SaGa Emerald Beyond

Emerald Beyond takes a lot from SaGa Frontier, the short and easily replayable scenarios, the setting combining fantasy and scifi, the stats going up individually (weapon levels are also included but are no longer the only stat that grows), the multiple races w different gameplay.

But I feel like in some areas it falls short of what made SaGa Frontier and SaGa as a whole appeal to me. It's not the lack of dungeons or exploration, but rather the lack of interactivity with the world at all. There's no npcs to talk to outside of plot. theres no areas to interact with that affect the environment. There's no puzzles to solve and differerent ways to approach the progression of the world like there was in Scarlet Grace. That really, to me, makes the world feel empty even with all the colorful art and areas.

Not only that but none of the subplots the characters do really progress their character or story at all. There's no small scenes that develop the protagonist like Frontier, and not much dialogue between the hero and deuteragonist like in Scarlet Grace. In writing it feels. empty. On the positive side however, the combat is phenomenal. Incredibly intuitive incredibly fun incredibly entertaining to work out different strategies depending on your party composition and what enemies youre facing. The amount of ways the different subplots play out gives it so much replayability. And the game expects you to replay it because for stories like ameya and mido, you won't see all that they have to offer until the second, third, or even fourth run of them. The fact that theyre so short makes it incredibly digestible. I know I'll definitely for sure be replaying every character at least once. Speaking of which, the main character designs are all gorgeous and fit the different worlds available to explore. Diva No.5 and Ameya are my favorites. And their personalities are so cute, theyre incredibly likeable.

The world also has really cool lore that changes depending on how the subplots play out. And I'm hoping someone takes notes of all the lore exposition and collects it all so I can have a clearer picture of whats going on behind the scenes.

All in all, I liked the game quite a lot even if I still found myself disappointed in some aspects. I hope ya'll give it a try sometime. It's a good game.