The SaGa series is a divisive one, but those who have come to love director Akitoshi Kawazu’s freeform RPGs have next month to look forward to with SaGa Frontier Remastered coming out digitally on April 15. As of today, fans can pre order their digital copies on Steam, the Nintendo eShop, or the PlayStation Store.
Originally released in North America in 1998, SaGa Frontier confounded and frustrated Squaresoft fans with its lack of linear storytelling and gameplay. This was compounded by the seven choices for protagonist, its unwillingness to prevent players from wandering off the intended path, and (regrettably) an ultimately unfinished story in its original form.
The upcoming SaGa Frontier Remastered won’t do away with the obtuse nature of the game, one of its biggest draws, but it will finally bring together the story of SaGa Frontier in its entirety with the final piece of the puzzle: Fuse.
Fuse is a character who was initially intended for SaGa Frontier but was scrapped. In the upcoming remake, he and a number of other pieces of content have been added to finally bring the story to a full and hopefully satisfying conclusion. However, he won’t be accessible at the start of the game; players will have to complete a protagonist’s storyline to unlock the Fuse chapter correlating to that character.
For fans of the SaGa series, seeing SaGa Frontier finished in full and the prospect of getting a true ending is hard to pass up. For those uninitiated, the game may prove to be more of a headache than they may expect from the JRPG genre due to the utter lack of structure.
Personally, I could not be more excited to finally experience this game as it was always meant to be. The past few years have been great for fans of Kawazu’s works with the remakes of Romancing SaGa 2 and 3, SaGa: Scarlet Grace Ambitions, and Romancing SaGa: Re;Universe all being released internationally. Kawazu also produced the classic Legend of Mana, which will receive a remastered release on June 24.
