Why, God, Why: More SaGa Games on the Way

Bob Mackey — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

I don't "get" Akitoshi Kawazu. More importantly, I don't get his games. And I certainly don't get how anyone could possibly enjoy the SaGa series. No offense intended if you happen to be a Kawazu fan, of course; but for me, playing the SaGa series has always been the equivalent of heading outside to enjoy a nice summer day and immediately getting taken out by a sniper before making it past the front porch. When you play a SaGa game, it's like entering into some bizarro video game world where all the rules have changed and you might need to saw off one of your feet to escape.

Needless to say, I wasn't too thrilled when I saw GoNintendo's report (via Japanese mag Shonen Jump) that the second SaGa game, released for the original Game Boy in America as Final Fantasy Legend II, will see a DS remake this year. I'm slightly consoled by the fact that SaGa 2 isn't quite as devious as some of Kawazu's later games, but this kind of thinking will only lead to me trying it and then hating myself just a few short hours later. I'm not about to embarrass myself and tell you the exact number of times I've come crawling back to the SaGa series thinking things would somehow be different, but here's a hint: too damned many.

It's not clear if this game is going to make it over to America, but one thing is certain: Kawazu's contempt for the human race will continue unabated.

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The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:30:00 GMT

More than any other creative medium, videogames rely on sequels. Unlike serial fiction (television, comics) or film franchising focused on continuing narrative and familiar characters, videogame sequels — at their best, mind you — are not just the next chapter of a story or the return of a popular protagonist. The most successful gameplay designs are perfected through revision. Practice, as they say, makes perfect. And while sequel-as-business-model more often than not leads to stagnation, sometimes pandering to the audience reveals a vein of creativity richer than that found in the source material. Sometimes, a good idea needs to be demolished and rebuilt over its original foundation to become great. This week, 61 Frames Per Second takes a look at gaming's ten most adventurous sequels: direct successors that significantly alter the fundamental design, aesthetically and mechanically, of their predecessors. Some of the entries on this list are great successes, others failures. But they all broke the mold to change our ideas about play. — John Constantine

Adventure Island IV

Even as an old-school die-hard I've always been pretty indifferent to the Adventure Island series. Sure, it's solid hop-and-bopping, but without much aesthetic or architectural distinction. Does anyone feel passionately about Adventure Island, really? More people might if Adventure Island IV had come out in the States. IV melds the series's standard run-around-whacking-stuff-with-other-stuff mechanics to an ambitious Metroid-esque superstructure, in which newly acquired items must be used to open previously inaccessible sections of a large, continuous map. (The snowboard you pick up in one area gives you passage through a snowy field, and so forth.) This is a familiar tactic today — see recent Castlevania games, for example — but at the time it was unusual, and certainly not where you'd have expected a staid platforming series to go. — Peter Smith

Super Mario Bros. 2 (Super Mario Bros. USA)

Quiet down. I know Super Mario Bros. 2 is Doki Doki Panic. As soon as those sprites were transplanted into Shigeru Miyamoto's platforming follow-up to Super Mario Bros., it became a Mario game, and SMB's first true sequel. Even Nintendo went on to re-categorize Takashi Tezuka's Japan-only Super Mario Bros. 2 as little more than an expansion of SMB (it was re-released in 1993 as Super Mario Bros: For Super Players in Japan and Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels in the west.) What's remarkable about Super Mario Bros. 2 is not its unorthodox development; it's how it warps the fundamentals of SMB (and even J-SMB2) while maintaining familiarity. The aesthetic shift from SMB risked alienating Nintendo's still-growing fan base but it made Mario and his friends even more recognizable as icons. Play wise, it expands on the multi-character abilities of J-SMB2, and re-defines progression through levels. In SMB, the goal is merely to get to the end of a series of stages and then get past Bowser at the end of castle. In SMB2, the completion of levels is usually tied to items, whether it's procuring keys to get past locked doors or retrieving a magic orb. The game also has multiple antagonists that have to be physically defeated as opposed to just avoided as with Bowser. It was also pretty adventurous to have a transgendered dinosaur in a game for kids. Risky! — JC

Final Fantasy II

The old joke is that, by rights, Final Fantasy II shouldn't even exist. In 1987, Final Fantasy was intended to be a young Hironobu Sakaguchi's swansong, an experiment in the rising role-playing genre made popular by Yuji Horii just a year before. Its success has kept the Gooch making games for two decades now, but the series, and JRPGs broadly, owes many of its enduring characteristics to the sequel that never should have been. Final Fantasy II was designed by Akitoshi Kawazu, best known for the SaGa series. While the first FF, with the exception of a few aesthetic flourishes, was more or less a clone of the first two Dragon Quests, Final Fantasy II placed an emphasis on story and character that was absent from the genre previously. Rudimentary as the tale of empire and resistance was, the story of Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon in Palemecia was a drastic shift from the western-style hero-epics that typified the genre in 1988. Kawazu also made some decidedly ill-advised changes to play. As opposed to the traditional system of gaining experience points through battle to build character's statistical attributes — a foundational aspect of role-playing games, digital and non — each action in the game improved only through use. Increasing defense requires defending against attacks, increasing attack power requires attacking, and so on and so forth. This system of growth was applied to every interactive aspect of the game and quickly became tedious. But it was one more new idea in a game full of them. — JC

Click here for Part 2.
Click here for Part 3.

61 Frames Per Second : akitoshi kawazu

Why, God, Why: More SaGa Games on the Way

The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 1