Sony
MS Saga: A New Dawn
By Euric Fuselier
Mar 31, 2006, 5 :37 am

Oh, to be a child in a Japanese developer’s future. If you aren’t piloting giant robots or taking part in a melodramatic story, you’re busy looking androgynous and detached. Such is the life of Tristan, an orphan who became an avenger after his friends were killed during an attack on his orphanage. Along with a typically wacky sidekick friend, Fritz, his plan is to gather a gang of stragglers and warriors to strike back at Vladi Zarth and his Dark Alliance syndicate.

In the post-cataclysmic world of MS Saga, mankind is resurfacing after the Great Fall. The giant robots, mobile suits, which are of the super deformed variety (big head and little bodies, minus all the imposing creepiness of towering mechanical objects of destruction), are instruments of mystery and destruction in present day Earth. Oddly enough, for mobile suits being so feared and mystical, they are incredibly common. You’ll get to meet them and several varieties of tanks as you traverse the world, traveling from city to city, helping out townsfolk. You’ll get to meet them a whole lot, in fact; actually, I would classify the random encounters as Very Frequent, if I was answering a questionnaire. In the beginning, this isn’t really a problem due to the fact that you need experience, but as you progress and get deeper into the story, the battles end up making travel a pain. There are items, like stealth modules, to help you bypass low-level enemy encounters, but such items are only partially helpful. Instead of throwing out somewhat helpful objects, the preferred route would’ve been moderation - well, adjusted moderation, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

So you’re off, going across a bland world – everything production-related about MS Saga is bland, from the audio to the graphics, and they would’ve been considered so even if the game had been released five years earlier – from point A to B to C and back to A and so on. You’ve literally played this game hundreds of times before: you have a world map that is dotted with cities and random encounters, with your party’s travels represented by a single unit (mobile suit) on the world map and the hero (Tristan) is controlled when navigating through towns via rigid controls and locked camera angles. Really, this has to be one of the most by-the-numbers role-playing games I have ever played, barring the lack of a sorely needed log.  That being said, it’s also somewhat comforting in a way, because there are no significant flaws and it’s nice to sit back and level up with giant robots every now and then. Yet, it does have a few addictive quirks.

The main culprit to my continued campaigning against Vladi - aside from the potent mixture of lethargy and responsibility, that is – is the customization of the mobile suits. While I wouldn’t be considered a diehard fan of the Gundam series, I have checked out a few entries into the universe and have enjoyed what I saw. With over 39 base suits from Gundam, G Gundam, Gundam Wing, and Zeta Gudam and over 260 parts to use, there’s quite a bit of tweaking in which to partake. In towns, you can create new suits from purchased information or taken from fallen enemies using the Mini G System in underground hangars. From there, you can go to vendors to purchase weapons and parts which can be added to the mobile suits via another vendor. Aside from simply adding parts, of which you can replace legs, arms, the torso, and add items like shoulder-mounted bazookas and iron shields, you can also choose colors for each piece. So you can create a unit tailored to your style and that of the pilot. Pilots can also be moved from one suit to another, and the suits themselves can be further upgraded to have stronger attacks, increased health, and so on.

It might not seem much for those not into the Gundam universe, but all of those combinations proved to be a powerful monkey on my back.

Your character gains new powers as well, of course. There are boosts and techniques, the former using energy stored and used in combat and the latter a separate point system (think magic points).Techniques can do anything from repair a suit and power up an ally’s attack to healing them from the various mechanical diseases within the game such as acid and overheating. Boost abilities drain boost points that are used for everything in combat, and these tend to be offensive-based and very powerful.  The energy points used for boost attacks are also used for your basic attacks as well, and additional points can be earned by using a round to charge your suit or by not using any, but taking half damage, and defending.  This means that you can decide to gamble on a melee move, which can be countered by mobile suits, or to play it safe with a long-range blast that adds a slight layer of strategy. The timing of the moves becomes more involved when your three-party team extends beyond, allowing you to switch out one of the three within combat for another character in reserve.

The replacing of characters becomes an integral part of strategy in boss battles, since they both take a very long time and the game does an extremely poor job of preparing you in advance for combat with them. Characters in reserve gain energy points per round as well as a little health, and switching one out for another does not take that character’s turn, so the fresh unit can immediately take a turn. This system actually works out pretty well and gives the later battles a little more energy.

Earlier, I mentioned adjusted moderation, and it’s particularly with the boss battles that I had problems. The game throws tons of low-level and moderate enemies your way, without worry of bogging down the story or progress, but the moderate annoyance of all the random encounters really comes to pass when you realize that all of that wasn’t nearly enough to prepare you for the boss. That leaves you to either continue to try and hope to get lucky or to backtrack to gain more experience, which is added to the backtracking already needed for the quests – double backtracking is never a good thing.

Overall: 5.5/10

A positive of not trying anything new is that there’s less chance to screw something up, and that’s pretty much the design philosophy behind MS Saga: A New Dawn. I suppose it’s a positive that little goes wrong, when more certainly could have, but when it’s so formulaic that it plays like it was built with RPG Maker 2, it’s hard to get too enthusiastic about it not being a buggy mess. The acquiring and customizing of the dozens of mobile suits is certainly the high point, and it does that with all the gusto that a giant headed robot can muster.