I'd play a lot of things as long as I can create my party at the beginning of the game, so I recently completed the fan game
SaGa 4. Don't get fooled by the location, it's not made with RPG Maker, in case you think it's important. I think it took me something like 25 hours.
It's meant to be inspired by the first SaGa games (Final Fantasy Legends I & II). I'm not an expert of these games at all, I wanted to play SaGa 1 (Final Fantasy Legends) a little bit but the Field Of View is boring on a big screen so I won't play more than the tiny bit I've played. Therefore I don't know what is taken from which game and what freedom the dev took. SaGa 4 seems to be an improvement over SaGa1 from the little I've played but what I've played is not significant enough to be sure.
Yet, I think the game was fun so here is a brief review.
The story is the chase of some big bad dude, with some recurring characters. It's serviceable, nothing to say about it.
You travel from one medium size world to another, each with several towns and dungeons.
The exploration of a world is midly linear with some things you have to do in some order. Worlds also contain totally optional caves.
In my opinion the world settings and layout are good enough and solving each world is fun, nothing amazing but listening to what people say can help at times, sometimes you require a key item, ...
Towns are banal, small with a couple of shops, not all with all the same items, with people having some things to say about their town and its relationship with the rest of the world.
Dungeons are so-so, or to be more precise for a big part of the game I thought they were boring. It's visible the dev spent some time fleshing out the world, the settings, the towns, the dungeon layouts, but with most dungeons in the first half of the game finally having no gameplay gimmick at all it often falls flat.
However most dungeons from the last two worlds have one gimmick, which makes them more of the nothing to talk about kind. If the dungeons from the entire world were as good then they would be unoffensive, as is I still think the dungeons from the first half of the game are kind of bad, overall.
You find treasures in dungeons, and given weapons have durability and you're rarely at a point where you've got all available armor parts you will use what you find even when it's not better than what's available in shops, you will occasionally find things you can't buy and you also find gems that can be traded for strong items at the end of the game, so nothing awesome but treasures are mostly worth looking for.
You create 4 characters among 4 types (humans, mutants, monsters and robots) at the beginning of the game. And yes, it sucks that it's the same number, I would have preferred to create 5 instead.
You are also often temporarily joined by a 5th party member.
Humans can use a full equipment and their stats are permanently increased only by consuming specific items.
Mutants use half the equipment slots and the second half is made of skills and passives they get when the party wins battles.
They level up when defeating monsters, and when they do you can choose between two upgrades, which can be a stat rise, a skill or a passive. If the skill or passive would replace an old one you know the one which would get replaced when choosing between the two upgrades.
Robots use a full equipment and they can wear anything in any slot, multiple armors, multiple weapons, etcetera. Their equipment determines their stats.
Equipping a weapon permanently removes half of his charges but their weapons are reloaded when resting in an inn, while they normally don't.
Monsters transform unto another monster when they're allowed to eat an enemy after a fight.
You know which monster you'll transform to before eating.
There abilities are replenished when resting but they're also fully replenished, and also changed entirely, obviously, when eating an enemy.
I don't think there's any need to say these 4 completely different types is on the biggest appeal of the game, it's one of the biggest appeal of the series to begin with.
All weapons have charges.
Managing your money is a big and cool part of the game, buying weapons and consumables you would be lacking of while spending the remaining golds on armor parts and stat upgrade items for your human(s).
You gather elemental gems all around the game that you can trade during late parts of the game for very strong items you'll have to choose from a large variety of items, that's very cool.
Key items can take an important room of your inventory and you want to drop those eventually, I think you can when you think you can (especially because it should be possible to get an item again if you were wrong) but don't quote me on that.
Customizing and preparing your party for what's coming next is fun.
During long travels, against trash mobs, you typically want group targetting instant death effects, while against bosses you want appropriate resistances and immunites and drain or big damage effects against one enemy.
There's no level scaling, as far as I'm aware.
The travel between one world to the next and the first fights when you just reach a new world can be tough, while the last fights before leaving are a joke.
Rise in power is certainly more satisfying than in SaGa Frontier. I'm not saying it's a better game, let's not exaggerate, but that part is.
Boss fights can get tough as you advance if you're not prepared well enough, and for example as far as I'm concerned I got punished for not raising the mana of my mutant enough, making some parts much harder than they could have been because his mass healing effects were weak.
Note that I never fled from battles, so I got much gold, if you intend to flee from random encounters then I think you'd better have an appropriate party. Typically at least two monsters, which don't require any gold.
Combat against trash mobs certainly gets better and better, eventually you need to be very aggressive and kill them before they kill you, it's cool.
In the end I think that experience may vary but my experience was that, after the very beginning there was a point when I feared the game would be get eventually too easy but it did not. Difficulty was fine, overall, the game did provide some challenge, a very good point for the game.
I think the game is solid, granted you really like the character customization mechanisms of SaGa games.
The dungeon design could be worse but it does not shine either, and there's no freedom of any kind regarding narrative. I also think it's unequal overall, combat tends to get better and better, which means it's a bit mediocre in some early parts, and the same can be said about the dungeons.
However customizing and managing your own party made of these different types of characters is very cool, and the provided challenge makes your management relevant enough, and that's why you could want to play the game.
