Why I love Berwick Saga

Shouzou Kaga 

 

To talk about Berwick Saga I must first talk about its creator Shouzou Kaga and his previous two works: Fire Emblem and TearRing Saga. Though Kaga is called the father of Fire Emblem, he only worked on the first 5 games. During the development of Fire Emblem 5 he grew dissatisfied with Nintendo and founded his own game studio Tirnanog to develop games for PlayStation instead, and to create a successor to Fire Emblem called TearRing Saga.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding TearRing Saga's development, and Tirnanog was even sued by Nintendo for stealing Fire Emblem's gameplay (this was in the early 2000s so the concept of spiritual successors for video games hadn't been established yet) but despite its development troubles and pressure from Nintendo (and fans who felt Kaga had betrayed Fire Emblem), TearRing Saga released in 2001 to modest success both critically and commercially.

I played TearRing Saga earlier this year and found it quite enjoyable. I believe it is a worthy successor to the first 5 Fire Emblem games and it is a game every Fire Emblem fan should play, but I also thought the game had a severe lack of identity as most of its gameplay was lifted directly from Fire Emblem. It's no wonder Nintendo tried to sue Tirnanog for it, as there are very few original ideas in TearRing Saga, and it instead feels like a best of compilation for everything Kaga tried with the first five FE games.

But Kaga and Tirnanog must have also seen TearRing Saga's lack of identity, because in 2005 Tirnanog released TearRing Saga's indirect sequel for PlayStation 2, and it is what I consider the greatest strategy RPG I've ever played: Berwick Saga.

 

The evolution of Fire Emblem

 

Though the game is commonly (and understandably) called just Berwick Saga, it's full title is actually TearRing Saga Series: Berwick Saga: Lazberia Chronicle Chapter 174. And though Berwick Saga still bears the TearRing Saga name, unlike its predecessor that simply borrowed from Fire Emblem without offering much new, Berwick Saga scraps almost everything its predecessor had borrowed, and innovated the strategy RPG genre in ways not even Fire Emblem itself has ever been able to accomplish.

And the moment you begin Berwick Saga you immediately start to see these innovations. First and foremost, the tried and true square grid that has been a staple of SRPGs since their inception has been replaced with a hexagonal grid instead. At first this seemed like a superficial change that only serves to make it look less blatantly like Fire Emblem, but the more you play Berwick Saga, the more you start to understand how this switch to hexagons fundamentally alters how you engage with the game's maps. All units now have six different directions they can move to and every panel has six different directions you can enter from, so strategies like barricading an enemy or creating road blocks (very common strategies in Fire Emblem) become nigh impossible to pull off outside of very specific circumstances.

Another big change has been made to how turn order works. Rather than the player moving all their units in a player phase, followed by the enemy doing the same in the enemy phase, the player and the enemy now move their units one at a time. So you move one unit, then the enemy moves one of theirs and you get to move another one of yours. Once you and the enemy have moved all your units once, the turn ends. Each unit can only take one action per turn, so once a turn ends everyone can move once again. 

This change completely alters the flow of gameplay. In FE, the player turn is a safe time, you don't really need to consider the order in which you move your units because the enemy won't move again until all your units have moved. But Berwick's system means each action you take has to be carefully considered. In FE if two characters are in enemy range you can move both of them out of the enemy's range on player turn without worry. But in Berwick you have to really consider the risks of such action because as soon as you move one unit out of enemy range, the enemy might attack the character you didn't move. But it also means you can react to the enemy's actions as soon as they happen instead of watching every single enemy move at once during enemy phase as they destroy you.

But by far my favorite change introduced in Berwick Saga is how the player's army functions. The player only has access to a handful of loyal knights in their army, way less than the recommended amount of units the player should deploy in a stage. Instead, to compensate for the lack of knights, the player has to hire mercenaries into their army. Mechanically the mercenaries work like any other unit. They are named characters who fight like any other unit would, they level up and you can improve their equipment like all your units. But they will not work for free. You need to pay them money in order to deploy them into battle, and money is a very valuable resource in Berwick Saga so you can't just hire every mercenary whenever you want to. 

But while that may sound like the game is discouraging you from using mercenaries, they are very much worth investing into as many are much stronger than your initial set of knights. Each mercenary also has their own questline you can complete to then recruit them as a permanent member of your army, though these questlines often can not be completed until late in the game. The desire to see as many of these questlines as possible is also a great encouragement to rotate your deployed units more often.

Those are the three biggest changes but there's so many other smaller ones that have a big effect on your strategies, such as:

 -Mounted units and their horses now have separate HP bars. It is actually possible for the enemy to kill your horses, which not only significantly weakens your mounted units but also forces you to buy a new horse after the stage is over.
 -Bows (including crossbows and ballistas) now require you to equip arrows in addition to the actual bow, which gives them much more utility than they ever had in Fire Emblem as there are many different kind of arrows you can use to deal different kinds of damage.
 -Certain characters can equip shields, which gives them a chance to increase their defense during combat. But much like weapons, shields will break if a character blocks too much. 
 -Spears deal extra damage based on how many hexes the character wielding it has moved on that turn before attacking, meaning spear units are at their worst when fighting at close quarters, and at their best when the enemy is at a decent distance away where the spearman gets to rush towards them before attacking (and this makes spears an excellent weapon for mounted units)
 -It is possible to capture enemy soldiers. Capturing them not only allows you to steal their entire inventory (granting you many valuable items for free) but captured imperial soldiers can also be ransomed with the empire to earn some extra money (however it is also possible for the enemy to capture your soldiers, in which case you must pay the empire a ransom to release the soldier)

And while not a mechanical change per se, it is worth noting how important money as a resource is in  Berwick Saga. I always respect an RPG where money has actual value, and in Berwick Saga money is one of your most valuable resources. Whether its hiring mercenaries, rescuing imprisoned soldiers or buying items, equipment and horses, running an army is not cheap and your opportunities to earn money are quite limited so you must put great care into deciding how you spend your money.

There are many, many more mechanical changes to the gameplay and I could fill this whole post with just listing all the things Berwick Saga does differently (and arguably better) from Fire Emblem and TearRing Saga, but I hope I already got the point across. Whereas TearRing Saga was a simple successor to Fire Emblem, Berwick Saga is its evolution. In fact, Berwick Saga is so different from Fire Emblem that I feel by drawing comparisons between them I am doing a disservice to Berwick Saga, as it stands proud on its own without needing to draw any parallels to Fire Emblem.

 

Lazberia Chronicle Chapter 174

 

As I mentioned earlier, the game's full title is TearRing Saga Series: Berwick Saga: Lazberia Chronicle Chapter 174. The name is quite a mouthful but it makes sense as TearRing Saga Series is there to show it's a successor to TearRing Saga while Berwick Saga is the actual name of the game, but what about the last one. What is Lazberia Chronicle and why does it have 174 chapters? The game never explains this, nor is the number 174 ever referenced in the story but I have my own theory on what that name means. However before I can explain my theory, I must talk about the story in general.

Berwick Saga takes place on the Lazberian continent, which is dominated by two countries: the empire of Raze and the kingdom of Veria. Veria and Raze have been on hostile relations with each other for centuries, and several years prior to the start of the game, the two countries have engaged in a full scale war where Raze is finally about to wipe out and conquer Veria for good. And as Veria's king dies and the capital falls, the game's protagonist Reese joins the war and the game's story begins.

On the surface Berwick Saga's story is nothing special. A very basic good guy kingdom vs bad guy empire story where our brave hero joins the fight, turning the tables and vanquishing Raze's invaders.

Except that's not at all what happens in Berwick Saga. While the generic set up is there and never goes away, where Berwick Saga subverts your expectations is that Reese is not some heroic commander who leads the fallen kingdom to victory. Reese is not arguably even the main character of this story as Reese is more or less the new king's errand boy. He stays far away from the front lines, and is instead tasked with missions such as espionage, evacuating civilians, escorting troops and rescuing prisoners.

While Reese's efforts are no doubt important to the war and Veria's survival, he is not the one who turns the tables and wins the war. Rather than a grand tale of war like in Fire Emblem, Berwick Saga tells a very personal story of Reese's struggles as he tries to help as many people as he can to survive brutal war. And the player too only ever gets to see the war through Reese's perspective. While there is a narrator explaining the course of the war between every chapter, the player never sees any of these big battles happening on screen because they are not relevant to Reese's personal story. 

And I believe this might make Berwick Saga's story divisive among people. Surely in a strategy RPG players would rather play as the commander leading their troops on the front lines and fight epic battles, but this bold direction is what makes Berwick Saga's story so special. It is a story all about how even small actions can have a big impact and turn the tides of a great war, and I think that's much more beautiful than yet another story of a brave commander leading their troops in the war's front lines. 

And though I have only talked about Reese, he is not the only character in the game whose story is told. All the cutscenes that could've been spent showing the war are instead spent developing Reese, his knights, his mercenaries and all the various innocent townspeople who are hurt by the war. Each and every one of them is a character with a story, and that is what makes Berwick Saga so special. There are no throwaway characters, even if a character has no direct impact on the plot (which is most characters) they still have a story to tell.

This is also further highlighted by the game's side missions that focus entirely on the game's side characters, so much so that you can not even deploy Reese in any optional stages. Those missions are entirely about developing the rest of the party, and the game does not let Reese steal the spotlight from anyone else (it also helps keeps your party's levels more balanced as you can't simply have Reese take all the exp). 

So with all that in mind, what does Lazberia Chronicle Chapter 174 mean? I believe it shows that even though Reese is the protagonist of this game and the character whose perspective the player follows, there are so many more important people in the war (and in Lazberia's history) that his story is only the 174th in this long war between Raze and Veria. And I think that's awesome.

 

The greatest strategy RPG I've played

 

I've already praised Berwick Saga a lot, yet there is still so much more I could praise about this game. For one thing, Berwick Saga is difficult. While it never reaches the levels of cock and ball torture present in Fire Emblem 5, it is very very difficult nonetheless, and will push your strategic skills to their limits on several occasion. 

But despite how difficult Berwick Saga is, it never feels unfair or overwhelming. A big reason for this is that, like in Fire Emblem 5, every mechanic the enemies do is also available to the player. Every overpowered skill, class and weapon the enemy torments you with can also be used by the player to torment the enemies with. Even fog of war, a mechanic in strategy games that famously only works in the enemy's advantage due to unfairly balanced AI has been balanced in a way that the player can exploit it just as much as the enemy does.

Another feature that gives Berwick Saga depth and challenge is that you can pick up side quests from citizens before each main story mission. These side quests are never simple "kill X amount of enemies" and instead require you to complete unique objectives, often while using specific characters. Not only do these quests require you to do things that might significantly divert from what the main story requires of you, the character requirement of these ensures you will keep switching up your character roster instead of relying on just the same characters every time.

In addition to the side quests, each main story stage also has up to three hidden objectives you can complete to receive tactics points. These tactics points largely serve no gameplay purpose nor do they have any story attached to them like quests do, but they are fun extra challenges that further push your strategic skills (and your tactical points are counted at the end of the game for a final score).

And on top of those, Berwick Saga also contains wanted criminals and rare items you can collect. Wanted criminals are named enemies who spawn in certain stages and can be quite a challenge to take down, but you receive money as a reward for defeating them (and even more money if you capture them alive). Rare items on the other hand are various pieces of equipment requested by a rich collector living in the city, and if you see an enemy is carrying one of the rare items he requests, you should try to take them down.

These parts of the game are entirely optional (though I do not recommend skipping side quests as the rewards are very much worth it) but when trying to balance the main mission's completion alongside the side quests and tactics points, while hunting for the wanted criminals and collector's items is when Berwick Saga truly shines its brightest. It is really difficult, but it is also extremely satisfying to clear all these objectives.

But while Berwick Saga is a really difficult game, there is one huge help the game gives you. Whenever 5 turns have passed in a stage, the game allows you to save your progress. Having those checkpoints in the middle of a stage makes it much easier to experiment with strategies as you don't need reset from the very beginning of a stage if your experiment fails. Though in order to prevent the player from abusing the save points, many main story stages have a time limit (either a hard time limit of clearing the stage in X turns or a softer one where more enemies start spawning after a certain number of turns has passed) to prevent the player from simply waiting 5 turns after every major action so they can save and mitigate all risks. And quite frankly Berwick Saga is so difficult that sometimes merely surviving 5 turns to reach the next save point is an ordeal.

I can say with confidence, that aside from Fire Emblem 5 (which challenged me a little too much), I have never been challenged by a strategy RPG as much as I was challenged by Berwick Saga. Yet no matter how much Berwick Saga challenged me, no matter how much it might have made curse at times and even after playing it for over 100 hours, I never stopped having fun with it. Berwick Saga always gives you the necessary tools for dealing with any situation it throws at you, it is just up to you to figure out how to utilise those tools to survive each of those situations.

 

The obligatory criticisms

 

No matter how much I praise Berwick Saga, it is obviously not perfect and I have a fair amount of things to criticise about it. For one thing, Berwick Saga is filled with secrets that are quite frankly impossibly to figure out without a guide. Thankfully Serenes Forest includes very in-depth resource guides for the game, and without a manual I feel it is almost mandatory to read about some of the game's obtuse mechanics from there to understand how Berwick Saga works.

Another frustrating part is how low your accuracy is, especially early in the game. In Berwick Saga your accuracy is determined in part by your character's weapon level, a stat which naturally grows on its own as you use specific weapons. However early in the game you will be missing many of your attacks as everyone's weapon levels are so low, and I think it makes the beginning much more frustrating than it needs to be. Though the game does take this into account as enemies often have low accuracy as well, and your weapon levels can grow even if your attack doesn't hit.

I also wish the game would automatically equip a new shield from your inventory when your current one breaks. There were several moments when my shield broke and I simply forgot to equip a new one because it's something you need to perform manually from each character's own inventory, and unlike with weapons, the game does not prompt you to equip a shield whenever you are about to fight an enemy.

And as much as I appreciate the ability to save every 5 turns, I think there are moments when that saving becomes a bit too easy to abuse. If, for example, you are on turn 5 and miss your first unit's attack, you can simply reset until the unit eventually hits. Theoretically if you're patient enough you can keep resetting until you get the perfect RNG for the whole turn. 

And speaking of resetting for perfect RNG, the RNG isn't an issue only during combat. One feature of Berwick Saga I haven't mentioned is the restaurant in town where you can feed your units to receive various buffs at the start of each chapter. It's a great feature that helps with a lot of the tougher missions but you can not choose which of your units visit the restaurant nor what foods are available in its menu in every chapter. So if the available menu (or the characters eating there) isn't to your liking, you have to reset the chapter and pray for a better menu.

 

The conclusion

 

This blog post has already become longer than I intended, and after all my praise I don't really have much more to add to this. It's a shame Berwick Saga never received a follow up, and all of its mechanics were only used in this one game. In a just world TearRing Saga as a series would have the same popularity and acclaim that Fire Emblem does, but perhaps it is for the best that the TearRing Saga series ended after it had reached its peak, as living up to the expectations set by Berwick Saga would've been no easy task.

Though while the TearRing Saga series ended with Berwick Saga, Shouzou Kaga later made another spiritual follow up to Fire Emblem called Vestaria Saga. I've yet to play it and I don't expect it to be anywhere near Berwick Saga's quality as it is a small indie game made with a fraction of Berwick Saga's budget, but I am looking forward to playing it one day and seeing what Kaga has cooked for us after he finished Berwick Saga.

My favorite games 2024

I don't play many games at launch nowadays, I prefer to play them after all the hype has died down and I can play it at my own pace. As such I did not play many games released in 2024 and this is simply a list of the best games I played in 2024.

Up until now whenever I've written a favorite list at the end of the year I've done it on twitter, but this year I decided to change things up a bit and write it here instead. It's partially because twitter is an awful platform if you want to write anything longer, and a blog post like this allows much more freedom, but the real reason is just because this blog is really empty and I want more activity here,

So without further ado, let's get this list started. Welcome to my top 5 favorite games of 2024

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#5 Evenicle (PC, 2015)

Evenicle is a hard game to talk about because at first glance Evenicle sounds like the most generic porn game ever. But while Evenicle is legitimately a porn game, I assure you it is far from generic. In the world of Evenicle there are two rules all humans must follow: you are not allowed to kill other humans and you are not allowed to have sex with more than one person. Breaking either of these rules will make you lose the Goddess' protection, as well as basically all human rights and be banished from society. There is one workaround however, becoming a knight will allow you to have a second sexual partner, and the more heroic deeds you accomplish the more partners you are allowed to have.

And so the protagonist Aster sets out on a journey across the world to become a great hero and have a harem of wives.

But if thats all Evenicle was it wouldn't be on this list. Yet despite that, I must talk about the sex in Evenicle because it does something I've never seen any other harem story do: all of Aster's wives are treated equally as a family. There is no "will they, won't they" with any of the girls, when Aster fancies someone he marries them on the spot (with consent of course, Aster is a gentleman after all). And more importantly, none of the wives are treated as just a member of his harem, everyone is a part of Aster's family, and instead of the girls fighting each other for Aster's affection, all of Aster's wives also treat each other as family. This gives the whole party an incredible dynamic with each other, because they aren't simply friends or companions, the entire party is one big family and that makes following their adventures across the world incredibly endearing.

I think Evenicle is already worth experiencing just for having one of my favorite casts in any JRPG, but it also hides an incredible story behind its generic premise. While the vast majority of Evenicle's story is simply about Aster marrying more girls by doing heroic deeds and beating one dimensionally evil villains, it all slowly builds up towards an incredible climax that works only because Evenicle is a porn game with a world built around strange rules.

My one big caveat with Evenicle is that while its gameplay is not bad per se, it is also not very exciting either. It has a bog standard turn based battle system that doesn't do anything interesting or unique, and every enemy is just easy enough to not pose a challenge, but still hard enough you can't steamroll all encounters without effort, creating a difficulty balance that's just kind of a pain in the ass.

The other big thing holding me back from reccommending Evenicle is that while Aster is a gentleman who respects all his wives, the same can not be said for other characters who do not respect the rules set by the Goddess. Evenicle has a lot of lovely and wholesome sex, but also a lot of disgusting and depraved sex. It's all an important part of Evenicle's story and worldbuilding though, and while some of the scenes in it were really hard to stomach, I wouldn't want Evenicle without them, because every bit of darkness in its world makes the light shine all the more brilliantly.

#4 Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven (2024, Switch, PS4, PS5 and PC)

Revenge of the Seven is a full 3D remake of the 1993 SNES RPG Romancing SaGa 2. The original Romancing SaGa 2 is one of my favvorite games of all time, but it's a game that's far too ambitious for the SNES hardware, and I've always wondered what a modern reimagining of RS2 would look like without the limitations of the SNES hardware. So when Revenge of the Seven was announced earlier this year I was beyond excited to see my dream become a reality.

To my disappointment Revenge of the Seven is not the bold reimagining of Romancing SaGa 2 I was hoping for. My wish was for something similar to Romancing SaGa 1's remake, which changed and added things so much that it is practically a brand new game. Contrast that with Revenge of the Seven, which is simply Romancing SaGa 2 but in 3D.

But despite my disappointment with that aspect, the original Romancing SaGa 2 was an amazing game and this faithful remake is also amazing because of that.

In Romancing SaGa 2 you are the emperor of a country that is under attack by the seven heroes who once saved the world, and have now returned to the human world as monsters to have their vengeance on the ungrateful humans who betrayed them.

How this is reflected in gameplay is what makes Romancing SaGa 2 so cool: there is no set path you need to take across the world, RS2 is a very non-linear game where you can go wherever you want in the world and fight the seven heroes in whatever order you want. However in addition to fighting the seven heroes there is another goal for you: uniting the entire world under your empire, and this is the part where RS2 gets really ambitious and ahead of its time.

Uniting the whole world is too much for one person in a single lifetime, and so sometimes when you annex parts of the world, the game experiences a time skip, after which your emperor has died and you need to choose an heir to carry on the previous emperor's duty. This system is not only super cool as a concept, but it also creates a satisfying gameplay loop where your protagonist is constantly changing, and instead of sticking with just one playstyle (though you can do that if you're boring) you're encouraged to constantly experiment with new builds and classes whenever you need to change your emperor.

There is not much story in Romancing SaGa 2 (most of the story is right at the start of the game and in the heroes' backstories), it's an RPG you play purely for the gameplay, but from a gameplay perspective, as well as its unique premise, this is one of the best RPGs I've ever played (for the optimal experience I highly recommend the classic difficulty mode, even if it seems intimidating).

But it is still a remake of a SNES game, and everything I just said also applies to the original version. Because despite some tweaks to the gameplay to make it more casual and making everything 3D, structurally Revenge of the Seven is more or less the same game as it was on the SNES.

#3 The Legend of Heroes: Kai no Kiseki -Farewell O' Zemuria- (2024, PS4 and PS5)

If you follow me on any social media I'm sure including the latest Trails game on the list comes as no surprise, and I don't think I need to introduce this game or series to you. Trails is my biggest obsession in gaming and I never shut up about it. And while I have some issues with Kai (mainly related to its pacing), it is an incredible game and a reminder on why I love Trails after the previous game (Trails through Daybreak 2) disappointed me.

I'm not sure what I should even say about Kai, it's the 13th entry in a long running series, and if you've never played a Trails game before, Kai is not what you should be looking into, and if you have played Trails games before. you probably don't want to hear me raving about how good Kai is because the game hasn't even been announced for localisation yet.

But trust me when I say Kai is a really damn good game, and you are in for a really good time when it eventually gets released in English. But I also think if Kai was a bit shorter and its pacing wasn't so slow, would've been #2 on my list.

I really can't wait to see what Falcom is cooking for the next game in the series, after Kai I am extremely hyped for the series' future.

#2 Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (1995, Super Nintendo Entertainment System)

The first Lufia is without any exaggeration one of the the worst games I've ever played. It's a game so bad that I eventually turned on cheats to disable random encounters and make my party level 99, because I just wanted it to end as soon as possible. But despite how much I hated Lufia 1, I kept playing it because everyone was saying the same thing: Lufia 2 is so good it makes suffering through Lufia 1 worth it. I was naturally very doubtful of this, how much of an improvement could Lufia 2 really be when the first game has barely anything in its gameplay that I like.

Well you can probably guess this already from Lufia 2's placement on the list, but it is quite possibly the biggest glow up I've ever seen in a video game sequel. You don't actually need to play Lufia 1 to enjoy the second game like I did, as Lufia 2 is a prequel, but their stories are closely related and I think you do get more out of Lufia 2's story if you play the first game before it (that's the only positive thing I'll say about Lufia 1).

But even on its own merits Lufia 2 is an incredible game. The original Lufia was game that copied Dragon Quest very liberally in its gameplay and didn't have any unique or interesting ideas of its own, but what made it so bad was that on top of being a cheap copy of Dragon Quest, the game was also really grindy and the pace of its battles was dreadfully slow. Add on top of that a really high encounter rate and you have recipe for a game that's not enjoyable in the slightest. Lufia 2 still has all the standard turn based mechanics you're used to seeing in JRPGs (though it's not copying Dragon Quest specifically anymore), but the combat moves quickly and its balanced to give just the right amount of challenge. The game also has no random encounters and it's easy to avoid fighting enemies if you're not in the mood for it, ensuring the fights never grow stale like in many other turn based JRPGs.

But in addition to having fun combat, Lufia 2 does what very few other JRPGs do: the level design is good. Lufia 2 puts so much focus on its dungeons I think it's actually a dungeon crawler rather than a standard JRPG. It is simply masquerading as a standard JRPG with its visuals and having an overworld and towns between every dungeon, but make no mistake, this is without a doubt a dungeon crawler, and a really good one at that.

What makes Lufia 2's dungeons so good is that they are full of puzzles, and these aren't ordinary puzzles where you push a couple blocks to open a door (well some of them are, but those are a minority), they are proper brain teasers that will make you think really hard about the solutions. And all of them are built around Lufia 2's mechanics, it doesn't feel like you're stopping to play Lufia 2 to solve some puzzles, instead the puzzles are an extension of Lufia 2's mechanics. You get various tools you use for puzzle solving and it almost feels like a turn based Zelda game (except unlike in Zelda, you use all your tools throughout the game and not just the latest one you obtained in the current dungeon)

In addition to all this Lufia 2 also has an optional dungeon that turns the game into a roguelike game where you start the dungeon at level 1 with no equipment. The dungeon is randomly generated and you need to search chests for new equipment and actively fight enemies to level up, because the enemies keep getting harder and harder as you progress in the dungeon, and you need to keep your party strong to endure the whole dungeon. I must admit I never actually finished this dungeon so I don't know if its final rewards are worth the effort, but as an optional dungeon I think it's a really fun addition to the game, and especially in 1995 when roguelikes weren't so common (especially on consoles) I'm sure it gave Lufia 2 a lot of replay value.

But the final cherry on top of this cake is its story. Lufia 2 isn't very heavy on story, I was actually shocked at how little focus it puts on it until the end. Instead, much like Evenicle, Lufia 2 is a game that puts all of its writing effort into making its party as likeable as possible. Your whole party is very well fleshed out, and the whole world is reactive to your party's actions. It's not the kind of game where your party stays in obscurity until the very end of the game when they defeat the demon king and get declared as heroes who saved the world. It's a game where your party achieves fame and heroics rather early on, and your journey still continues for a few more years after the party has become heroes to the whole world. 

And while the story connecting Lufia 2 with its predecessor gets very little focus in favor of a more character centric narrative, it does have some really emotional moments in its story. And these emotional moments are further amplified if you have played Lufia 1 before it.

Honorable mentions

There are two games I played this year that I'd like to shout out before I talk about my #1. The first is Phantom Brave (2004, PS2). Phantom Brave is a game I would very much like to add to my top 5 list, but I haven't actually finished it. The reason I haven't finished it is because I find it exhaustingly difficult. But aside from the difficulty I love everything about Phantom Brave. Its gameplay has a unique twist to standard SRPG formula that makes it very fun (albeit it is excessively grindy), the music is some of Tenpei Sato's best works, the art is gorgeous and the story is really good (and way darker than I expected from a NIS game made in Disgaea's style). But I still need to see how that story ends before I can say my final judgement on the game, but before I see that end, Phantom Brave gets a preliminary recommendation from me.

The other game I want to shout out is Heaven Burns Red (2024, mobile and PC). I have a hard time getting into live service games, and the only ones that have managed to hold my attention for longer than a month are Granblue Fantasy and Blue Archive. But now Heaven Burns Red is about to be the third game to keep me playing actively for over a month (as I am writing this I have 37 days logged into the game). What I love about HBR is that it never feels intrusive with its live service stuff, once you start the main story you can keep playing without any interruptions as if it's just a regular visual novel (you can even quit in the middle of a story chapter and when you boot the game again it starts from where you left of instead of bringing you to the main menu through several loading screens before you can continue). In fact, while HBR is a very competent RPG even without its story (the battle system is really fun on higher difficulties) all of that can be easily ignored if you just want to experience an incredible visual novel. Aside from having some limitations in its gameplay, it really does not feel like a mobile game at all, and when played on a PC it's easy to forget it even is an RPG designed for mobile phones because it is so easy to ignore all of that as you read through the visual novel portions. And even as a visual novel HBR is so full of personality and charm. I'm still only leaving it as a honorable mention because just like Phantom Brave, I haven't actually finished it yet (not like you can finish a live service game anyway, but I haven't read all the story that is in the game so far) but I am enjoying it just as much as I do Granblue and Blue Archive.

#1 Octopath Traveler II (2023, Switch, PS4, PS5 and PC)

Octopath 2 was one of the first games I played this year, having played it all the way back in January. But even in January I had a feeling nothing else I play this year will top Octopath 2, because this is one of the very best games I have ever played.

Octopath 1 was a flawed game, but despite those flaws I found it very compelling. The game was often frustrating, but I frequently found myself forgiving those frustrations as I fell in love with it. 

But when Octopath 2 was announced I actually wasn't excited, part of the reason I loved Octopath was beccause there was nothing else like it, and though it certainly could be improved, I felt getting more games in the style would be boring and take away what made Octopath so special. I'd much rather see the team do more new IPs that share some of the same DNA but are wholly unique in their design, like Triangle Strategy. The first game had quite a middling reception, but once Octopath 2 came out everyone started praising it to high heavens, even the people who disliked the first game were singing their praise to the sequel. Despite all the praise I tried to keep my expectations in check and was prepared to think "yeah, this is cool but I prefer the first game".

I was dead wrong.

Octopath 2 is a masterpiece, it continues the first game's gameplay style and structure while ironing out all of the first game's flaws. The basic idea of the game is the same as before, you have 8 different protagonists with 8 different stories, you can pick whoever of the 8 you want as your primary protagonist and then you travel across the world to recruit the other 7 characters and complete their stories in whatever order you want. But Octopath 2 brings some big changes into this formula.

The original Octopath was an extremely formulaic game. Every character had 4 chapters, you completed the chapters in a set order (though you can do each character in whatever order you want) and each chapter follows a very rigid formula where your character arrives in a town, something bad happanes, you go to a dungeon to investigate the bad thing, you fight a boss and then the chapter is over. It's a very repetitive game and this formulaic structure is maybe my biggest issue with the game.

Octopath 2 still has some of that structure present, but it does the best it can to mitigate the repetition, Now some characters allow you to clear their chapters in a non-linear order, some chapters do not feature any battling at all, and there are new dual chapters where two main characters share a story together. 

On top of this the 8 stories of Octopath 2 are much more interconnected than the first game's. I think the individual stories are actually better in the first game, but in 2 they form a much more clear bigger picture, and even after clearing just one of the 8 stories you can start making up your theories on how all of this is connected, and seeing the bigger picture slowly form as you complete the 8 stories and gather other clues hidden throughout the world is a wonderful feeling.

And speaking of things hidden throughout the world, there are a lot of them. I went out of my way to complete as many side quests as possible and explore every corner of the world, because I had so much fun with this game. I wanted to see everything this game has to offer.

The base gameplay isn't actually that different from the first game, but I found it a lot easier and less grindy this time around (your reserve party members still don't get exp, but I found the difference in exp less of an issue here than in the first game), maybe a bit too easy in some parts as the game didn't really offer that much challenge outside of the optional bosses, but I still had a ton of fun with the battle system. There are some new additions though. There are new advanced classes that significantly alter how each character plays, and each character now has their unique skills that can't be passed on to others even via class change. Another change worth talking about is that the game now has a day and night cycle that sometimes brings significant changes to what you can find in each area and town.

There's a lot more I could talk about Octopath 2, but I'm afraid a lot of it would end up just being "this was good in the first game, but they made it even better in the sequel". I am trying to keep these entries short but I could write a whole blog post about why Octopath 2 is such a special game to me (maybe I will do that if people would like to read it), but it is a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who enjoys turn based RPGs. My final playtime for the game ended up being over 100 hours, but even after all that time I never got tired of it.

Because as I already said in the first paragraph: Octopath 2 is one of the very best games I've ever played.

Why I love 7th Dragon

 

I am a huge fan of Yuzo Koshiro. And just seeing that he's involved will usually make me interested in any video game. I've had my eyes on the 7th Dragon series for a long time because of Yuzo Koshiro's work on it, but up until earlier this year, the only game in the series I had actually played was Code: VFD in 2016. But my desire for more of Yuzo Koshiro made me finally get back into this series and play the earlier games in the series, starting with 7th Dragon 2020.

I ended up liking 7th Dragon 2020 significantly more than I expected, and after I was done with it I  almost immediately started its direct sequel 7th Dragon 2020-II. After playing both of these games I considered maybe replaying Code: VFD as it's the conclusion of the 2020 storyline, and I thought maybe its story will actually make sense now that I have the context of the 2020 games. But there was still one more 7th Dragon game I hadn't played: the first game in the series, which seemingly has nothing to do with 2020 and was completely different from the rest of the series. 

I had never really heard anyone talk much about the original game since 2020, 2020-II and Code: VFD are the only 7th Dragon games most people seem to talk abnout. The first game seems more like a forgotten relic that people occasionally talk about as fun facts. Like "did you know 7th Dragon was not always about futuristic Tokyo, but it actually started out as a generic fantasy Etrian Odyssey clone?" It's something people certainly seem curious about but no one actually wants to play because it's so different from the other games in the series.

But after finally playing the game for myself, I think this game deserves much more recognition. Because not only do I think this is the best game in the 7th Dragon series: it might just be one of the best games I've ever played. So I want to tell you why I love the original 7th Dragon, and why you should play it so you can love it too.

The first impression

The original 7th Dragon gets often compared to Etrian Odyssey, and it's easy to understand why. Not only were both games directed by Kazuya Niinou with music by Yuzo Koshiro, but Etrian Odyssey was a clear influence on many aspects of 7th Dragon. The very first thing you see after you start the game is the town introduction screen, which is almost identical to Etrian Odyssey dungeon introduction screen, followed by the game asking you to make yourself a party of 4 characters out of 7 available classes. Soon after this you can head off to battle and are presented with a battle screen that's almost identical to Etrian Odyssey's. 

If I'm being honest, that did not leave a good first impression. The 2020 games and VFD also share elements from Etrian Odyssey, but they have a very strong identity of their own, whereas the original game simply felt like Niinou just wanted to make another Etrian Odyssey game without Atlus' involvement. However after I got past the shock of the game's first impression and played the game for longer, I satarted notcing that while the game certainly looks like Etrian Odyssey, its gameplay is actually much closer to Dragon Quest.

The game starts with a short prologue that also acts as a tutorial for everything you will be doing for the rest of the game. For better or worse, 7th Dragon is not the kind of game that wastes your time with excessive dialogue and tutorials. Almost as soon as you start the game you are already free to leave the town and go explore the areas near the starting town, and clear your required objectives in whatever order you want. Even early on it gives you very little direction on what exactly you should be doing. Just explore the parts of the world available to you right now and clear every side quest you find. 

After enough exploring in the prologue, you come face to face with a dragon, and that's where 7th Dragon really begins.

Not long after your first encounter with a dragon, the entire world gets overrun with dragons (666 of them to be exact) and the poisonous flowers they produce. The peaceful world of the prologue is gone, and you are left with a single task: travel the world and kill the 7 imperial dragons that are leading the attack against your planet.

The core of the game

After the prologue is over, the game starts to really open up. Though you need to take down the first two imperial dragons in a set order, after that you can take down the remaining five imperial dragons in whatever order you want, and this is where 7th Dragon really starts to shine. There is nothing stopping you from going almost anywhere you want in the world. And there is a lot of places you might want to go.

The world of 7th Dragon is huge. As you are travelling the world you will constantly find something new and exciting. Maybe you will find a dungeon, maybe you will find a town, maybe you will find some important item or maybe you will find a mysterious location whose purpose you don't uderstand yet. There is nothing forcing you to go after the imperial dragons specifically, you can just go explore wherever you want and maybe you will run into the imperials on your own. On top of the seven imperial dragons, there's also the aforementioned 666 regular dragons you can hunt, killing them is not necessary for clearing the game, but killing all 666 will unlock the game's final optional dungeon and biggest challenge.

There is much more to 7th Dragon than simply hunting dragons. Though the main quest is very light on story, the game has many optional character stories you can complete throughout the game. Some of these stories are presented as quests, but many others the game will not treat as any kind of big deal. Though not every NPC in the game has a name or a face, nearly every NPC as something to say. It may not be on the level of soething like Trails, but the game encourages you to always talk with every NPC you see because they can have a lot to say. Some NPCs will give you quests, some will give you helpful gameplay tips and some may just have a little story arc of their own. Nearly every NPC in the game has something new to say whenever you defeat an imperial dragon or accomplish some other major main quest objective, so it's always worth it to travel to previous towns and see what its inhabitants have to say.

And not only do all NPCs have something to say, the game has a ton of objects to interact with too. Whether it's just crates or drawers with simple items or money in them, or bookshelves with surprising amount of things to read about, the towns have so much detail put into them. It's worth interacting with everything you see in towns, because you often get something very unexpected from them.

One of my favorite moments in the game was when I cleared a completely optional dungeon and my reward for it was an item that lets you change the game's entire soundtrack to 8 bit arranges. It's a completely ordinary looking dungeon that I'm sure many players might ignore because it's optional, so receiving an item like that at the end of it was something I never could've imagined. Another stand out moment in the game was when I cleared a side quest and my reward for it was a pet cat (or a dog or a cow, you get to choose one) being added to my house. The pet doesn't have any effect on your gameplay, you just get a cute little pet hanging out in your house from now on and I think that's very lovely. 

And while not all dungeons or quests give such impressive rewards, doing all the optional content you can is still very much worth the effort. If you simply decide to pursue the imperial dragons and ignore all the optional content, you will miss out on so much of what makes this game special. It almost feels like the game is more about exploring the world and learning the stories of NPCs than actually about killing the imperial dragons. Though that's not to say the imperial dragons aren't exciting too, because they certainly are exciting as well. Each imperial has something that makes them unique from everything else in the game, like Earthshaker: a dragon so big that the entire dungeon you fight him in is actually his body, and you need to take down his tail and legs before you can fight against his head.

As for the combat itself, it is a rather simple turn based battle system at the base level, but there's a lot of depth surrounding it. The overall difficulty of random encounters and dragons isn't too bad, but where the game's challenge comes from is managing your resources as you have limited inventory space, and there are very few opportunities to heal inside dungeons. There is also no option to retry if you die, and aside from a few longer dungeons with save points in the middle, death in 7th Dragon often sends you all the way to the last inn you visited, so you need to play very cautiously. Though despite the harsh punishment for failure, I wouldn't call 7th Dragon an overly difficult game once you get past the beginning and start to have more options during combat, and better ways to protect yourself and save resources.

Besides the resource management, the other core part of 7th Dragon's combat is the classes. You have 7 different classes to choose from to create a party of 4 characters. I played my game mainly with Mage, Healer, Samurai and Fighter (the remaining three classes: Rogue, Knight and Princess I only tried out a little bit), but from what I can tell each class is very good at what they're doing, and the game is designed so that you can make each party composition work. Some classes also have skills designed to be used in tandem with other classes. Such as how a fighter can do combo attacks with mage's spells or how a knight gets stronger if a princess in your party gets knocked out. It's a system that really encourages you to try out different combinations for classes. Each class also has unique EX skills and ultimate weapons that you may sometimes receive as rewards for side quests or dungeons.

So while 7th Dragon's combat can seem simple on the surface, there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. Between managing your resources and choosing a party that suits your playstyle the most, a lot of thought goes into surviving in the world of 7th Dragon.

And then there's the game's soundtrack. I wouldn't say it's one of Yuzo Koshiro's best works (I'd even say it's not the best 7th Dragon soundtrack) but there are some really good individual tracks here. Maybe my favorite song in the game is the theme of your starting town Kazan, which is simply the perfect song to start your adventure with. Other noteworthy songs from the game are the first battle theme: Swords Bursting, the title screen theme: The Tale Began, the imperial dragon battle theme: Seven Threats and one of the game's many dungeon themes: Jungle Navigation. All in all, it's a good soundtrack. Even if it's not one of Koshiro's best, every song in it is very pleasant to listen to during gameplay (though I really wish the game had more than one battle theme for the regular dragons, as their battle theme gets a bit tiring after fighting 666 of them)

The game even got a jazz style arrange album by Norihiko Hibino, who is best known for his work on various Konami franchises such as Metal Gear Solid and Zone of the Enders, as well as a similar jazz style arrange album that was made for Etrian Odyssey. The album only contains 13 songs, but they are all excellent arranges and I love Hibino's jazzy take on the soundtrack, with my favorite being the theme of Marlleaire Islands. 

The negatives

As much as I would like to heap endless praise at the game and tell everyone to play it, 7th Dragon is sadly not a perfect game and I have to address its negative sides. This game is janky as hell, especially for a game released in 2009. This game has so many small little issues that may not sound bad on their own, but when there's so many of those small little issues, they start to pile up and become big issues.

One of the first things you will notice when starting the game is your movement speed. You walk across towns and dungeons really slowly, however before the prologue is over you will learn the ability to run, which is nice. However this reflects one big issue this game has: a lot of basic gameplay features are hidden unlockables you earn as rewards for side quests. On one hand you could argue it makes the side quests feel more rewarding, but the game gives you no indication for what rewards a quest might give. Some quests might give you nothing but money, some might give you stronger equipment and some might unlock completely new gameplay features. You have no way of knowing what quests are worth doing and what quests to prioritise until you've actually cleared the quest.

On top of that, some side quests are just very obtuse in general. Just like the game gives you no direction for how to clear the main quest, it also gives you no direction for how to clear the side quests. With some quests the game simply expects you to wander the world aimlessly hoping you'll eventually run into a quest's solution. 

The game also has no bestiary which you could use to see which enemies drop which materials, and where those enemies spawn, so when a quest asks you for the loot of a specific monster, you just have to hope you remember where you've encountered them before (or look up enemy drops from an online guide, it's not worth it trying to remember them yourself). On top of that the game has limited inventory space, which I think is great balancing for difficulty since it ensures you can't stockpile endless healing items, but that same inventory space is also occupied by monster drops, and when you're specifically farming for items you will run out of inventory space very quickly. This would be forgivable if the game at least had a storage like in Etrian Odyssey, but for some baffling reason there is no storage and you just have to carry all your items in your very limited inventory.

But the part in the game's quest design I really can't forgive is that the game only allows you to accept three quests at once. The game has a lot of quests, and many of those quests have story to them. The game clearly wants you to do as many quests as possible. But before you can do any quests you have to accept them at the quest office, and you can only accept 3 quests at once. 

This is an extremely frustrating limitation and feels counterintuitive to the way the whole game is designed. The game wants you to wander around the world aimlessly while talking to people. And many quests are designed so that if you just talk to everyone you see, you will clear the quest eventually. But you can't get quest specific dialogue from NPCs unless you have that quest active, and since you can only have three quests active at once, the chances of you running into the solution of the specific quests you have active are very low.

And what makes matters worse is that you want to do these quests. As I said before, the rewards you get for clearing quests are sometimes really important. And unless you look them up from an online guide you simply have no way of knowing what quests have those important rewards.

The quest system is so bad that it single handedly ruins a huge part of the game's exploration, which is its biggest appeal to me. If there is one thing I could change from 7th Dragon, it's this. Thankfully the following games fixed this system by allowing you to accept as many quests as you want, but the quests in those games simply aren't as interesting as the ones in the first game.

However while the quest system is my biggest issue with the game. it is not my only one. Another big issue is the game's difficulty balance. The game starts out very brutal, but once the world opens up, the difficulty kind of stagnates because you can go wherever you want and the game can't really balance the enemy levels properly because of that. The more optional content you do, the easier the game becomes because the game has to be balanced so that you can clear it even if you only go after the imperial dragons and ignore everything else. This is only really remedied by the game's final optional dungeon, which you can only access after killing all 666 dragons, so the devs could actually balance it with the expectation that the player is near max level.

And speaking of the dragons, you might think 666 dragons to kill sounds a bit much, and it absolutely is. The game may have a lot of optional dungeons, but there's not so many dungeons that you could place 666 dragons in them in interesting ways. And so many of the dragons feel like they're pure filler made to bloat the overall dragon count so they could have a cool number like 666 as the total dragon count. I still think most dungeons have a good balanced amount of dragons that have been placed inside the dungeons in interesting ways, but there's a couple dungeons with a total of over 50 dragons and they are a real chore to get through because of how many dragons you have to fight in them (though the dragons in those dungeons are also typically super weak and not much harder than a random encounter).

Closing thoughts

The more I think about 7th Dragon, the more I'm amazed that it's a game that actually exists. Every aspect of the game appeals to me so much it feels like it's a game that was made specifically for me. The game feels like a mix of Dragon Quest with its world design, Etrian Odyssey with its mechanics and aesthetics, SaGa with its player freedom and Trails with its large focus on NPCs and side quests. Before playing 7th Dragon I never knew i wanted this kind of game, but now that I've played 7th Dragon I desperately want another game like it. I really want more of this style.

Etrian Odyssey started out very janky as well, until it got sequels that refined its ideas to near perfection. Sadly 7th Dragon's sequels went into a completely different direction, and it never got the sequels that could take its initial concepts and refine them to perfection, there is no equivalent of Etrian Odyssey 3 for 7th Dragon. It is a game that has plenty of fantastic ideas but it couldn't quite execute those ideas as well as it should've, and we will likely never get a sequel that returns to these ideas to do them justice.

Despite the jank and other flaws 7th Dragon has, I have so much respect for this game and I really loved playing. It's a game that I never got tired of and would love to keep playing even more in the future. Maybe one day I will replay it with a different party set up and a lower level to keep it more challenging.