The 7th Saga is a classic JRPG from Enix that stood out on the SNES with an unusual offer: at the start the player chooses one of seven characters of different races and classes — from a human warrior through a robot to an alien being — and the remaining six then, as rivals, traverse the same world and develop alongside the player. The task is to gather seven runes scattered across the world before the evil sorcerer Zoshi finds and collects them, which gives the game an unusual sense of competition and tension, since the rival heroes grow in strength just like the player's character and can confront them at any time.
The combat system is turn-based, with random encounters and rather merciless difficulty — the player often has to grind experience to survive encounters with enemies and rival heroes, who can get ahead of them on the journey, obtain better equipment, or even rob them of key artifacts. On their journey the player can also meet other racial heroes as companions and let them accompany their party, which partly compensates for the otherwise solitary trek across the world. Visually the game relies on vast, grim landscapes, towers, and castles connected by a web of paths, and simple but functional battle screens; the music was composed by Kenji Ito, who gave it a gloomy, adventurous tone matching the world's difficulty.
The 7th Saga received mixed reviews at the time precisely because of its high difficulty and the need for grinding, yet thanks to its original concept of competing heroes it earned a solid place among the cult JRPGs of the nineties and was also released in Western markets, where it appealed to players seeking a more demanding alternative to the more popular series of the time. Today's players remember it as a merciless but distinctive experience that shows how variously the genre could be approached in the SNES era, and its concept of competing heroes appeared only rarely in later JRPGs.
Why play: Anyone looking for a merciless challenge and an original concept of competing heroes will find a distinctive experience in The 7th Saga, though the high difficulty and need for grinding aren't for everyone.
Game 113 of 154 for Super Nintendo
