Makaitoushi SaGa

Makaitoushi SaGa is a remake of the game that kicked off the entire SaGa series on the Game Boy and was released abroad under the name Final Fantasy Legend. The basic idea is simple yet oddly compelling: in the middle of the world stands a giant tower said to lead to heaven, and the heroes decide to climb it. Each floor is its own separate world with its own rules, so the game drops from a classic fantasy setting straight into a post-apocalyptic city or a realm of gods. The player assembles a party from three races: humans grow stronger through purchased potions, mutants gain abilities at random, and monsters transform based on the meat they devour after battles.

Working with characters is therefore completely different from a typical JRPG. Weapons have a limited number of uses and get consumed, the right pieces of meat need to be found among enemies to trigger a monster's transformation, and there's never any certainty whether a mutant will get a useful spell or something useless. The WonderSwan Color version redrew the whole world in color, added more detailed sprites and a clearer interface, but kept the short, tight structure of the original game, which can be completed in a matter of hours. Nobuo Uematsu's music remains recognizable, and the bizarre transitions between worlds give it a peculiar dreamlike atmosphere.

At the time, it served as a reminder of where the whole offshoot came from. The original game was one of the first true RPGs on a handheld console ever and showed that the genre needed neither a big screen nor much memory. The remake made it accessible to a new generation and also confirmed that Square took the WonderSwan seriously. Today, Makaitoushi SaGa is a great entry point into the SaGa world for anyone put off by the length and sprawl of the later entries: it has the same uncompromising nature and experimental systems, but fits into a single long weekend. Its peculiar charm doesn't lie in the story, which is told sparsely and in hints, but in how unexpectedly the rules of the world change floor by floor, and how freely the player assembles their own party from beings that don't resemble each other at all.