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25% of a good saga

  • NTC3
  • 08/02/2015 12:01 PM
  • 1892 views
At its best, Guardian Saga can be a lot of fun. Yet, in spite of the "Completed" tag, Guardian Saga is decidedly not finished in the way story games are. Sure, there are apparently some credits at the end, but the conflict of the story remains unresolved. Moreover, even getting there is a challenge. Not because the game is difficult, far from it, but because its technical state often manages to provide better barriers than the most dastardly enemy in your way.

Storyline

Guardian Saga uses a non-linear narrative, in what is probably the most conventional manner possible. The opening cutscene shows us all nine Guardians gathering in one place from different directions, as the snow falls and they get ready for the final battle. The camera pans around a bit, and there’s some above-average explanatory text scroll present as well. Once it finishes, you’re sent back to the apparent beginning, where some knight is waiting in the forest for an evil mage. The latter teleports in, and so you battle. This fight is easy, (see Gameplay), but the plot still thinks you’ve lost, which is never a good sign. Mage gloats about how weak you are, and is about to send our unfortunate avatar to an early grave, when this happens...



Thus, the game surprises us early on, and reveals that this particular battle was just a game played in the computer café between our protagonist, Raje, and his friend, Skean. Skean is the cool, sarcastic guy who just won as a mage, and he teases Raje for a bit before the two read said email. It’s from Raje’s younger brother, Arche, who just got a mercenary job and wants the two to join in the cafeteria in 10 minutes. Not 10-real-world minutes, though, as the segment is not timed, so feel free to explore. On your way, you’ll learn that you’re actually at some point in the far future, and are not on Earth (or Terra, as everyone calls it now), but on Terra Val, a large colony ship that is meant to establish new settlement once suitable planet is found. In the mean-time, mercenaries like you and your brother are sent whenever there are things to do on the uninhabited ones.

The planet the ship is currently orbiting, Azmith is a case in point. As Arche tells you over some food, all you need to is accompany the dropship pilot and assist them in taking some samples from the surface. You’ve also landed near the ruins of a long-gone alien civilisation, and the three of you obviously couldn’t pass the chance to explore them a bit. Actually, you just wait in one ancient hall, with nothing but some pillars, a couple of “alien” skeletons and three dragon statues to keep you company. Raje soon finds that the centre statue is the only one with its mouth opened. Closing it is what draws a pentagram on the floor beneath him, before sending him back to the planet’s past.

There, our hero wakes up in the house of Alza, and her tiny pet dragon, Nihls. The two only know him as someone who washed up on the shore, and while he lets slip the name of Terra, he’s smart enough not to reveal where he’s truly from. In fact, he takes the whole ordeal very well on the whole: I was expecting him to at least consider the fact that all of the vibrant cities and people that he sees are apparently doomed to extinction in his future, or to try and relate it with the events somehow, but that never happens. He never thinks back to his time on the colony ship, either.

Anyway, there isn’t a whole lot of plot afterwards. We learn that the peaceful people of current-Azmith are threatened by Calva Knights, an organisation that was apparently good once, before Macbeth became their leader and turned them to evil (hehe), and that they are planning to awake … no, not the crystals, but the five elemental Guardians of the planet. For the rest of the running time, you sort-of-thwart their first attempt at awakening the Ice Guardian (he’s still partially awakened, though, causing persistent snowfalls all around), rescue Skean (who was also sent back in time) and Alza’s friend, Nace, from the Calva fortress, and then make your way towards Valla Shrine to make contact with the Guardians. There the game ends, a little sooner than intended because of a bug, but it ends nonetheless, as the helpful txt. walkthrough had assured me. On the whole, it’s not a plotline that would impress anyone, even when the future element and a couple of other attempts to subvert the formula are taken into account. However, it is largely a comedy game, and for that purpose, it’s entirely acceptable.



This is the door to a final cutscene. It’s also the door you cannot enter, no matter what.

What hurts the game more are its characters. Skean and Nihls are the two characters that get an absolutely disproportionate amount of dialogue: the former talks in nearly every future dialogue, the latter during the ground ones. Granted, they’re entertaining more often than not, but it gives the impression that their snarky sidekick archetype is the only one creator knows how to write. All of the other characters not only have less presence (yes, even Raje), but they’re utterly bland by comparison, with, at best, a trait each. Raje is largely the standard, generic hero. Arche is the cool hacker. Jena, a girl who joins before the Calva assault, is slightly more resolute, and a hoarder, as shown by a sidequest, but that’s it. Alza fares the worst, because nearly the only thing that makes her stand out are the jokes about her cooking, which are over-used almost as badly as Haddy’s breast size jokes in Fragile Hearts. It’s really disappointing in comparison to Guild Raider!: its cast wasn’t especially complex either, but it gave them all enough screentime to bounce off each other, and the way the inter-group dynamic consistently evolved throughout the game was a joy to watch.

What the game does manage to do well, though, is the secondary writing. The environment description is actually done well, and reminds me of A Blurred Line and Guild Raider!, since it’s done everywhere you would expect, is nicely written with plenty of humour and often includes party members bantering about stuff. You immediately get a feel for characters’ personalities with descriptions like “Oregano. The Bachelors’ Spice.” in Skean’s room, his admission that he never cleans the bathroom, or Raje teasing him about all the viruses his brother got onto his computer. You get some of this stuff in Dia Monte, too, though less often. Before you leave, there’s a sequence in the cafeteria where you get to choose the food for your group in the cafeteria, a ritual that both increases your familiarity with the Terra Val world and (according to Walkthrough) has some influence on the stat bonuses Raje gets. Then, of course, one of the computers has this:



This is a subcategory, too. There’s also similarly expansive Mercenary Forums, and both have a fair bit of entertaining stuff.

The dialogues with other people are also very good on the whole. For one, there are a lot of them, both in the colony ship, and in the Dia Monde city, and they generally have quite interesting lines to say. Your characters reply as well, and though Nihls/Skean replies are frankly over-represented, the jokes still tend to hit more often than miss. Occasionally, some characters in Dia Monde even get deeper backstories before you’re about to enter their houses, which is a bonus. Fragile Hearts and Sore Losers arguably took things a step further with their 3-question dialogue trees, but what is there is still good. The one problem is that the dialogue hardly ever updates, and so you can trigger the same long dialogues again and again and again. On the whole, however, this size and variety is what manages to make both the Terra Val setting and the planetside one believable.

Talking to everyone you meet also introduces you to the game’s greatest strength: the sidequests. There are 9 of them in total, and only one of those is a straight-up fetch quest with no elaboration. The rest are all quite engaging. My favourite is the Slime Drops quest, which literally lets you talk to the temporarily non-hostile Slimes in the mines, as you search for one that stole said Drops from the friendly Slime accompanying you, only to get a twist at the end. There’s also the aforementioned quest where you help Jena sell off her excess stuff, a digging sidequest on the World Map with plenty of rewards and a cool boss battle at the end, a really heartwarming event where you help out a shy teen at a date, and more.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

The mapping is quite inconsistent. It is at its best in Dia Monte, which is really large, but doesn’t waste space, and as a result feels like a real town, with the administrative buildings you would expect (a school, mayor’s office, etc.), plus a cemetery, a well, a wharf, etc. and many normal houses alongside them. Those are all roughly the same size outside as they’re inside, and there are also signs next to houses and such, so that you don’t really get lost, or at least no more than you would in a town from Elder Scrolls or a game like that. The Valla Forest also feels real, with wide, yet curving paths through it. The rest is mainly forgettable, and some areas, like the dungeons of Valla Shrine or later colony ship interiors, feel really bland. There are also moments where commitment to large map size goes too far, giving us sights like this



Then, of course, there are other mapping errors beginners make, which I didn’t really keep track of. This is basically the only one that stood out much:



Combat backgrounds are also decent, but forgettable, and there’s the occasional mismatch: fighting a Calva Knight indoors somehow still gives you the lush meadow background. There’s the traditional issue of default rm2k3 character sprites being much smaller than the enemy battlers, even when both are supposedly human, but other than that, it’s fine. There’s an interesting design choice with fonts and such, whereas important parts of dialogue will always be highlighted in orange, while emails/letters use a darker blue colour than the normal text. Lastly, emoticons above the heads of our characters frequently appear in conversations. Usually, it’s a drop of sweat to signify nervousness, though question marks, exclamation marks and such also appear, and it’s pretty cool.

The sound side of things is decent, but largely unexceptional. The Valla Forest theme and the Worm boss theme were the only ones that stood out much; others are fine, but forgettable. The sound effects are also just adequate, and sometimes even feel mismatched: the bow attack sound and animation feels more suitable to a rock thrown or mace struck: in other words, something blunt and lower-energy than an arrow. There is also a strange bug that caused all sound effects to disappear and a lot of music to cut out the first time I played the game. It’s the first time I’ve had that happen with an rmk game, and it disappeared when I closed it, and continued normally, so do that if it also happens to you.

Gameplay

The combat is ATB side-view, and it’s on the mediocre-to-poor side of things. On the bright side, all characters start with at least one skill that’s actually useful, and so the combat is not purely spacebar-mashing. For Raje (and his digital avatar in the prologue) it’s Dual Slash, and spamming it instead of spamming attack in that Mage fight is the difference between winning and losing. (This matters, too, because even though you’re supposed to lose plot-wise, actually losing causes the game to glitch out, and restart the battle with your character fallen, for all perpetuity.) Once you’re fighting in the game proper with Alza, Raje soon gets a strength buff, and Alza a stronger shot in addition to her healing. You get some proper tactical choices, and the combat becomes quite fun, even though the enemies at that point are neither strong enough for a good challenge, and nor do they have skills beyond one that just substitutes Attack.

Things get worse, though, in part because next skill, at level 4, is Raje’s Introspection. It’s a skill that costs 1 SP, yet gives about 20 in return, and unlike Iron Gaia Rover’s Charge, it has no chance of failure, so there’s never a reason not to use it. Worse, you can give Raje the ability to heal, either through buying a relevant tome, or just receiving it through a side quest. That essentially lets you heal up everyone in between battles as often as you want, free of any charge. Now, neither of these mechanics can automatically break the game: Sore Losers had the characters’ SP regenerate as they walked around to encourage frequent skill use, while LockeZ’s games fully heal the party after every battle, but this works because the individual battles are challenging. Here, they aren’t, as once again, the player stat growth outstrips that of the enemies significantly, and the addition of Jena and Skean into the party turns even late-game battles into a breeze. Essentially, even though I figured how the exploit worked, I didn’t even need to use it much, and even though I never bought any potions, there were still enough to fall back on.

What Guardian Saga needs, at this point, is removal of Introspection and lots of attention given to the enemies, since the heroes are generally fine. The addition of further skills is a priority: the aforementioned Sore Losers and Guild Raider are good examples to follow. Another way of improving would be to follow Tristian: Lady of the Lion and make weaknesses/resistances to different weapons and elements a more integral part of the game. Right now, GS reminds me of Elementa Bellator's early build a little (so early it was still called Mystic Knights back then), in that it also has a cool and complex-sounding elemental chart in it (though here it’s tucked away in Die Monde school instead of being shown at the start) that means absolutely nought. Few enemies seem to have particularly important elemental weaknesses, and all can be defeated easily without exploiting them. Weapon resistances would also help a lot in encouraging tactical thinking: you often fight the flying Sporkers early on, for instance: having them be vulnerable to Alza’s bow while dodging/taking little damage from Raje’s sword would both make battles more interesting and encourage the player to learn their elemental weaknesses and buy Raje the appropriate attack spell to compensate.

Instead, Magical Twilight, the shop that sells spell books, only exists to make Alza not useless 95% of the time. She happens to be a low-strength, high–intellect character, and yet she has no offensive magic of her own while gaining a bow skill (which eventually ends up weaker than regular attacks from other characters anyway) It’s a little misleading, but buying an offensive spell does redress imbalance. Any one will do, though if you want, you can probably afford to just buy it all; after battling for a bit, you’ll soon have plenty of money and little to spend it on. As I’ve said before, buying healing potions and tonics is largely superfluous. Weapons and armour are also scarce: there’s literally one upgraded version of character-specific weapons and armour on sale, and two of the non-specific body armour. Somehow, this happens in spite of the game having multiple weapon and armour merchants that still basically sell the same thing. Often, you’ll loot the same items in chests and such anyway. Creativity is also lacking: the only somewhat interesting item is Skimpy Vest, which raises Defence and Agility at the same time. Elemental weapons, weapons that inflict status effects, armour protecting you from them, etc. etc. are all absent.

The status effect-negating items, though, are outright useless: there are probably a dozen of them on sale, and you should never buy any. Only Antidotes cure a condition that actually exists in the game’s world, and it’s inflicted by one late-game enemy, while said Antidotes are regularly dropped by Slimes, and Alza has a skill that does the same thing anyway. This obviously leads me to recommend making sure the enemies (and bosses) can deal out all of those effects, and it goes hand in hand with increasing the number of enemies in general. There are only 11-12, and some of those (Calva Knight, and the poison-inflicting one) appear once or twice, while Slimes, Sporkers, Skeletons and Scorpids have to be fought dozens of times, since they all appear both in the Mines, which are the first, and largest dungeon of the game, and on the World Map in random encounters. (Dungeon encounters are all on-touch, and neither encounter type can be escaped from.) Even though the overall encounter rate is low for once, seeing the same encounters again and again still gets very annoying after a while. I’ll probably never tire of citing A Blurred Line, where even the first section of the World Map had dozens of different encounters, most of which were also unique to it.

Combat aside, there’s a simple and unobtrusive rock-sliding puzzle in the Mines, and the short stealth section in the Calva HQ. This one is actually quite fun for once, as you’re clearly told the sight range of all of the guards, they don’t patrol unpredictably, and it’s even possible to distract away one guard who’s otherwise standing at a chokepoint. Best of all, being spotted doesn’t restart the game, and only forces a battle. You can just cleave through all of them, but it’s fun enough not to. Lastly, there’s PET, which stands for Personal Electronic Thingy, and is one advantage Raje has over the typical rmk fantasy protagonists. Using it in menu brings up options like GPS (tells you where your next plotline goal is), Side Quest log, and the ability to change menu themes, like the personal computer in Iron Gaia: Virus. There’s even a Teleport option, which doesn’t work at first, but can be activated as a reward from a sidequest.

Conclusion

On the whole, I was willing to give Guardian Saga 3 stars, as even though it’s unfinished and the combat is poor, there’s still enough charm and energy in all the dialogues and sidequests to carry it through. However, I’m forced to deduct half a star due to the bugs. I’ve already mentioned the inability to finish the game properly, the bug in the prologue battle and strange music glitches. There’s also another, really annoying bug in the Dia Monte castle, whereas entering the room where Queen’s pet is held forces you to restart the game, as leaving it is impossible: you’ll be thrown back to the center time and time again. There are also some passability issues in that castle that let you walk on one of the walls and such, but they pale in comparison to this.

If the developer fixes these glitches, I will raise the score back up. Should the more fundamental issues be improved alongside it, I would be willing to raise it further.

Posts

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Thanks for the incredibly detailed review. I'll keep all of this in mind. I've already fixed a number of bugs and I'll work on the ones you mentioned. Guardian Saga was my baby, the first real game I developed more than 15 years ago, so I'm sure much of the dialogue, mapping, etc. really shows this, but I learned a lot from it.

You discussed a lot of things I never truly got to implement. Raje and Skean not telling people where they were from would be elaborated on in further chapters when they told the group where they were from and helped them to save their world from destruction. Arche would make an appearance in Chapter 2, and you would gain Senko (you see her at the resort) and Sukaru as playable characters as well.

Each character, once speaking to the Guardians at the end of the game would unlock their powers which would make combat a lot more engaging as you would have to work with enemy elemental weakness, and deal with negative statuses more frequently (I took most of them out as the battles used to be much more difficult).

The PET was a custom menu in the beginning, but since I was very young and new to making games I never quite finished it, and instead opted for the default menu system. It's still there in the files though.

Anyway, thanks for the review. I'm humbled! I'll take your bug-fixes into account as well as a few additions, like making Alza a little stronger. I'd love to finish the saga someday and show how much I've grown in other chapters, but my priorities have changed and currently I'm working on a different, much bigger game. We'll have to see what happens!
I fixed a few things. For one, the bug where you can't leave the Queen's room is fixed. I also buffed Alza a bit in terms of healing, and she has a new skill which allows her to heal everyone at once. Raje's Introspection now has a 50% success rate to discourage repeat use.

I'll look through your comments a bit more and see what else I can improve. Thanks again.
Had a busy week recently, so replying a little late. I also updated the review with the images it was supposed to have from the start: I was moving the day it got uploaded, and so must've forgotten them in all the rush. Anyway, I'm really glad to a see a developer take criticism to heart and update their game, especially one that's apparently this old. Let me know when you're done with current improvements, so that I can take another look and update the review: like I promised, it's going up to 3 stars once I see it's finishable.

And of course, best of luck on whatever it is you're currently working on!
I did fix the game-breaking bugs for this game to the best of my knowledge. At times I feel like coming back to it and really reworking a lot of its systems, even continuing the story and gameplay with everything I've learned so far. However, my big project now is my game Infinite Mana. If you're still around, I'd love to hear your opinion on that one someday. :)
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