SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

The SaGa series is one of Square Enix’s longest-running series of JRPGs, although it doesn’t get the same level of recognition as the likes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. This is likely in part because the series has only sporadically been localized to Western territories – while the earliest games in the series were released in the West on the original Game Boy as the Final Fantasy Legend series, entire generations would pass with SaGa games staying exclusive to Japan.

Saga Scarlet Grace was originally released on the PlayStation Vita in 2016 and ported to multiple other platforms including the Nintendo Switch in 2019 with an upgraded port that adds voice acting, more characters, and more content. It marks a return to the series after a long drought between releases, with the game being the first major release in the series since 2003.

Players more familiar with the Nintendo Switch remasters of Romancing Saga 2 and 3 will find that this game doesn’t stray far from the gameplay of those games (for better or worse), but does bring with it a more modern presentation. The visuals here aren’t in any way impressive, but they’re decent enough, with good 3D characters and environments, and a map screen that is visually presented like a pop-up book, which is a nice touch. The music here is also very good, although I didn’t find anything especially memorable in the soundtrack.

This game also takes an interesting approach to the story, with players being assigned one of four characters at the onset after taking a personality test of sorts, and with those four characters’ stories affecting one another on subsequent play-throughs, making for some good potential replay value. I found myself not especially engaged by the story here, but I appreciate the variety nonetheless.

As for that gameplay, what felt novel and original in the Super Famicom games honestly feels both over-complicated and overly simple here.

Combat in this game has players working with a limited number of action points spread among their party, meaning that each round of combat will likely see multiple characters sitting things out. Furthermore, characters’ turn in combat is determined by a mix of that character’s speed as well as the ability they choose to use. And as with prior games in the series, characters heal between battles, only seeing a long-term effect if they’re knocked out in battle (though as opposed to earlier games’ threat of perma-death, here they’re threatened with a time out to sit and think about what they’ve done).

Unfortunately, there’s little indication which battle actions will be more effective than others beyond a vague “more stars = better”, and with the 3D presentation making it less clear how useful ranged or melee weapons will be against a given enemy (since it’s unclear what the “range” is), it feels like players are more likely to default to choosing the attacks that cause status effects. Where in the Super Famicom games I found myself frustrated at the complete lack of information conveyed to the player, here there’s an in-game instruction manual to refer to, making my frustration that even after reading through how it all works, I still feel like I’m missing something, as so much of combat still feels like a luck-based matter of trial and error. And what’s more, the game’s focus seems to be on that combat, with the story relegated to static images of characters speaking.

There are some good qualities to SaGa Scarlet Grace, and I credit it for being a fairly unique game in the world of JRPGs, but I simply couldn’t enjoy the game, with its bewildering combat system and story that failed to capture me. Fans of the genre may find this to be a somewhat unique curiosity, but it’s not one I can recommend highly.

tl;dr – SaGa Scarlet Grace Ambitions brings the PlayStation Vita JRPG to the Nintendo Switch with more content and voiced characters. However, this is still a game with the focus aimed squarely at combat that is both too simple and overly complicated, and it simply wasn’t very fun to play. Fans of the genre might find something interesting here, but most would do well to skip it.

Grade: C

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