single scenario, my friend ultimately decided the game wasn’t for him. He traded it to me, and there I was, once again owning a game I had originally disliked enough to bounce off after a week.

I could lie and say I went home and spent the next month beating SaGa Frontier into submission, mastering every aspect and squeezing every bit of piping hot content out of its flesh. The truth is that I played SaGa Frontier continuously for years. For, quite literally, multiple decades, I explored the game’s recesses. Finishing one scenario, starting another. Getting sidetracked by new releases. Returning to SaGa only to be confused all over again and starting anew. Online resources cropped up slowly but surely, becoming more useful but no less arcane with every passing year. Somewhere around 2012, I finally finished, putting a nail in the coffin of the final scenario and accessing the debug room you get as a reward for full completion. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more self-satisfied with completing a game.

And as wonderful as that all is, it doesn’t really answer the original question, does it? How did SaGa Frontier do what so many other 90’s JRPGs failed to do: persist? What did I find that merits a blog post, let alone a whole book?

I’m going to show you. In the next eight chapters (one for each of SaGa’s seven protagonists, plus an eighth for the scenario that was cut but which can still be spotted at the seams), I’ll walk you through the ins-and-outs of this weird, not-even-cult classic. I’ll tell you what I think works, what I think doesn’t, how it was inspired by, and went on to inspire, other games. I’ll introduce you to the hackers who rifled through the game’s innards, and the speedrunners who broke it wide open. You’ll see the game how I see it: an art portfolio filled with unfleshed designs, dangling narrative threads and artifacts of ideas jettisoned because their creators ran out of time or interest. If I do my job, you’ll understand that comparison isn’t a criticism.

While you’ll likely tackle this book from cover-to-cover (like, you know, a book!), I’ve taken inspiration from the game itself and written each chapter independently. Feel free to start with 5, circle back to 2 and end with 3. Heck, if you like, act like you have one those chonky memory cards with 50 save slots and flip between chapters, reading one page from each at a time! (please don’t actually do this)

My goal with this book is not to convince you that Big Gaming has hidden the truth, and that SaGa Frontier is secretly a masterpiece, the most expertly designed, quality-tested, gleaming gem of a roleplaying game that has ever existed. Rather, my goal is to convince you this game — and hundreds like it — are valuable precisely because they are none of those things. I don’t intend to cover for lazy, broken cashgrabs. I do intend to advocate for chaos. Perfection is laudable, after all, but frequently boring. Being interesting requires mess.

SaGa Frontier is messy. I wish more games were.