Makai Toushi SaGa - Act III

 

The climb continues with the highest reaches of the Tower of Babel. This is still a good game, but I'm feeling the age of it here in 2025. Look at how vibrant the Wonderswan Color is, though. I wish there were more things to play on this system.

PsiSword has turned out to be the best weapon I got in this part of the game, and does significantly more damage than all the other weapons to this point. Especially when equipped on Mutants. I think it might go off of the Magic stat, but not sure. It's good right up to the end of the game, and probably the best weapon I can buy besides the Sun Sword.

Another tedious dungeon follows, the Skyscraper. Why did they design it like this? Fake stairs everywhere, fake walls, fake elevators, a bunch of incomprehensible floors... World 4 just doesn't get any better, and brings this game down a lot.

There's also a tattered subway on the ground level. Considering the paint on the ground, this is a recently-used subway, so this world only recently met the apocalypse of Suzaku. It isn't an ancient subway like the one inexplicably underground in Secret of Mana (Which I speculated was a carryover from when the game was originally going to have some sort of time-travel).

After following Suzaku through a bunch of subway cars (hello Predator 2), our heroes confront him on the roof. Time to deploy this Erase 99! ...whatever it is.

Without invulnerability, it's a pretty standard boss fight, just with more HP than the other fiends. He's the first one to actually last several rounds!

Gang leader's sister thanks our heroes, and that's it for World 4.

Now equipped with all four fiend orbs, the seal opens to the last few floors of the tower. Time to confront Ashura and save the world, or whatever it is that's going on here!

There's one particularly weird tower floor where you find the corpses of a bunch of kids. In the back room is the corpse of the adult that was trying to take care of them, to no avail because they eventually ran out of food. I guess they were stranded up here and couldn't get back down. Why would anyone take a bunch of kids to climb the tower to begin with?

Even weirder is that the adult in question is carrying a NUCLEAR BOMB.

So wait...this guy was carrying a nuke up the tower? Was the idea to blow up the tower? Probably not, he would have just done it. Was his plan to nuke Ashura? It looks like it. But again, why bring a bunch of kids?

Another weird floor contains records of various travellers who attempted to climb the tower in the past, with the floor they reached and the day of their demise. Judging from all the bookcases, this is a very, very long list of failed adventurers.

The most important floor contains a hut with an old guy who gives you the game's strongest (regular) weapon. Excalibur hits super hard and has unlimited charges, making it the perfect weapon for the Human to wield in the endgame. Also renders the Sun Sword obsolete before I even get it, which is unfortunate because I really like the Sun Sword. A similar thing happens in FF1 if you only have one Knight.

There's also the Glass Sword, a one-charge mega-weapon that does huge damage. This was bugged in the Game Boy version and could be used repeatedly, which is not the case here. Glass Sword and Nuclear Bomb are the two big one-charge attacks for the final battle, and I'm gonna need 'em both.

Suffice to say, you can really bork your game by using them before that, and since there's another very tough fight imminent, a lot of players probably did just that. Or worse, used them on random fights.

There's a third super-weapon of sorts, the 3-charge Wavecannon, but it doesn't seem to work on any bosses anyway and is more of just a win button for regular fights. I sold mine to help me afford Sun Swords at the next merchant. In the Game Boy version it's called Hyper and actually works on bosses.

Ashura's floor is now fiery, which definitely wasn't in the Game Boy version.

The enemies on this floor are awful and attack with Death and Petrify, which at this point are basically "hit the reset button" situations if they land and take out some of your party members. Good thing you can save anywhere in this. This floor is short, but it's the single worst room in the game.

Ashura is the underboss of this story, much like Baramos in DQ3, and represents "the devil" to the upper floor's God. An opposition force of sorts, but also created by God as a test. In any case, he offers our heroes jobs as his NEW four kings and of course they decline.

Note: There's a pit trap in the middle of the hallway right before Ashura and it's super-lame because it causes you to have to repeat several floors if you stumble upon it. Very much a "but why?" addition.

Ashura looks a lot like the Skyblazer version of Ashura, and is debatably the toughest fight in the game (I'd say he's the second-toughest myself).

Skyblazer Ashura, incidentally also an underboss.

This is where the game's "save anywhere" becomes both a blessing and a curse. This fight hands me my first loss of the game, but luckily I saved right before it. However, if you get here with an underpowered party, that same save can lock you into a very bad situation, because leaving the tower from here is super difficult if not nearly impossible.

In this case, my group's kinda overpowered and this guy is still formidable. His defenses are sky-high against most weapons.

The main challenge here is refraining from using the Glass Sword or the Nuke, as I paw at both of them in my pockets like they're the One Ring. Must resist! Don't use them!

I unleash Flare, the best offensive spell in the game, as well as...

...PsiBlast, which is a great Mutant skill. Boco did most of the damage with Excalbur, but didn't survive the fight. Either way, the fight is doable without using the super-weapons and it's highly-advisable that you don't. I'd bet that the #1 killer of FFL1 runs towards the end is burning the super-weapons on Ashura and not having them for the final boss. ...that or saving in the upper floors of the tower while in a battered state and getting stuck, also easy to do.

So with Ashura the Lord of Evil defeated, what's left? Is there anything between me and the tower's top? The mystery of what's up there to begin with is almost solved.

Next floor is a copy of the very first floor, with the same town and everything. Eerie. Characters from earlier seem to appear here, all talking about how our heroes are going to leave the world. Is all of this created by the ruler of the tower?

Here's the last shop, and the best shop in the game. The Sun Sword is a tremendous weapon and getting two of them for the Mutants is a huge power boost for them. I say two and not three because the Masamune is coming up. Excalibur is the strongest sword, followed by Masamune, then Sun Sword. The cool thing about the Sun Swords is that they critical hit a lot and do huge damage when they do. Not sure about this "kills undead" thing because we don't really have any undead for the rest of the game. Didn't really have any earlier either, at least not anything that stood out as a threat.

Now equipped with most of my final weapons, I take on the last few floors. They're all short and consist mainly of these escalators that whisk you up from one level to the next, getting randomly attacked all the while. It's like the developers went into "speed mode" to wrap things up at this point.

Having a backup save back in town is a MUST. Getting trapped on these upper floors is an extremely high possibility, and starting the game over would be ridiculous when one is this far along.

Much like the original Final Fantasy, we get rematches with the four fiends in this final leg of the journey. They all have more HP than before (like +40%, about on par with the FF1 upgraded fiends) but since they were such easy fights to begin with, they're still complete pushovers. Would have been cool to see them get revamped into being a real endgame threat, especially poor Genbu here who has never gotten out of round 1.

Another floor! More escalators! This one looks interesting and more unique than the other floors, with a water theme befitting...

...Seiryu 2.0, still a pushover, who gets one-rounded.

IS THERE NO CHALLENGE LEFT IN THIS TOWER? IS THERE NO BALM IN GILEAD?

Another floor, more conveyor belts. As a kid I actually DID get stuck at this point in the game with the original Game Boy version, saving on one of these floors and finding myself totally unable to get back out to hit the Inn because of unavoidable conveyor belt fights. Not sure if I had to restart the entire game or if I found a way to power through, but I think it was the latter.

Byakko 2.0 manages to last a second turn! Can't even really say that these guys are resource-sappers like the four fiends in the last dungeon of FF1 are. More like speed bumps.

Finally, Suzaku. Didn't I just fight this guy an hour ago? Yeah, quick turnaround time on this. He was the only fiend to put up a fight in their first form, so I expect him to do the same here. He's Rubicant, for sure, the strongest of the group.

And again, Suzaku 2.0 is the only one of the four that presents a real fight, since it's well above the others on HP. However, it's nothing compared to Ashura (A-Tier toughness) or the final boss (S-Tier). Pretty much on the B-Tier with Warmech, bosses that feel like legit bosses but aren't going to give you fits or anything, while everything else in the game is like... (E) and could be thrashed by the Whelk.

The very top floor of the tower...is in space, in a cloud platform. They pull a REALLY nasty trick here: It looks like you can probably click the crystal to go back the way you came, but you can't. It does nothing. So if you stop and save once you're up here, you're stuck forever. ....why even have that crystal there, if it does nothing? Just have a blank space so it's obvious you're stuck here and can make an informed choice on whether to save or not.

There's no inn and no way to grind here, so you have to beat the final boss with whatever you've got now, in whatever shoddy state the party is in. It's a truly awful trick. Wonder how many FFL1 runs ended in bullshit hard-locks like this.

Turns out the big boss at the top of the tower is... GOD. Yep, a lot of Japanese RPGs insinuate that you gotta fight metaphors for God, but here we have one that just straight-up cuts to the chase and tells you to FIGHT GOD.

The prevalence of "church is evil" in JRPGs has a reason behind it, going back to Japan's contentious relationship with western religions over the past few hundred years. It's something I'll probably get into a lot more whenever I finally play Breath of Fire 2, as that game has elements of this subject more than most.

So...everyone else who climbed the tower to see what was up here and become heroes...all just sorta died, while this guy sat up here and observed the feeble mortals and their attempts. We're the only ones to ever get past Ashura.

God is fairly androgynous in this version, and serves as the game's toughest fight. Yes, tougher than Ashura, which is why it's crucial to bring the superweapons here.

Time to NUKE GOD. Also Glass Sword. However, I actually lost this first fight because I did those things too early. Ya see, combined those do about 1400 damage. The boss has around 5000 HP. He gets more and more powerful as the fight goes on, and starts spamming Flare once he loses around 3000 HP. He'll also fully heal after several rounds of Flare if he isn't downed yet, which means the fight is over. So you want to wait on the super-moves until late in the fight.

Once he's lost about 3000 HP, that's the time to unleash hell and finish him as fast as possible before he full heals or wipes out the party with Flares. So save the super-weapons, count your damage, and go FULL BURN once you've done over 3000.

On the second fight, I played it cool and counted damage until I knew I was over 3000, then blasted the super-weapons and my strongest attacks to finish things in two more rounds (he won't full heal until like four or five). No problem. This could go badly very easily and I'm not sure if I could have won this if I'd used the super weapons earlier in the game, due to that full heal. It could well be a soft-lock here, especially with me not being able to leave and further power up (what little power there still is to gain).

There's a gateway up here and it's implied that it leads to our world. Yes, us, the ones holding the Wonderswan. Curiously, this same idea would be revisited many years later in Lightning Returns, where at the end Lightning walks through a portal and ends up appearing in our world, along with lots of other folk from her world. Basically the message is that she and her people could be walking the Earth with us today (or their descendants are), travelers from a distant planet.

As for Makai Toushi SaGa, what a strange game. This WSC remake had the opportunity to remake things and really smooth out the edges, and...it didn't do much in that regard. Most of the improvements are visual, and auto-targeting the next foe was a welcome change, but I wish they would have gone further with fixing things and making SaGa 1 reach its potential (which to this day, it never has). Still worth a run, and I can't say enough good things about the WSC.

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