What I’m Playing: Romancing SaGa Re;univerSe (Saga RS)

Yet another gachapon game based on a classic GameBoy and later Square Enix franchise (SaGa Frontier, etc). To a large extent, this is as basic, standard, zero innovation of a gacha phone game as I’ve ever seen.

The characters are very pretty, there’s some great character art, and then it goes into 16-bit sprite art for the game. Nice retro tone. Repetitive music’s getting a little annoying, but it has sliders for BGM, SFX, and voice, unlike so many other games.

Gameplay has a 5-character party, with various formations possible, and turn-based combat, with increasingly powerful skills, multi-character combos, and passives; it’s not a real “FIGHT CAST ITEM DODGE FLEE” menu, so all your tactical choices really are in party setup. Right now my main party only has a few melee fighters and one caster, and I just summoned an S rank healer, just need a better AOE caster. I keep trying to use Sif as a main DPS, her stats & damage are amazing… and she dies in every hard fight despite having high HP, I don’t know why. I’ve tried moving her position, giving her best armor, nothing works.

There’s a weird distinction in this between characters and “styles” who are the specific instances by rank (A, S, SS, like Lake Woebegone everyone’s children are above average, there’s no N or lower ranks, no trash chars but A’s aren’t really useful). You don’t gain experience instantly, you have to return to town, hit Dojo, and level up. And increasing level cap/rank is possible, but it costs a lot of gold and “character parts”.

There’s a shop with random gear and character parts, and will be a forge but I haven’t unlocked it yet.

This could be any gacha game—if I really cared, I’d play more Another Eden, Last Cloudia, or get back into DanMachi now there’s been new episodes—but it’s competently done, I’m having fun grinding these chars up for the moment, and advancing a quest where some Robin-like waif is looking for his sister in “Graves”, giant dungeon towers that appear across the land every 300 years.

I don’t know if Squenix is going to make any money out of me, there’s so far been no paywall where I needed more gems, so it’s just a free game.