romancing saga: minstrel song
a videogame by square-enix for sony playstation2
a review by tim rogers
1/2


What a mess this game is. There's hardly one element of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song that rubs against another element without creating some kind of distorted havoc. The latest train wreck by acclaimed producer Akitoshi Kawazu, the closest thing videogames have to an Ed Wood, Minstrel Song represents two years in production during which the team played a score of better games and came away not understanding a whit of what made any of them good.

I personally have followed Mr. Kawazu's career with a kind of perverse anxiety over the years. I know that he got his start as the lead producer of Final Fantasy II, which was developed in 1987 concurrently with Final Fantasy; Kawazu's assignment, in this case, had been to make a role-playing game in which the player is left in charge of four characters. Kawazu's take on this task differed so radically from Hironobu Sakaguchi's that one gets the impression he had a faulty microphone planted in Sakaguchi's planning room and was trying, earnestly, to make the same exact game. In Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy, players select four characters of six different classes, name those characters, and see them grow and develop with regards to strength and equipment as you progress through the game. In Final Fantasy II, the player is stuck with four people who have names listed in the instruction manual, who have personalities based on some penciled-in script about evil empires and virtuous resistance factions, four people who gain and lose statistical numbers through unseen means during stages of combat. In that game, it's possible to reach the last dungeon, in the depths of the earth as it were, and be forced to restart the game because your characters have fought too many battles, screwing their numbers up to the point where the enemies are so exponentially stronger as to render a battle winnable only by a statistical miracle. Anything less and you're dead. Waiting on statistical miracles can be very frustrating. Just ask my ex-girlfriend.

Final Fantasy III was developed once more by Sakaguchi's men. The rumor has it that Final Fantasy is called "Final Fantasy" because Squaresoft, fledgling computer games company, had enough capital to make just one last game, and if that game was a winner, they would be able to make another. This is mostly true -- in truth, they had enough to make two more games, though only enough to finish one. When Final Fantasy was released and it made money, they turned over Final Fantasy II, which made even more money just because of the number in its title. So it was that more attention was paid to Final Fantasy III, and it was a better game because of it, much as I'd still rather play Final Fantasy V instead.

Since he was the man responsible for Final Fantasy II, and since Final Fantasy II made money, Akitoshi Kawazu was given a promotion and his own team of producers. He shortly began work on a game called SaGa for the brand-spanking-new Nintendo Gameboy portable system. SaGa was released in America as The Final Fantasy Legend, and as a game, it's a filthy mess. Players choose their characters from a field of "human" and "mutant," and then wander around confused until they kill God, and when that happens, it feels kind of like an accident. The pea-green color of the screen has something to do with it. No God I know could be killed in any less than sixteen colors. In SaGa, human characters are able to upgrade their strength by buying hit-point upgrades. "HP200" will increase your hit points slightly toward 200. "HP400" moves you toward 400. The ultimate "HP600" moves you toward your final goal of 600. Mutants are much an indicator of the way the SaGa series is going to play out in the future, in that they behave mysteriously and gain hit-points and status enhancements seemingly out of thin air. Every once in a while, a mutant will earn a magic spell in his or her inventory for no reason. When it pops up, you start using it. You can also have monsters in your party, and they're more chaotic. It's possible for a monster to run out of attacks and then be totally useless. You can kick him out or make him eat the meat of another monster, which may or may not make him stronger.

In the end, the game is as wishy-washy as it is dirty. The story revolves around a tower that leads to Heaven, and there are four worlds, each ruled by one of the four Chinese compass gods, on the way up. There's Boring Regular World, there's Ocean World, there's Sky World, and then there's Post-Apocalyptic World. The latter is the most interesting. In it, Kawazu shows off his flair for vehicles and gives players a super-fast hovering motorbike, which as many as five people can disappear into at prudent plot points.

This game, being the only RPG on the Nintendo Gameboy, had a stranglehold on the market. Much as Nintendo's handheld has traditionally been the only option for people who want to play videogames on the bus, SaGa was the only option if you wanted to play Dragon Quest on the bus -- it wouldn't be until the Gameboy Color version in 1996 that players actually got to play Dragon Quest on the bus -- and as such, it filled many commutes for many gamers, and can now be found in-box new for about 300 yen. A lot of people -- myself included -- were quick to get rid of it when they felt the time had come where they didn't need to play a role-playing game on the bus, or even train, anymore. By this time, however, the damage was done, and Kawazu was a hero to his company. Like a Chinese general after a big battle in Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, he was awarded more men, larger quarters, and a bigger military budget. Soon, he was making games for the top-secret Nintendo Super Famicom, and his first offering was Romancing SaGa, which would bring the on-the-bus action of SaGa and SaGa 2 and SaGa 3 to a place that was not the bus. Like Hironobu Sakaguchi after Final Fantasy IV, no one watched Kawazu or, really, cared what he was doing, and this went on for more than a decade. He was able to make the biggest, dumbest blunders when it comes to game design, and hell -- he still is. Judging by the sales of Minstrel Song -- released during the Golden Week of holidays, it sold more than two million copies to mistaken gamers who thought they remember the name Romancing SaGa for good reasons -- he'll be allowed to go on making games a little bit longer. Unlike Hironobu Sakaguchi, Kawazu has yet to do anything like "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," the multi-hundred-million-dollar motion picture fiasco that resulted in Sakaguchi being relegated to a corner of an office in Hawaii (until he worked up the guts to start his own company just recently), and as far as dreck-rakers go, though I've never met him, I'm certain Akitoshi Kawazu is a funny guy who waves his hands around when he talks about his big ideas. You giggle at him for a few minutes until he pauses from his Shakespearean soliloquy to ask you why you're laughing, and you realize with a snap that he's dead serious.

If we revist the original SaGa for a moment, we'll see the trend that sets up the rest of Kawazu's career -- the game, though the player holds it in his hands, never lets us feel comfortable. There are innumerable ways to screw up so that you might wind up standing at the feet of the final boss, one step away from engaging him in conversation and beginning the final battle, and be hopelessly unable to win. This is because there's a weapon called the "Glass Sword," the only weapon that can hurt him, and you can only get it between the fourth floor of the tower and the top, where you fight a being called Ashura, who sends you back to the bottom. The next time you enter the tower, it's an all-new straight shot to the top. You can no longer find that one tiny little far-off hidden room on the way to Ashura's place. Had you forgotten to pick it up, the Glass Sword remains not yours forever, and you cannot beat the final boss. Even more interestingly, the Glass Sword, like most weapons in the game, can only be used fifty times before it vanishes forever. The charm of the game is, supposedly, that each hero can store as many weapons as he sees appropriate, and use them on enemies as he wishes. So our human party leader can be carrying a sword, a machinegun, a fire spell, a whip, and a punch. (Yes, a punch is an inventory item.) Some weapons have higher damage-dealing capabilities than others, though who's to tell, really, what's what? You use the weapons, you kill the monsters, and you move on.

Yet there is always an inscrutable dread. The earliest console RPGs all had this dread -- Final Fantasy had it in spades, only it was the kind of dread that gave preteen boys goosepimples and caused them to hit each other in the shoulder and scream "USE THE POTION" while they were running out of the Marsh Cave, the game's first formidable dungeon, escaping sorcerors with squid-heads and poisonous spiders. Every dungeon after the Marsh Cave just felt kind of redundant, and we were conditioned, by then, to just stock up on 99 potions before any dungeon no matter what. Still -- every curve of the dungeon walls seemed positioned to scare young children and excite young adults. What was the player afraid of, you ask? Well, game over. Game over meant starting back at the last save -- of course you save right before going in -- and regrouping. Game over isn't such a bad thing, really -- it gives you time to readjust your focus, and maybe gain some more levels. Gaining levels is good; as Dragon Quest taught the men who went on to make Final Fantasy, there's nothing that can't be accomplished with a good leveling-up session.

SaGa revels in making the player feel as though his chances are running out. Final Fantasy makes a young player walk around in circles for six hours to save up enough money to buy a Silver Sword, which will make the Marsh Cave objectively 30 times easier. The Final Fantasy player feels much like a young boy being given an electric guitar; he knows that, with practice, he can one day rock the Budokan. The SaGa player, when the bus ride ends and he's home after work sitting against the balcony door with a cigarette and a bottle of beer, feels like an aging hipster who has, literally, one last chance to impress a crowd with his rock and roll. SaGa revels in making the player feel sick and lonely. In its fourth world, the post-apocalyptic one, non-player characters are set up like stick figures or finger puppets; members of a resistance group, they are raging against Suzaku, a giant malicious phoenix who eventually, over the course of four hours, devours and destoys them all one-by-one, as we learn their names. No doubt Kawazu thought this was funny. It's not funny. It's mean. The ten-year-old me wanted to wag my finger at Kawazu like I was his mother and he'd just pushed a kid down the stairs at school. It was a naughty thing to do, and the game just kept doing it, again and again. Surprises heaped on surprises until the story, which no one really cared about in the first place (we were just gaining levels on the bus, see), had contradicted itself into nothingness. So the tower goes to Heaven, and the being at the top is evil? Okay? Though he's not really the real god -- the other guy is, and he's evil too? The player's so numerically being in control of his characters progress turned out to be a sneering curse as well, like, "Yeah, you thought we'd keep giving you these hit-point upgrades, huh? Well! No! 600 is all you get! Now you're weak, and the monsters are strong! You'd best start running!"

In order to gain more hit points in Kawazu's Final Fantasy II, as I discuss in my review, the second-best method is to attack your own party members, reducing them to critical status, when there is only one weakened, perhaps incapacitated enemy on the screen. Then defeat the enemy, and watch your hit points grow. There is also a magic spell called "swap" that allows you to simply switch your hit-points with that of a weak monster -- maybe a goblin, with six hit-points, who you then blow away with your staggering strength, even if he has 400 hit points, now. When the battle is over, you find your hit points have exploded. That the game has a magic spell with so auspicious a use indicates that Kawazu is, on deep, frightening levels, aware of the gears that turn behind games. Before RPGs were a genre that even had its own official abbreviation, Kawazu was aware of and toying with, in true postmodern fashion, the elements of the game that most appeal to the player's heart. I remember seeing one schoolkid screaming over another in 1991 at a screenshot of Final Fantasy IV, saying, "Look, you start the game with 200 hit points!!" That kid reminded me of something like the inverse of the entire SaGa series, which had yet to even begin in all its glory. A decade and most of a half of a decade later, Kawazu's odd little series of train wrecks is the only videogame that gets its own devoted, fawning board on 2chan.net, where Japan's anonymous elite geeks gather to conspire and lie about what beverages they are drinking at this very moment.

So suffice it to say that I hold in my heart the deepest respect for Akitoshi Kawazu when I say that his games all, historically, suck long and hard. Kawazu himself, now seventeen years older and more mature than the man who made Final Fantasy II a bloody mess in the name of experimentation, told Famitsu's Hirokazu Hamamura in an interview back in April, "Yeah, I'm aware that the games I've made have never been, you know . . . good." I read this sentence in a 7-Eleven in Minami-Senju, and my knees buckled. Wow. Wow, I thought. The man's last game was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, an utter mess that, at first glance, seems to mean well, though in the end, it doesn't. All he did was supervise that one. It wasn't his production. Before that, he'd made Unlimited SaGa, his worst game ever. Unlimited SaGa is a player-hating parade of 200 random battles during which player-characters evolve in mysterious ways none of which will, at the end of the day, make any sense. A marred pile of dreck worse in concept and execution than even "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," Unlimited SaGa nonetheless sold more than a million copies, turned profits, sold to unsuspecting Americans in unnecessarily localized form (unnecessarily in that Western gamers probably would have understood the game's glee in raping them a lot more had the text been left entirely in Japanese; it's not like the menu choices correspond to what actually happens, anyway), and kept Kawazu's boat afloat. I personally beheld Unlimited SaGa like I'd been turned into a child long enough to have a nightmare and then be turned back into an adult and have the same nightmare again. Though I played it only three hours, and even then not entirely willingly, it was enough to make me recall my neighbor Heath in Wichita, Kansas, back when I was seven. He could beat Ninja Gaiden in one life, and once he showed me and my brother Ultima: Exodus on his computer. He wandered around the first town, and showed me his list of options -- how you can choose to order your party (which trails behind you for effect, something the party in Final Fantasy sure wouldn't do), equip items and magic, talk to townspeople, or even fight them. I thought the final option curious. Why would you fight a townsperson? Heath replied, "Because you can. The game gives you the choice." He then saved the game and attacked a little girl. She only had four hit points. He had eighty. He killed her in one move. "Look at this, though," Heath said. The little girl had been replaced with a big, burly-looking castle guard in black and reddish attire. Heath killed a few more townspeople. In a few moments, the entire town was full of guards. Heath let me press the button that initiated conversation with one of them -- a battle began, in which Heath's party, led by the fighter "HEAT," was outnumbered by six guards of 300-something hit points each. The battle was over in a moment. Flash forward fifteen years, where my little brother would tell me "Dude, I bought this game for six bucks at Big Lots and it's called Fallout 2 and in it you can totally kill anybody." Flash back to Unlimited SaGa -- in a game with paper-thin characters and no logic to its systems of statistical progression, losing battles (which happens, and happens a lot) feels a lot like being served justice. The question, however, is justice for what? Recommended reading would be Franz Kafka's The Trial on this one.

Kawazu's earlier PlayStation-era monsterpieces included SaGa Frontier and SaGa Frontier 2, neither of which are good games in the least. The former has big sloppy sci-fi vehicles that carry your characters from world to world because, as Kawazu predicted in a Famitsu interview, people don't like having to wait tens of hours for the airships in Final Fantasy; they want to fly right away. Kawazu would then say, of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, that players "Don't care" if a character's village has been burned down, or if his parents are dead -- all they want is to make the game their "own thing." Much as I disagreed with this, I found it miraculous that the same man as said players hate waiting for vehicles would say such a thing. Even though, you know, it's kind of the same sentiment. It's just a different side of the same sentiment.

SaGa Frontier 2 has fans and little else. The fans like the art design, which places every scene in the game on beautiful scanned watercolor paintings. It was at the time and is even now a wonderful change of pace from Final Fantasy VII, which used apocalyptic-looking backgrounds. Frontier 2 marked the first time Kawazu scooped Final Fantasy in aesthetic devolpment; Romancing SaGa 2 was an imitator of Final Fantasy V, the god-awful dungeon-slag Romancing SaGa 3 was a spitting image of Final Fantasy VI, and the first Frontier's graphics were a pale imitation of Final Fantasy VII. Frontier 2 sold to newcomers on its interesting graphics alone. I owned the game as well. It is important to note that I did not beat it. I have finished no Akitoshi Kawazu games outside SaGa, because I don't think it's possible to finish most of them, even though it usually feels like it should be.

This brings us, at long last, to Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, which continues the trend established in SaGa Frontier 2 and carried through to Unlimited SaGa, wherein a SaGa game seeks not to imitate a Final Fantasy with its graphics, and instead looks something like its own creative beast. The characters in Minstrel Song are huge-headed veritable monsters of people who run with Muppet-like bobbling waddles. Sometimes the graphics glaze over into a fine and utterly amazing hard-edged watercolor-and-pen-drawn visual style that resembles a breathing painting. It'd be nice if the entire game looked like this, and it'd be a perfect explanation as to why the game sold so well. Only it doesn't, and it isn't; the game most of the time resembles an RPG with a mildly moving three-dimensional camera that follows characters with larger heads than usual. The occasional interludes of the moving-watercolor style make one wish the game had some other underlying ingenuity which it clearly doesn't. Radiata Stories, also released in 2005, manages to open with a storybook look and roll onto into a game with a pleasant visual style that doesn't at all resemble a storybook; what I'm saying is it's possible, even in this jaded gaming age, to make a game that contains two visual styles, each of them unique and interesting. Minstrel Song has one, and it doesn't use it.

The story of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song is that there's a mythical world, and it's in danger. Eight brave people from eight different nations each rise to eight different challenges and set out on eight different quests with eight different goals, all of those goals in the context of this world where things are, they say in the Bible, "going wrong." Kawazu has made foour games in this mold already -- the original Romancing SaGa trilogy and SaGa Frontier, and it's important to note, as Kawazu did in Famitsu, that for Minstrel Song, he's taking the mold back to its roots, and simply reusing the same eight characters as he used in Romancing SaGa: "They were a good group. I liked them." What I see this as is a confession that none of the Romancing games actually worked at doing what it had set out to do; Kawazu elaborates, that "In Minstrel Song, I wanted a chance to rethink the execution of the form without worrying about the contents." Such words on paper are as respectable a sight as that of a warrior sharpening his sword; such a noble goal has allowed Kawazu to produce what I will gladly place on a pedestal right here and now as his best game to date.

It's just still not very good. At all.

What makes a SaGa game, this one in particular, unique these days, something to put on the back of the box, if you want:

MORE STATISTICS! MORE NUMBERS! MORE ATTRIBUTES! MORE PARTY MEMBERS! MORE OPTIONS DURING BATTLE! MORE BUTTON PRESSES REQUIRED TO GET A FIGHT STARTED, NOT TO MENTION FINISHED! MORE BATTLES! MORE THINGS THAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN YOU CHOOSE ONE OPTION! LESS LOGIC BINDING THE WORLD TOGETHER! GUARANTEED!

You begin the game by choosing your protagonist. What's important to note is that once you choose this person, there's no turning back. You have to play as them until the end of their quest before you're allowed to choose another protagonist and play his or her quest. This is, right off the bat, a slightly unnecessary unkindness to the player. What if the player decides he suddenly wants to try another quest, yet doesn't want to give up the progress he'd made as one character? No good, says Kawazu. On the one hand, it's interesting that such a hard choice be imposed on the player right away, and it shows you what kind of person the player is to see who they choose. There's the vanilla guy, prince Albert, just come of age in his little seaside kingdom, who wears -- I kid you not -- fairy-princess wings on his back; there's Aisha, the vanilla girl, who has a horse, though hell if you get to ride it; there's Jamil, the chocolate-flavored guy, who's a little more interesting than Albert and wears a better hat; Claudia, the chocolate girl, who lives at one with nature and dresses in green; Hawk, the giant, hideous pirate captain; Sif, the giant, broad-chested girl-prince of an ancient tribe of feral people; Gray, a token brooding bounty hunter; and Barbara, a gypsy dancing girl. Not a single one of these characters, least of all the pirate captain, has a sense of humor. Just as the "Star Wars" prequel movies suffer without a "Han Solo" character who doubts everything and is cynical, so Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song writhes under the force of its melodrama. Every story scene in the vanilla hero Albert's quest, for example, consists of Albert bowing, speaking -- very loudly -- in honoriffic language, and being very much agrieved that his town has been burned down by giant monsters and his parents and family members killed. The pirate captain behaves like the president of a small company that makes and packages Sytrofoam peanuts. The people in the game are pulled along by the train-engines of the story, and every little train engine is cute and holdable in the palm of one's hand: "Okay, so he's going here because his family and kingdom was wiped out." It's otherwise nothing to get emotionally worked-up about. When Albert tries to reach the kingdom his father urged him urgently to try to go to, his ship is wrecked in a storm, and he's blown far off-course, to a whole other continent, one covered in ice. The mayor of the little ice village says, yeah, he'll help Albert out, if Albert proves his worth and kills the monster in the cave to the west. This is funny, because on the day Albert's home got burnt down, as part of a coming-of-age ritual, he had to kill a monster in a cave to the east. The cave to the east looked like something by a seaside, and it spiralled down and inside, and each battle halted with a little tutorial explaining to us that our characters all carried various weapons, weapons that break with repeated use, and weapons that can be used in various ways. Eventually we find a large bat, which screams like Dracula and attacks us. In the case of the ice continent, we take the mayor's daughter and walked west of town, find a cave, and go in. There's the monster, just standing there, waiting for us! Ha! We attack it and get completely destroyed. That's game over. Reload the save and -- shit -- you're back in the first town. Do remember to save frequently. You do that at the inns in various towns -- you know, the inns where you have three options of types of rooms to stay in.

In order to kill the monster in the cave to the west and receive the information that what you're looking for is north, which then allows you to leave your current section of map and head north, you need to get stronger. Getting stronger is a curious process. There is an optional dungeon in the area, one that is so full of monsters -- you can see them walking around, though in the grand tradition of Chrono Trigger that doesn't make it all the more possible for you to avoid them -- you might throw up your dinner. One fight might be enough to kill you. Or it might not! You might win! If you win, you find your hit points restored and your dead party members revived. This makes Minstrel Song interesting once again on paper -- the grind of the game prepares you to fight one battle. In a dungeon, all you're doing is fighting a string of one-battle sequences, so to speak. Lose a battle and you die; win a battle and you receive random statistical increases (no more purposely allowing yourself to be injured so as to crank up your hit point maximums), then are thrown into the overworld, where you fight another one. This makes delving into dungeons perversely entertaining, and you can only delve so far until you die. It's possible to have not saved the game in ten hours, and be playing the game on memory-file saves that evaporate after being resumed, and to resume a save deep into a dungeon, die, and lose everything. And with the unpredictable nature of the battles, that's a huge possibility. Furthermore, the game makes no efforts to caution you about how huge of an asshole it's going to be once you leave town. It'd rahter you figure it out for yourself.

Occasionally, during battle, a lightbulb will appear over a character's head, and he or she will learn a new attack. These attacks are usually devastating, and they're never more devastating then when you learn a particularly good one, die, and then resume your saved game without it, hoping for twelve hours that you'll learn it, and then giving up hope and never seeing it again. Their assignment is totally random; one would think that punching a hundred times would earn a character a super punch ability, or something. It doesn't. It's more like, every time you punch, you have a one in 256 chance of being awarded a new punch move, and that's selection without replacement, in probability terms. Meaning, each time you attack, that's a fresh roll of that 256-sided die. It's a little frustrating, and sometimes more than a little frustrating.

Enough playing of the game, however, and one can understand why it's laid-out this way. As Kawazu told Famitsu, he wants the game to be "different" for every person who plays it, every time they play it. In this regard, he has succeeded most inadmirably. The simple fact is that the game's flippant and coy nature when throwing around statistics is frustrating and a little prickish. So much hangs in the statistical balance already, with the way the game's structured, that to make character growth so fickle seems unnecessary cruelty. Even the wholly controllable parts of the game flow are dark and stained in a spooky fatalism. Weapons have points that dictate their durability. EP -- I found later this stands for "Endurance Points." A normal use of a weapon -- a horizontal or vertical slash, these doing different amounts of damage to different kinds of enemies in different situations -- takes no EP. However, special attacks -- like fierce slashes, armor-piercing slashes, and the like -- will take a few EP. EP is one of the few attributes that does not recover with the end of a battle. If EP runs to zero, you need to take your weapon to a blacksmith and have it repaired. Right? This is simple enough. In order to prevent yourself from falling into the inenviable position of guy with a broken weapon, carry more than one weapon. A hand axe is better than a punch. Unless you get that ultra punch attack, which drains one LP a use.

The LP is the big caveat of this and any recent SaGa game. Rather than merely consist of characters with hit points that, when drained to zero, result in a character's death, SaGa has LP -- Life Points -- which indicate something beyond a character's mere physical durability. Should your hit points be reduced to zero and one or more party members remain standing, and if an enemy attacks you in your face-down state, you lose a life point. Albert, a main character, has eleven life points at the start, for example. While dead, if an enemy attacks him, he loses a life point. If he loses all eleven life points, even though his partner might still be alive and slashing, it's game over. If the generic warrior dude you picked up at the pub in town loses all four of his life points, he's dead forever and can never be revived. One death of any kind takes a life point; even should the battle end in your favor and your characters be restored to full health upon your return to the field screen, that generic warrior dude who died is now going to have three life points instead of four. Restore life points by staying at an inn in a town. This is an interesting system; it puts a collar on the player; when it's working, it feels like its risking spiritual failure, and this brings a cloud of dread down just over the top of the game. What makes that dread descend further and jam up the whole atmosphere of the game is when the design takes this little life point system in its right hand and starts shaking it like a baby shakes a rattle: some super-ultimate attacks will drain a life point, or two -- or, should you get far enough in the game, six. This can make a boss fight easier should you choose to throw all your trump cards on the table right at the beginning. However, what happens if your life points are insufficient to last the road out of the dungeon?

Yeah, it happened to me, and boy was I angry.

Running along the snowy plains, wolf monsters chasing me. You can see them way out on the horizon, and their backs are turned so they couldn't possibly see you, and you'll have them tailing you all the way back to town, and maybe they'll attack you at the gates and you're down, and that's it. Oh, it's a god damned heartbreaker.

"JUST HAD TO DO THE FLURRY PUNCH THING DIDN'T YOU?!?!?!"

It is a scary thing when a game offers you more chances to die permanently than it does to live temporarily. And hell if there aren't a lot of ways to live. Sixty hours' playing experience is barely enough to acquaint one with all the methods of "training" to earn new items and weapons. Sure, there are plenty of attacks and styles for using each weapon; still, it takes so long to get into each battle, we have to choose fight, sword, overhead slash, that hornetish thing right there -- and the enemies are just these odd collections of brushed-up polygons, lord knows what most of them are supposed to be -- next guy choose axe, go for the armor-piercer, on the thing that looks like an armadillo . . . we've pressed the circle button twelve times before we can see anyone attacking anything, and even then, sometimes the characters don't even do what we want them to. This feeling is amplified when we run through a giant city with towering buildings of much computer-generated vigor, only to enter the king's castle, head down a hallway, turn right, turn right again, turn left, turn left, turn right, turn right, turn left, turn left, and find some stairs. We go downstairs, turn around and around again, finally find a throne room, and once inside, the king tells us the Japanese equivalent, "Well met!" Is he congratulating me for navigating his little unimaginative maze? And that's all he says, anyway -- no more. It feels like a horrible snub, though in the end it's easy to explain away: this king exists for another character, with another story thread, in another quest. Yet the game is so full of towns with people who say things that mean things only to one of the other eight characters. It's a hopeless roll of the dice that a town you're in at the moment happens to have any one NPC in it who will say something relevant to you. Well -- at least, that's how it feels. It's guaranteed that someone will say something, you see. Each quest is a wild goose chase of sorts, and all you need in each town is for one guy to tell you "yeah, there's a town [north] of here -- let me mark your map." And then you're free to leave the town. Try to leave before talking to this one guy, your character will turn around, needing to "gather information." Sometimes you come across a dungeon in the wildnerness and you wander all the way to the end, where a boss should be, because no one told you not to, only there's no boss, or no treasure, either. There's nothing -- the dungeon is for something else. Sometimes, though, the town you're in is the place you have to be, and a story event of sorts comes up, and you get to see the nifty animated watercolor graphics, and you wonder how they did that, and it's for those moments that this game is allowed to live.

Sooner or later, though, after poking around in three or four quests -- the most any hardcore role-playing gamer who doesn't love 7th Saga is going to be able to stomach -- we'll grow tired of this game's world for always, always, always seeming like something that "might be cooler as the pirate captain." And then when we find out it's not cooler as the pirate captain, well, all is shot to shit.

The best analogy I can think of is that a Final Fantasy game, particularly the rousing VII or the hyper-experimental, bold VIII, is always like a date. You plan for it, you dress well, take a shower and all that. You meet the girl, and you take her to dinner and a movie, and if you're lucky, something else happens. Even if all doesn't go gorgeously as well as you'd hoped, the fact stands that you still got out of the house and people saw you with a pretty girl. Romancing SaGa: Minstel Song is a lot like going over to a friend's house on a Sunday night -- Sunday night, the night the weekend dies -- to watch television. Sure, there's probably plenty on television, though does any of it matter? You're just going to end up sitting there talking to your friend about things you haven't talked about in a while, catching up on the past and finding out that this guy is still about as boring as he was in high school, and he still collects model trains and wears turtlenecks. Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song is a game I played every night for a month and a half after taking a bath. The bath is pretty much the final nail in my night's coffin. Once I have enough drinks in the refrigerator and maybe a snack in the kitchen, some cookies or something, I see fit to take a bath, and when I get out of the bath I open the windows and turn on a little lamp and turn off the big lights and play videogames. Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, until all its tired tricks were revealed and its world pulled the wool out from over my eyes and showed itself as lifeless and full of empty places and empty people positioned like train station benches on the way from one string of statistically random fights to another, filled this time well. However, it's most important to note that in hindsight the game defeats itself. The moments that felt intriguing and fun, the things that spurred me on are now dead, out of life points, and there will be no reviving them, ever. I arrived out of the perversely enjoyable experience of the game and was left holding a controller, looking at another cookie-cutter town, and thinking what a horrible mess this game was, and how stupid I'd been to play it this long. It's a cold-feeling game, is what it is. This being its nature, it was able to sell copies and make money, though I suffer to not say that it did so dishonestly.

Yuji Horii says of his Dragon Quest games that the reason the player wins the slot machine the first time he plays is because "it's just a videogame." In the case of a real casino, casino owners could draw in millions of non-gamblers if they advertised a slot machine that everyone won on their first pull. However, they'd also get a lot of people coming in, betting five hundred dollars, winning once, and then leaving. Yuji Horii understands, however, that in a videogame, the coins the player wins in a slot machine are not real; there is no house to suffer financial losses of any real consequence. This is important: videogames don't lose when players win. Romancing SaGa games have, historically, sneered at the players like the bullying guards in Ultima, who only attack you if you're being a jerk-off, anyway, yet wrongly; Romancing SaGa games seem afraid of losing to the player, afraid of having their intelligence questioned or insulted, and that is, quite frankly, a little questionable and insulting. I'd suggest Kawazu get a fat notebook, play Dragon Quest VIII, and all the while write down things that are better about that game than any game he's ever made. I'll be neither the first nor the last to say there's a good game yearning to break free beneath the surface of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song; instead, I'll not say it at all. There are problems with the way Kawazu thinks, and he needs to fix them. Then maybe we'll be onto something. If he can harness his ability to create curious dread (without resorting to zombies) in gamers young and old in a game that reins in its hokey ideas, presents shiny, glittery graphics that enthuse as well and entertain, and contains a story that does more than meander down a path wide enough for eight people who will never meet one another, well, then we'd really be onto something. This game, though -- no manner of remaking it or tweaking it will help. It is and it ever shall be dreck. You can't just get rid of all the dreck, because that'd be like leaving only the Sonic and Shadow levels of Sonic Adventure 2, which would just leave people wondering, like anyone who beholds that one girl you know who always looks like she lost weight, even if they're seeing her for the first time: "Shouldn't there be a whole lot of . . . dreck in here, somewhere?"



There's a character named Ginyuu Shijin, the Minstrel seen on the game's package and in the opening titles. He appears in bars across the land, and will play music for your when you're weary. You have something of a morbidly low chance of getting him to join your party. When he does join, he might require you to drop all your other party members first. Or he might not. I managed to get him into my party with Albert and Sif, and I instantly saved my game on two memory cards so as to explore what I can do with him. It turns out he's a real badass. At the beginning of a fight, he strums his giant double-acoustic-guitar and says some kind of narration: "The heroes came across a party of violent vagrants in the wilderness!" And when you win, he hits that guitar again: "Through much struggle, the brave heroes defeated the monsters!" It's a lot more entertaining than any announcers is any basketball videogames, that's for sure.

The voices in the game, for the most part, are brassy and obnoxious. Old men speak lowly and slowly and humbly and rumbly, with gravel in their throats and pain in their syllables. Girls talk like kids in rooms full of helium. The heroic males all speak with this overbearing and honestly shocking lisp that makes them all sound like cartoon homosexuals. It's safe to say someone found this funny. After a while, I found it ridiculous, insulting, and tiresome. Albert is particularly an offender. The poor guy can't pronounce an "S" to thave hith thoul. This is all well and good; that the game escalates and repeats thentences where he would have to articulate himself resembles torture.

Only the Minstrel speaks wonderfully. Voiced by legendary Japanese folk singer Masayoshi Yamazaki, who once opened the Budokan for The Beatles, he is a gift to this game above all its wishy-washy, coming-and-going art design. The theme song he provides, "Minuet," is a delicate piece of music with a quite rocking acoustic guitar, and clearly the best piece of music Square Enix has yet stuffed into an RPG. The rest of the game's music, composed by Kenji Ito, redbook in quality as it is, is quite stunning as well. The battle themes are tightly composed rock-guitar numbers that sound just a little too good for MegaMan; the quiet dirge that plays over the crystalline snow town of eternal night early in the game possesses that "three-minute radio-single quality" I said was missing from all of Final Fantasy VI's pieces in my review of that game. Those who misunderstood what I was trying to say need look no further than Minstrel Song, which has the best game soundtrack of 2005 so far. Sadly, the rest of the game is a mixed bag quality-wise, a mixed bag wherein the jewels of the soundtrack and graphics are beset by many lumps of gameplay coal. Even the gorgeous music can't save the game from any of its numerous spiritually bad parts, and not a piece of music in the game holds a candle to the brilliance of Mr. Yamazaki's vocal performance that begins the whole thing. I must have watched the title roll six times, just to hear that song (watch the Minstrel's hands as he frets the right chords on the guitar!). Not a night went by when I, fresh from the bath, turned on the TV and the PlayStation2, and then didn't watch that introduction scene. Eventually I bought the man's album, and haven't played the game since. I was replaying Dragon Quest VIII the next day. Interesting.

--tim rogers, 06142005

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