Developed by none other than RPG game designing wunder-kind Square, Unlimited SaGa is the newest entry into the oft-overlooked (and often for good reason) SaGa series that managed to gather a moderate following in its earlier PSX iterations.  Fans of those games will be glad to know that the newest SaGa continues their tradition of unique artistic style and off-beat gameplay dynamics.  However, no one will appreciate the fact that Unlimited SaGa just isn’t that fun to play thanks to the aforementioned gameplay dynamics (which take RPG obscurity to a whole new level) and brutal learning curve that, even once mastered, rarely affords the player any amount of satisfaction.  Square may be the cock of the walk in the RPG realm, but Unlimited SaGa is the runt of the pack.

Not unlike the previous games in the series, Unlimited SaGa’s storyline is told through the perspective of multiple main characters, each with unique intentions.  There are seven characters in all and you are able to begin the game as any one of them.  Each character will have their own set of supporting characters that are related to their specific storyline and occasionally some main characters may meet up with each other.  Problem is, these characters aren’t all that interesting, their personalities are severely lacking and the lack of any meaningful dialogue progression doesn’t help matters, either.  The cast of un-lovable characters is as follows:  Laura is a 30 yr. old ex-pirate with a so-called romantic side; Mythe, an inventor who loves women and beer; Kurt, a middle-aged man who travels the world to discover the origin of his mysterious arm-gauntlet; Judy’s a 10 yr. old witch in training; Ventus, a teen-age carrier who seeks revenge for his brother’s death; Ruby, a wannabe fortune teller whose catchphrase is “Everything will be alright!;” and Armic, a small furry woodland Chapa creature who has agreed to help collect the needed items for a rain-making ritual.

If you’ve come to expect a certain degree of visual flair and impressive production values in Square-developed RPGs then you may want to sit this one out as it bears nary an iota of Square-flavored lovin’.  (With the exception of the trademark menu cursor sound effect, that is.)  First off, you are not in direct control of the character you are playing.  You don’t move your character around in different environments and explore towns and battlefields in the traditional RPG sense.  Instead, you literally bounce your small 2D character icon from enemy-infested area to area and tediously navigate through on-screen text menus.  Dialogue transactions are represented with static images of the characters who are conversing and cartoon pop-up bubbles convey the actual text in correlation with laughable audio dialogue.  In each town you can choose to embark on various missions by pointing your cursor over the inn and checking the available quests.  Some quests are nearly impossible to complete without acquiring the needed skills or items from another quest, though the proper sequential order that the quests should be tackled in is never really clear, so you are often left staring at a ‘Game Over’ screen until you manage to figure it out for yourself. 

You never get the impression that you are actually in control of your destiny in Unlimited SaGa because of the stilted manner in which you move around the game board.  For each mission you are afforded a certain amount of “moves;” if you backtrack too much or replenish your HP too many times there is a good chance that you’ll be forced to stop the mission and head back to town.  Luckily, any progress you made the first time around stays put, making the second time around the block a little easier.  Each new block of the game field you land on triggers a different event; sometimes you’ll need to dodge a trap or pitfall by successfully stopping a quickly-spinning slot reel, or you may come across a group of enemies, other times you’ll stumble across a treasure.  Regardless of the event triggered they are all dealt with in the same way; by stopping spinning slot reels.  It’s all about the reels in Unlimited SaGa.  A series of different slot icons will rapidly spin around in succession, and the goal is to stop the reel on the desired icon.  The sheer speed at which the slot reels spin makes performing the action needed to progress more a game of Russian roulette than skill, though the statistics are vaguely in your favor.

The combat system in Unlimited Saga is also based on reels.  Basically you are given five moves per turn in a fight, and you must queue up all five moves before you are able to actually execute them.  This means that in the off-chance that you are fighting a lowly enemy with a single LP (life point) who could be easily taken out with a single attack, you still have to take the time to input four other attacks that’ll never see the light of day.  But aside from the technical inadequacies of the combat system, its “innovative” HP/LP system is obscure to the point of frustration.  Unlike most RPGs where your health is dictated purely by how much HP (hit points) you have, Unlimited SaGa attempts to up the ante by shoehorning a LP dynamic that actually supersedes the traditional HP system.  When an enemy attacks you it’ll take away a certain amount of hit points, once your hit points have been exhausted enemy attacks will deduct life points, once your life points are gone you are certifiably dead.  I can see how this system looked good on paper but in practice it falls flat on its face since HP can be easily recovered and LP cannot until you go back to town.  Final Fantasy this ain’t.

Unlimited SaGa has an interesting visual presentation, utilizing hand drawn “Sketch” technology to convey detailed 2D sprites in a 3D environment, sans fluid animation.  The battle sequences are the only photogenic aspect of the game that feature anything resembling action, everything else is static images and slide shows.  But of the small amount of animation and character movements, the artistic style that permeates is up to Square’s normally high watermark.  You’d think that after floundering about in the depths of PSX’s technical limitations that the game’s debut on a 128-bit system would be bonafide next-gen, obviously this is not the case.  There isn’t much to write home about in the sound department, either.  The sound effects consist of a handful of aural representations of the on-screen actions, standard RPG fare.  Voice acting is bad, really bad.  The music though, wooo ding dang bubble-you doggy!  The music is stellar; Masashi Hamauzu fresh off his notable composition work on the Final Fantasy series lends his talent here, and as a result the music outshines the rest of the experience.

I could do without fancy-schmancy visuals and professional voice-acting, all I require in my RPG is good solid gameplay and satisfying plot progression.  Neither of which are present in this game. 

Gameplay: 4.2
Stilted board game dynamics and tedious menu navigation awaits those brave enough to play this game.

Graphics: 7.5
Interesting hand-drawn sprites and battle animations, though nothing that couldn’t be handled with last generation hardware.

Sound: 7
A beautiful soundtrack offsets an otherwise dull and drab aural presentation.

Difficulty: Hard
Lots of work and little reward.

Concept: 6.3
A gaggle of ambitious concepts that just weren’t executed well.

Overall: 5.6

If you’ve got the patience of a Buddhist monk and an affinity for all things Squaresoft then Unlimited Saga might be worth checking out.  For everybody else there is a cool preview of Final Fantasy X-2 on the DVD to keep you pre-occupied for a few minutes.