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My favorite part of SaGa Frontier exploration was flying to Manhattan, finding nothing to do, then flying back to Koorong, then flying to Baccarat, doing nothing, then back to Koorong, then to Mosperiberg, Virgil kicks me out, Koorong, then Yorkland, nothing to do, Koorong again, checking out the sewers (funny skeleton waiting room! but nothing new), then Magic Kingdom for nothing to do, then OWMI, going all the way around the manor (nothing there), down to into the basement to the very bottom (to find nothing... wait actually there was a Sanctuary Stone that's not bad at all), Mermaid won't join my team, then out, oh neat maybe Nelson has something (it doesn't), back to OWMI to transfer, back to Koorong, and then thinking, did I really do everything I needed to in Manhattan? Better go check.
Square Enix, bring this back!
That's the good thing about sucking for 25+ years, the standards get lower. God bless SaGa.
Yeah, I def agree most people expected the series to go in a different direction with its exploration style, no opposition there.
But I will never stop making fun of the revisionist comments that make it sound like somehow previous SaGas were "critical and commercial successes" with good exploration and story. XD
When talking about the success of the games I was only talking about their success in relation to each other. I phrased it poorly.
Its really disengenous to suggest that asking for exploration, gear, and NPCs is asking for all the worst parts of each.
I always believed that was a major part of the SaGa formula that made people into fans of the series. A freedom that has diminished in later entries.
Still, for sanity's sake, I beg everyone who agrees with all these issues to dip into the Negative Reviews of SaGa Frontier and take a good look at what people dislike about that game. You'll find pretty much the same stuff, I'm not even being hyperbolic. It's uncanny to see this shift from "those are problems in the series" to "those were great before, what happened!?"
An open-ended JRPG set in various worlds with multiple protagonists is the dream. It's pretty much SaGa's one selling point. Doing better than SaGa's best 20 years ago isn't exactly putting the bar very high.
From memory, Outward achieved something similar, if you count every main questline as a "protagonist". They probably even did it with a smaller team and smaller budget. And you know what, it's in fully explorable 3D, with dungeons and villages, the lot. The quest log gives the player some indication of what's the next step in your character's main quest. Problem solved. Outward is janky in its own lovable, low-budget way, but hey, they went the whole way. And it's not exactly a game that holds your hand either, oh boy no.
I also played Sailing Era, which is basically the same concept in a different package. All you get is a map of the world and it still feels more fleshed out that Emerald. Also, don't like your current quest in Sailing Era? Go somewhere else. Asia, maybe. What's particularly tiresome with Emerald is getting locked in the same 2-hour questlines again and again. Look, if you want to make me do the same quest again and again, at least make it snappy.
Caring about when it was made is a personal bar. If you can enjoy SaGa Frontier today, it doesn't matter if it was made 20 years ago. Back to the Future is an old movie, but I'd probably still like it today if today was the first day I saw it.
Beside the point though, because if SaGa Frontier really WERE released today alongside Emerald, Emerald would be considered superior in 95% of the ways. I don't mean this to be argumentative, because I totally understand the gripes of Emerald in isolation. I just think the comparisons to Ancient SaGa games are heavily rose-colored.
Emerald is definitely doing something more linear in terms of individual worlds, especially if you disregard the multiple playthroughs and invisible choices that alter things. And it definitely feels less fun to run between lines (Grelon, you are not cool). But I do think the locking in of the 2-hour questline makes its own type of sense in a new style.
Unlike SaGa Frontier, where you have infinite access to an airport that will continually lead you to Nowhere (see Koorong joke above, which is both sincere and absolutely a normal SF experience), Emerald is a train ride. You are moving on a path from the West Coast to the East, and you get to choose which places to stop in along the way. This form could be snappier, like you say (and I'd be okay with that; again, Grelon), but disliking it doesn't warrant the re-imagining of what could be seen as SaGa Frontier's biggest fault.
I don't think it's nostalgia blinding the community either as you implied later on. A lot of us have been recently replaying these games through the remasters, including experiencing RS2 + RS3 for the first time. The games seem very well received within the community, with RS2 being an exception with mixed reviews on Steam due to the somewhat poor pc port.
Maybe the more streamlined linear approach was an attempt to reach a new audience, one that disliked the more open world design of the older games. But sadly I'm not seeing any discussion of Emerald Beyond in other rpg/jrpg communities.
I don't think it's nostalgia (although there is that; again, check SF reviews). I'd say it's something more like turning a blind eye to the classics, or forgiving things for being old. But a lot of these things are mainstays, not exceptions.
I think that in an attempt to make sense of what we don't like about Emerald, we are elevating the previous games into things they never were, simple as that.
Sadly, the more things change, the more they stay the same!
The other thing is that certain UI elements take more clicks than they need to for a game whether it's PC or console. Some clicks feel really sluggish such as the minigame with ritgrams. Trading takes more clicks than necessary if the UI was better and for mechs, if you don't trade it limits your access to good equipment by not making it as easy to access certain materials, so you have to engage with something tedious and annoying to boost your trading rank. (You don't necessarily HAVE to, but it feels like it.)
Also believe in Kawazu when he says we won't be disappointed if we wait (regarding SF2).
But these are the scant few reviews of a game that's at 96% positive. The positive reviews make comparisons to games released at time of the remastereds re-release and review it favorably against them.
There's not some hidden phenomenon here. Emerald Beyond is a flawed jewel.
For my part, I don't "hate" the game. I like it. But, I am not so insane that I can't acknowledge things like it taking 14 minutes to delete 70 saves due to the UI sluggishness is a bit of a mechanical issue with the game. You'd have to be foolish or outright blinded by fanboyism not to.
As for why it's like this? It's because of money. This is obviously a budget game. If you actually look at the credits a lot of things were outsourced and the home team at Square was VERY small. The UI itself was programmed by two entirely different people from two entirely different teams; programmed by Cattle Call and Smaecchi and designed by Opus.
Concessions had to be made. I think they succeeded with what they wanted to do with the resources they had. But it's obvious they didn't have a lot of money to throw around and even less time for internal review. Which is why things like the aforementioned time-consuming nonsense that is cleaning out saves exists and probably will forever exist and why there were multiple game breaking bugs tied to trading at certain values. The QA cycle for this game has to be minuscule.