There are three facts that you probably need to know before reading much further into this review of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song - Remastered International:

1. Aside from the newly localized scripts, this is the same game that Square Enix originally released in 2022, which was itself a remaster of a 2005 game that was a remake of a Super Nintendo RPG from the 90s. Unless you were never able to enjoy the original Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered because you exclusively play video games in French, Spanish, Italian, or German, then there is nothing in this package that can be considered “new.”

2. I am the kind of player who gets his ass absolutely handed to him by the SaGa series's obtuse and complex layers of crunchy role-playing mechanics. If you're looking for a comprehensive breakdown and explainer of the myriad ways that Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song will chew you up, spit you out, and leave your remains for the buzzards, then this review probably won't be for you. I'm not ashamed to admit that I pretty much have to have three different wikis and a couple of walkthroughs on hand at all times to get through even one of this game's eight different character campaigns.

I have become absolutely obsessed with the entire SaGa franchise over the last couple of years. I've collected every available title for my Nintendo Switch, and each of the games has become a pet-favorite puzzle box for me to untangle, despite how much trouble they can give me. So, if you are someone who didn't play this game back in 2022, and maybe you don't have any idea if you'd ever be interested in checking this franchise out, then this might be just the review for you.

A fair warning to you, though: They say that SaGa fever can be quite catching.

Here's the general rundown for anyone who is, as I was, unfamiliar with what a “SaGa” was, and why anyone should care: In Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, it will only take you a minute to realize that this game is not like other RPGS published by the venerable Square Enix. In fact, it's not like most Japanese RPGs you are likely to have played. The best way I can describe it is that the game represents the series' general ethos, which is what would happen if you put the classic Nintendo-era Final Fantasy tropes into a blender with a bunch of esoteric table-top RPG rulebooks and a couple of your favorite niche European boardgames into a blender.

The eight playable protagonists all have about as much backstory and personality as you could fit in the “Description” box of an AD&D character sheet. Experience points are tossed out and replaced with skills that are awarded at random through “Glimmers” and player stats that are upgraded through repeated use in battle after learning the basics from various trainers. Instead of a single quest that unites every character, you have a world map separated into various nodes that all contain different quests which can be completed in any order…provided you don't miss them entirely on account of the game's constantly ticking Event Rank that moves forward with every cleared battle. This is the same Event Rank, of course, that also determines enemy level scaling, meaning that grinding enemy mobs actually makes battles harder, and quest rewards more challenging to obtain.

In short, this is a series that eschews tight, narratively-driven experiences in favor of an interlocking series of incredibly complicated battle and character progression systems that reward exploration, curiosity, and a willingness to be completely lost in the sauce for extended periods of time. If all of this sounds overwhelming and difficult to wrap your head around, that's because it totally can be. If it makes you assume that the SaGa series isn't for you, though, I'd recommend holding off on passing judgment. The best thing about the SaGa games - which is also the hardest thing to actually articulate, naturally - is the way that it takes all of its potentially frustrating and confusing elements and produces an experience that is just so supremely satisfying and addictive. All you have to do is get on the game's wavelength.

Once you acclimate to Akitoshi Kawazu's uncompromising vision for what a role-playing game can be, you begin to understand that all of that freedom and exploration make the experience endlessly customizable and unique to each player. Since the game is meant to be played through as multiple characters, multiple times, the typical pressure to plow straight through an RPG campaign is transformed into an urge to experiment, mess around, and learn from valuable failures. Did you completely miss a huge quest trigger because you spent too much time beating up monsters in the caves outside of town? Keep that in mind for the next round. Did the class combinations you assigned to Albert, Sif, and Claudia completely fail to synergize? Take those lessons into account and try a completely different combo. If nothing else, this is one of the crowning examples of a role-playing game that puts 95% of its effort into the game part of the experience. If Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song gets its hooks into you, you'll likely find that there are few other titles out there that scratch the RPG itch in quite the same way.

That said, there are issues with the game that a new batch of language packs hasn't fixed. While I love the game's oddball aesthetic, where all of the characters look like woodcraft dolls that have been brought to live in a watercolor fantasy world, the plain textures and simple models of the game are very obviously borne from a twenty-year-old PlayStation 2 game that was not exactly given the same budget as, say, Final Fantasy XII. Likewise, for as much as I love the SaGa games' willingness to just let players die a hundred times while they figure half of the game out for themselves, Minstrel Song can still be the wrong kind of obtuse. This is mostly due to the incredibly vague and honestly pretty terrible script, which I cannot imagine is going to impress anyone in any of its languages.

It's one thing to have a simple, modular story that forgoes complex dialogue to accommodate the eight thousand different directions a player can go exploring in. It's another thing entirely to have conversations sound stilted and nonsensical in ways that simply do not communicate enough information to be useful to players. There are too many times where Minstrel Song's cutscenes veer into the latter territory. Thankfully, this is a game where the plot and characters are really more about providing a hook upon which to hang hours of questing and playing around with the combat mechanics. When you combine that with the series' consistently excellent music, you have an experience that is much more about mood and atmosphere than any particular story or character.

Finally, since this is my opportunity to get all of my Romancing SaGa feelings out there, I hate the Event Rank system. I totally understand why it exists, and I think the SaGa games all benefit from having a method to force players forward, but the Event Ranks make new players feel like they will be punished for trying to grind and get stronger, only for them to then run into a quest that is simply impossible to beat without getting stronger. It's not the fun kind of tension that comes from perfectly executed mechanical friction; it's just stressful and confusing. The fights are the best parts of any SaGa game, and it is weird to incentivize running away from half of them.

If you had asked me a couple of years back, when this lifelong affliction of SaGa-itis first took hold of me, I probably would have told you that Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song was the perfect gateway drug to get hooked on the franchise. It worked for me, after all. Now, though, that crown has been handily stolen by Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, which contains all of the fun SaGa open-endedness and much less of its frustration. Still, it can only be a good thing that Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song - Remastered International has made this bizarre little cult classic more easily accessible for fans all over the world. Soon enough, the contagion of SaGa obsession will spread, and Square Enix will be forced to spend millions of dollars into a glossy remake of Romancing SaGa 3, or an entire new trilogy devoted to an impossibly expensive retelling of SaGa Frontier 2. Come on, Takashi Kiryu, President of Square Enix - I know you're reading this. Cloud, Tidus, Lightning - they had their reign on the throne. It's SaGa's time to reign.