Impressions....

SaGa Frontier II has some nice things going for it ... but more greater it has plenty of negative things going for it ...

like the Gameplay.. it needs quite a lot of work ... the battle system, though, is above par.. its works very nicely, and offers fair chance of progression through the newer techniques and moves... but, the most annoying part of the gameplay is the playable characters.. its great at the begining.. you have new characters that you grow and mature through .. but the story takes place over 100 years... the characters you play at the begining are not those you end with.. so all that work put into your primary characters are lost in the history of the game...

the second point is the idiotic Strategy battles.. where strategy really had little to do with it.. pure power is what wins these battles, which you do not have in the end when you need it... and they take too long too...

aside from the gameplay, i have a quarrel with the presentation of the story.. you aren't shown a story-telling event .. its a timeline.. that you bounce back and forth between different points in the game, that may or may not have nothing to do with each other... annoying at the begining, and end...

but the true treasure of this game.. and what i love the most.. is the interpretation... the characters.. landscape.. and music are all works of art... music melds within the watercolored backgrounds... it reveals the definition of the enviroment... the characters themselves blend into the background making each scene complete...

the illustration style is another aspect to point out.. such deformity of the human shape.. yes, they are super-deformed.. but at the same time they hold a linear shape.. the character's powerful weapons are also super-deformed.. but the are tiny.. almost no bigger than the hands that hold them.. they take no meaning away from the character.. they only present an accessory, not a neccessity...

The story is quite a gamble... it's great to see a game take a shot at such a pay-load... begining with two 10 or 12 year old characters ( or however old they are at the begining ).. live throughout their whole life.. and then battle in the end with their grand chlidren... such an idea... altough as i've pointed out already.. they failed within the limits of the gameplay...

The art style and presentation is the true wonder of this game... and that is why i've played it ... not because it has the BEST graphics.. or the BEST gameplay ... in it's self, it is simply an artist experiment... one that we see so few of these days...

- Dyre - 9.12.02