Makai Toushi SaGa for Wonderswan Colour, impressions

Wonderswan box art.

So if I say to you I've recently played Makai Toushi SaGa, you've probably never heard of it. If I tell you it was released on the Wonderswan Colour, you'd probably be even more confused. And if I was to tell you it's a remake of the original Final Fantasy Legend for the Gameboy........ you'd probably still don't know what I'm talking about, but since there's "Final Fantasy" in the title, you may be compelled to respond with "ohh...... that one......"

Allow me to Elaborate.

SaGa is Square's other RPG series back in the 90s, before the likes of Front Mission, Chrono, Parasite Eve and Kingdom Hearts. It started with Final Fantasy 2, not the SNES version starring Cecil and Rosa, the real FF2. You know, the weird one. ("Ohhh.... that one...") Exactly. So anyway, there's a genius on Square's payroll named Akihiko Kawazu, whom worked on FF2, didn't know whether he was a director or one o' the big wigs at the time (and too lazy to do any proper research) but a lot of his progressive ideas were implemented into the game, mainly one of SaGa's key principals, "you improve what you do". Make sense right? If you keep doing a certain thing, you would get better and better at it, just like real life. This translated into the game via random stat improvement based on what you do in battle, eg, your strength improve when you attack physically, magic improve when you use magic, endurance improve when you get hit, etc. But it was too progressive and hipster for the by-the-numbers crowd of the 80s.

So I guess panic must've spread through the Square office when the customers may or may not have reacted to FF2 with "it's not FF1 with different characters", so somebody wanted Kawazu out of FF but I guess the union must've frowned upon sacking the driftwood, so some bright spark from HR must've came up with brilliant idea of letting Kawazu have his OWN RPG series. The entire world breathed a sigh of relief at the compromise, as Square is able to build the FF franchise into what it is today (that is, even more of a let down than FF2) while Kawazu gets to do his arts and crafts project with the B-team, you know, like that episode of The Simpsons where Marge baked a cake but wouldn't let Homer touch it, instead made a second cake for Homer to ruin.

So Kawazu created Makai Toushi SaGa (or just SaGa for short) for the Gameboy in 1989...... and to everyone's surprise, people actually liked it and the game sold and made a profit (conjecture only, seeing as the game went on to spawn 8 sequels and countless remakes, but if I'm wrong with the assumption SaGa 1 was profitable, Square's even dumber than I thought).

When the time came to possible localisation for the Western market, the marketing manager may or

The towns are simple like FF1.
NPCs also say vague things like FF1.

may not have reacted "what the **** is a saga? Slap Final Fantasy on it and call it a day" (a strategy they upheld even today, except even the Japanese division has adopted *looks over at Crystal Chronicles*) so the first 3 SaGa games were renamed Final Fantasy Legends 1-3. Talk about false advertising, you were innocently thinking you're supporting the Final Fantasy office when you've unassumingly bought into the rival

So what is the game about? If you've played any of the Disgaea games you'd know that Makai is something like "Demon's world", and Toushi roughly translates to something like "tower warrior". So the premise of the game is to climb a tower, which connects multiple words on different levels, with the end goal of killing god (and you Xenogears hipsters thought your game was "ahead of its time" or "controversial", but as you see, it's been done). The game is fairly short. There's only 4 worlds, and each has its own (basic) story, and at the end you fight one of the 4 Japanese/Chinese direction gods (Suzaku, Byakko etc) and unlock the next world.

I don't remember having played the original Gameboy version (I may have played like 5 minutes or something) so this is the first time I've played the game. You get to create a team of 4 (not unlike FF1) and you get to choose between Human, Esper (or Mutant as per GB version) and monster. Having played SaGa Frontier on the Playstation to death, I am quite familiar to the races as SF is the only modern SaGa game to adopt the race system of the GB games.

So at first I created 2 Humans, 1 Esper and 1 Monster...... and after a few battles none of my Humans have improved yet the Esper has. I soon learned, Humans in SaGa 1 do not improve via fights as per later games, they actually act more like mechs from later games. They can equip anything and have 8 slots, and you "buy" stats upgrades.

After learning this, I restarted the game and made 2 Espers, 1 Human and 1 Monster. The Espers are very strong. They're like a mix of the best of Humans and Mystics in SaGa Frontier. They randomly receive stat upgrades after each fight, and they randomly learn up to 4 abilities, although any learned abilities could randomly be switched with something else, so they're a little unpredictable that way. However some of the abilities they get are so overpowered. Deathgaze and Stonegaze basically murders everything in the first half of the game, including the 4 world bosses.

Boss looks menacing....
...except it's vulnerable to instant death.

As for Monsters, when you beat a enemy Monster, there is a chance they leave behind some meat, and if your Monster eats it, it'll morph into a different Monster, however neither Monsters nor Humans' damage output seem to come near to Espers.

So I breezed through the first 3 worlds. The 4th world gave me trouble, since rushing through the previously worlds with Espers made my team sorta weak, so lots of save and load abusing was required to get through world 4. And more and more enemies seem to have gaze immunities, which was what I counted on to win fights previously lol. Yes I'm lazy.

So I've clocked about 3 and half hours. The game is probably around 6 hours long, not bad. But I probably won't go back to finish it. It's becoming repetitive and the encounters are becoming a chore, especially since the Human seem to be dead weight, even after much investment into bumping up his stats. But at least I have a pretty good idea of how the game plays now.

Oh and in case you were wondering, I played this on a emulator from the fan translated rom. And I do own the original Wonderswan cart and a Wonderswan Colour.