SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions was one of my favorite games of 2019, so when SaGa Emerald Beyond was announced as the latest mainline title and a mechanical successor to it I was beyond excited. I adore this series and think there’s really nothing else on the market like them. They’re obscure, strange beasts of RPGs made for a niche audience and done so unapologetically. With a small cult following growing in recent years, I’m not surprised they’ve tried to make them appeal to a wider audience. SaGa Emerald Beyond attempts to do just that, by reframing what a SaGa game is in the lens of an episodic sci-fi television show. This is still very much SaGa, and it wears its signature style proudly.
You have five starting characters to choose from when you begin a new game, all with unique campaigns. The worlds they visit can overlap, but what you do here is largely unique. I started with the charming Tsunanori Mido, a young man with the personality of an IT technician and the voice of Norm Macdonald. His story has to do with traveling to a large series of worlds to gather spirits to protect his hometown and stumbling into wackier events along the way. I’d say he’s a good introduction character to let you come to grips with how this game works before you dive into some truly weird ones.
If you’re looking for a touching story, I’d say look elsewhere. I wouldn’t say the writing is bad, and I especially like the fantastic English script, but these are not trying to be traditional RPGs. You are dropped in fantastical settings with strange characters, and your choices made there will decide how that little story plays out and if any of the characters there will join you. The more you play these games, the more you look forward to the story just to see what wacky thing you’ll see next. Like a punk underworld girl who sings screamo, a magical girl anime with monsters of the week, saving the president from assassination, and so much more.
Emerald Beyond, like Scarlet Grace, is a game for those who value battle systems in an RPG over all else. If you’re not here for quirky characters and a freeform narrative, you come for this. Scarlet Grace had one of the most engrossing battle systems I’d ever played at that point. Emerald Beyond takes that a step forward in so many ways that I won’t be able to list all of them, but I can easily say I think they’ve outdone themselves. Like before, battles play out in a timeline at the bottom of the screen, and you’re given as much prep time as you need to decide your moves before you initiate the turn. You can see icons for all of your party and enemies at the bottom, and actions taken can move them forward or back in that timeline.
You start each battle with a set amount of BP, always on the lighter side of your total amount and with the inability to use every character in one turn. Battles will always feel like you’re crawling uphill, but with each turn you gain an extra BP. By the end you’ll be able to whip out truly devastating attacks, and get your entire squad to organize together to unleash United Attacks. These work a bit differently than before, now just requiring characters to be next to each other on the timeline. Enemies can do this as well, and will aggressively try to knock you out of your scheduled United Attacks and take the advantage. Throw in a combo rate that can trigger additional attacks, or the ability to isolate units and have them unleash their own solo combos. When you play your cards right, this game is more satisfying than seeing a meticulous series of dominoes begin to fall.
There’s a sick joy I get in the randomness of a SaGa game. Unlocking new abilities at random during battle with the Glimmer system gives that character another move in battle. Whenever those would turn the tide in a tough battle I’d jump up in excitement. Whenever I’d get an extra combo, or see a tutorial for a new mechanic near the end of my new playthrough because the system I found just finally randomly triggered? Or pre-emptively intercept a deadly attack and ruin the enemy team’s plans? It’s unlike anything else. This battle system is outstanding.
You are given freedom to take whoever you want in battle, and build them however you see fit. There’s a wide variety of weapons available, each of which have unique skills associated with them, and every character belongs to a race that gives them different edges in battle. Mido starts with four puppet characters that can learn abilities from humans, for example. One protagonist, Siugnas, is a vampire and can sacrifice LP to unleash powerful attacks. There’s so much freedom in building your team, and I adore it.
There is so much game here for those who truly love to dive into their RPGs. The grin I got on my face when booting into Mido’s New Game+ just to see that it was an entirely new campaign with a new story? The possibilities revealed themselves to be perceivably endless in this moment, and I was hooked. I have not seen and done everything Emerald Beyond has to offer, and knowing there’s so much more there for me to possibly uncover is genuinely exciting. With each playthrough being pretty short too (I finished my first in about 6-7 hours) this is one of the most replayable RPGs you’ll get this year.
It’s strange to me that in a game series that adores player expression and freedom, the progression of this game has been stripped back significantly. The narrative has this, but playing the game feels lacking in a lot of ways. Gone is a large world to explore, replaced with a series of gates in a realm called the Beyond that take you to a variety of worlds. The amount you have access to is decided by the story, and once you pick one you can’t leave until you’ve completed it. Your chosen character can change how linear your experience is, but even in more free-form worlds you feel trapped. I think there’s value in this approach, especially when it comes to location variety. There are a lot of cool places you’ll get to see, and that wouldn’t have been possible if this was all one continuous world.
When you’re getting into the swing of a playthrough, I don’t think this change makes much of a difference. It just lays the systems bare, and makes it feel like less of an adventure. You can often only interact with a series of nodes on each map, and often when you pick one the others will lock out. From there you’ll branch the story in new ways, and it was fun to know that my decisions felt like they really mattered. It’s exciting to know you might have lost out on a whole story path, and will only be able to see it when you run it back. I learned to go with the flow, and was rewarded by a very breezy experience fitting a guy like Mido.
The maps themselves work a bit stronger, building on the pop-up book style of the previous game. The entire game feels like you’re doing Dungeons & Dragons campaigns with the world’s quirkiest dungeon master, and the way you explore the maps add to this immensely. The DM is quick to move on to any new campaign, so they rarely overstay their welcome. In each there is an immense amount of fun choices that can be made that your DM will remember, to use at a later moment when you aren’t expecting it.
The presentation itself is also a bit lacking, but I think I lean positive on it. Cutscenes contain pre-rendered portraits of the game’s (admittedly high quality and stylized) 3D models with no voice acting outside of the beginning and the end of the campaign. I think my issues ultimately come down to the game struggling to run sometimes on Nintendo Switch. Battles themselves seem to have loading and framerate issues that cause them to lose the sense of flow felt on other platforms. I didn’t realize this until I tried to play Emerald Beyond on PC, but after picking all your moves your party will run at the enemy until the turn loads properly. On PC this will happen almost right away, but on Switch your party will run at the enemies for quite a few seconds longer. So if you play on Switch, it might feel like the combat is less snappy than it actually is because the system is trying to run the numbers for just a bit too long. There’s both a prioritize Performance and Battery option, but I didn’t notice too much of a difference.
SaGa Emerald Beyond is a peculiar game. It aimed to streamline a lot of Scarlet Grace, but they might have maybe gone a bit too far. At the same time, I wouldn’t call it safe either. The cast and setting are wonderfully bizarre, reminding me of SaGa Frontier in the best of ways. I had hoped this would have strived to be more of an evolution, and in reality, it’s more of an iteration. I say all of this and acknowledge all these complaints, but I still genuinely love this latest take on SaGa. It is iterating on gold, and there’s so much I either haven’t been able to figure out yet or just didn’t have time to delve into. These systems with a higher budget in presentation? You’d have an all-timer. I adore this series and think this is a great entry point for anyone looking for a systems-driven RPG that strives to be different. It’s ironic that the upcoming Romancing SaGa 2 remake is looking to be a step forward in what this series is capable of, but for all we know Emerald Beyond is a final hurrah for this style of SaGa game. I’m not going to complain about two SaGa games in one year, either.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by Square Enix