For people who don’t know, Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered is really a remaster of Square Enix’s 2005 JRPG Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song which was itself a remake of the original Romancing SaGa from 1992. The newest discharge of the game features overhauled visuals, ports to several modern systems, and even fresh content for brand new and returning fans. However, its efforts to make it more approachable for newcomers are not enough. But fans seeking to revisit its world should find more than enough to love in the newest release.
Minstrel Song allows players look around the world of Mardias, where evil gods which were defeated countless years back threaten to awaken. The title is structured as an anthology featuring eight stories following different playable characters that every their very own role within the game’s greater story. Each story includes a unique class, a wide range of characters to interact with and recruit for your party, as well as an entire region around the globe to understand more about in their adventure.
The unconventional structure of Minstrel Song is among its most appealing aspects. It provides a bigger sense of scale towards the game’s world and events while allowing it to stay grounded in its playable characters. This is helped by the world progressing with or without the gamer. If a person drags their feet taking care of side quests for too long, that storyline will resolve itself without one.
However, the game’s various stories have aged quite poorly. They are so barebones and simplistic that it is difficult to imagine any player who has played other JPRGs to locate it particularly engaging. Its story beats and dialogue are sent to the player in the style of reading an outline. Characters awkwardly state plot elements inside a stilted manner, while most side quests have a sentence or two for the most part from the context and therefore are little more than general objectives like “find this treasure.”
The story also suffers from an over-all lack of direction. At the start of most of the character’s stories, there isn’t even a single entry in the player’s quest log that relates to the primary quest for the first hour or so. This is accomplished to inspire players look around the game’s environments in the price of often feeling directionless or confused early on. The main problem with this approach is that the game’s exploration just isn’t fun or interesting. Exploration in Minstrel Song is like exploring a corn maze. Players will go where they want and in their preferred order, but all there's to locate are dead ends and useless encounters that feel like a waste of time.
Exploring also forces players into many more combat encounters than should progress with the game. Combat holds many of the trademark mechanics that helped provide Romancing SaGa with its identity in 1992. Including decreasing the reliability of weapons by using special moves, party members randomly learning new moves by fighting higher-leveled enemies, along with a combo system that rewards players for strategic turns. Each character also starts with a class that is leveled by spending the jewels that players receive from completing battles while their individual stats are randomly raised during combat.
Most of those systems are fine but aren’t explained to the player very well, so newcomers will likely need to consult a wiki or spend time teaching themselves through learning from mistakes. Once one gets accustomed to the combat mechanics, they frequently oscillate between engaging and dreadfully dull. This is because of the sheer number of repeated enemies in encounters and also the insufficient a problem setting. When fights tend to be more punishing and demand that the player approach them using everything in their toolkit, it's an absolute blast, but those encounters make up much less than half of those players will take part in within a playthrough. The rest of the battles are so easy that one can usually mash the select button until it's over, especially as party members automatically heal among battles.
It is a shame that more difficulty options weren’t added with all of Minstrel Song’s additions to the game. However, the remaster does add new playable classes, makes fan-favorite NPCs recruitable to one’s party, adds some new bosses that are pretty challenging, and adds a New Game+ mode. It also upgrades the game’s visuals to become charming and filled with character. The character models and environments are great, but that does make some of the game’s cutscenes stick out using their poorer quality. These cutscenes are assembled as still paintings with sound files playing them over, and they don’t look to have gotten exactly the same attention all of those other game’s visuals have. As a result, their visuals look blurry and stretched out, when they also impose a square aspect ratio that's absent throughout the game.
All in all, fans looking to go back to a game they're already familiar with will probably be very pleased with Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered. It does an admirable job of remastering the game’s visuals and adds a great deal of new content for fans to engage with. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do quite enough to help make the game accessible or interesting enough for most newcomers to spend their time elsewhere.
Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered can be obtained now on Android, iOS, PC PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Switch.
