Makai Toushi SaGa (Wonderswan Color, 2002)

 

Someone out there may be wondering: What is Makai Toushi SaGa? It's a colorized remake of the very first SaGa game, which we in the U.S. know as Final Fantasy Legend. Like most Wonderswan Color remakes of 8-bit classic RPGs, it's different enough from the original to check out.

WSC doesn't get enough credit, and I like it more than Game Boy Advance in terms of visuals and sound. Everything is sharper and smoother and the contrast is better. Also the system was developed by Gunpei Yokoi's company Koto Laboratory which is a huge pedigree. The problem is that the West didn't get this system at all, so it was nothing more than a blip on most people's radar here.

UNTIL NOW.

...no, it'll still be a blip. I'm just some guy.

This is very much a "for SaGa fans" type of game. As in you need to really like SaGa and FFL to know about this and give it a whirl.

Wonder what it would have been called if it got an American release. SaGa Origins, probably.

Luckily we've got people who cared enough about the WSC to translate things for it. This game revolves around the Tower of Babel concept where people built a tower to the heavens and things went awry quickly. The interesting thing about this game (and FFL2) is that the world in both consists of a bunch of "layers" or planes and the tower extends up through all of them. Which is kinda like the AD&D version of the world, a physical plane with other planes that extend above and below it. Considering how much early Squaresoft (and, well, everyone else) was inspired by AD&D it isn't surprising.

For a name I decide to go with Boco. Why Boco? Because with the four character limit I couldn't go with my first choice, "Biggus Dickus"

Time to pick classes. Do I finally give the Monster a chance to shine?

IS THE DAY OF THE MONSTER UPON US AT LAST??

Go forth, ScissorBug! Shine! Shine you beautiful bastard!

....nope. Mutants are the most OP by far in this version of the game and it isn't even really worth entertaining anything else. Besides one Human, preferably the lead, for their defense. Since Mutants are called Espers (which is awesome) in the Japanese versions of these early SaGa games, I name my three Mutants after prominent Espers.

One Human to sponge up all the money / stat items / equipment is enough and should stay ahead of the Mutants. Any more than one Human and the Mutants will be consistently ahead on stats just from normal leveling, due to diffusion of the stat items.

While one Monster might be cool for the novelty of it, any more than that is severely gimping your party (and hell, even just one is a bit of a nerf). Attempting this game (or the sequel) with four Monsters would be a huge challenge, maybe even on par with something like 4x White Mage for FF1. Since this game is nowhere near the fun factor of FF1 this hypothetical undertaking has very little appeal.

Some BIG quality of life changes compared to the original. Auto-target just means you don't waste attacks on foes that have already been defeated, plus you can set the game to automatically dash at all times.

As a kid I really liked this game design of having to buy stat increases for your Human characters. Felt like you were customizing their stat growth. At the end of the day it's so basic that you really aren't customizing anything, but it was still cool back in 1999 when I played the original.

Stepping out of the Tower of Babel, we are greeted by a colorful world. Note how WSC's palette is less washed-out and more vibrant than GBA's. Telling you, this system went way too unsung.

In any case, the whole point of this game is to climb the tower and, supposedly, meet God at the top. The mystery of what's actually up there is the big driving force of the game, and as a kid I remember wondering about this because the Game Boy Player's Guide didn't tell you.

For example, check out this space vista. The colors leap off the screen.

As for the game itself, it's pretty much what it was on the Game Boy. Just as weird as ever. It has the burliest goblins of any RPG in the era, and they look more like ogres.

Stat increases for Espers seem to be even more common than in the GB version, hard to say for sure though.

I pool all my money towards powering up Boco and he takes a significant early lead over the Espers. I focused on Str early on and in retrospect I'd have been better off focusing on Agi at first (for Hit Rate %). The most HP you can get from a stat-up is 20, so I reloaded a few times to maximize my HP200s, which was totally unnecessary in retrospect. One thing I wish they would have changed is needing to use HP200s to go from 400* to 999. Would it have killed them to add an HP800 and HP999 later?

* - 400 because HP600s are wildly overpriced and it's far more efficient to just blast through HP200s after that for +1 HP each.

The first quest involves finding the King's Armor, King's Shield, and King's Sword. Unlike the original, they can't be equipped here for huge stat gains that let you farm massive level gains before leaving the first world. Luckily the game is still easy and you can still be maxed out by the halfway point if you want.

King's Armor is just a matter of reuniting this guy with his cyclops-squid hybrid girlfriend. This involves doing the easy Bandit's Cave dungeon which is barely even worth mentioning.

Can't get over how GOOD this overworld looks. The first world is nice and simple, with a few towns, a few castles, and a couple dungeons. This is the kind of thing that made me want to design my own RPGs as a kid (too bad we never got Super Dante here either).

Sword Castle is the next step up in challenge, with tougher foes and wandering guards that need to be avoided because they never disappear. Super weird how you can run into foes and fight them and they won't despawn, which is very similar to Final Fantasy II on the Famicom.

Sword King isn't as nice as Armor King, and you have to battle him for the sword.

With a relatively minor amount of grinding in World 1, I'm so OP that I one-shot this guy.

Finally, the Shield King is killed by his own servant before we get there, which results in our heroes pursuing him into the other room and another boss fight:

This one is also over in one round, and the memorable thing about it is that your heroes slay the guy in cold blood after the fight.

Bring the King's items back to the local statue and put 'em on there and we get our first REAL boss:

The dastardly turtle, Gen-Bu. In Chinese mythology, this is one of the Four Gods that represent the cardinal directions, in this case North. He could also be interpreted to be the elemental fiend of Earth in this game.

I think Genbu is supposed to be a big deal, but it's another one or two round fight if you've been grinding your characters at all. And with the high encounter rate, you're pretty much forced to grind your characters.

Between worlds, you've got a few floors of the central tower to go up to get to the next world. It's a little bit like how the DS Zelda games both have a central dungeon that you unlock further floors in as the rest of the game progresses. With World 1 down, I'm basically 20% of the way through this game already. It's a ten-hour game, at the most.

Next world is the Water-themed world (I guess World One was basically Earth) and has a tropical setting. After this we've got the Sky World (Air), Future World (Fire), and then a bunch of tower floors to reach the big bosses of the game.

HP400 = Up to 20 HP while HP200 = 1 HP at this point, so HP400 is well worth getting. Unfortunately like I mentioned before the same can't be said for HP600 in the next world, where they massively inflated the price and it's much more cost effective to just get HP200s after reaching 400 HP. Which is tedious but I guess you're paying for the less-than-half price with tedium. You'd have to do this after 600 HP anyway, either way. Not sure what they were thinking.

BIG EYE is my favorite FFL1 enemy, no doubt about it. Why? I don't know. Also look at how pretty this is.

This world is confusing. Have to ride these green rock things around the ocean, find this AirSeed, and use that to get to the bottom of the ocean which is another sub-world.

Elsewhere, Boco learns the potent technique of Triple Thrust. He's gotta keep the Espers happy somehow.

At the bottom of the ocean is the undersea castle of the Fiend of Water, Seiryu the Azure Dragon. Representing the direction of East in Chinese mythology.

This dungeon is a PITA because there's a side-room early on with this key, and if you don't find that side-room, you'll get all the way to the end of the dungeon and the boss door is locked and you have to backtrack all the way out.

In here we face the toughest foes yet, like the dastardly team of Shrimp and Red Bone.

Another thing I don't like about this dungeon is the final room. You have to inspect every orb until you find the real one, and every false one is a battle that has to be fought. It gets REALLY tedious really fast.

Seiryu is a big badass, but again the fight is over fairly quickly. Every playthrough of this game seems to go the same way because it's so easy to stat-up your characters whether you mean to or not.

Next step: Get Boco to 400 HP and then grind further HP with HP200s before shops stop selling them. This version of the game has a Teleport ability that I don't remember the original having, so it's much easier to travel between floors/worlds, so there's less reason to have to grind HP before leaving World 2 than there is in the original FFL. Still, Espers can learn new abilities that overwrite Teleport so I'm getting as much HP done as I can stand now.

Another tedious bit follows, where you have to solve this guy's riddle by figuring out what the cost of these items are and then finding an item that perfectly matches that number...somewhere. Yanno, I'm starting to think this game isn't as good as I remember it being from when I was a kid. This is certainly the best version of it, at least.

In the U.S. FFL1 the item is almost always a Battle Sword (sometimes it changes, supposedly). This threw me for a loop in this version until I realized that the Battle Sword's name is Seiryu Sword in this version. Only one shop sells this, so the player gets to run around a lot once they figure out what the number is that they're looking for.

So there you go, buy the Seiryu Sword and hand that to the riddle guy. Another spot where a lot of players would have probably given up on the game back in 2002, if they didn't have a guide or the internet.

This gets us to World 3, the Sky. Probably my favorite part of this game.

We'll see how the rest goes. This is a very solid remake, but surprisingly still pretty rough around the edges for 2002. It deserved better than where I ranked it on the big RPG list, and think I was just put off by the Suzaku thing:

#108. Makai Toushi SaGa (Wonderswan Color) - WSC lands on the big board with this remake of Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy. While they did a great job sprucing it up, adding color, etc, the game still has a lot of fundamental flaws and is consistently janky. The City/Ruins world is somehow even more tedious than the Game Boy version because Suzaku keeps attacking even after you get the bike for some reason. I'll always have a soft spot for this game, despite all of its flaws.

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