On the plus side, there are very few palette swaps! As this is an unlicensed title, the fairies and the Sea Nymph summons are all nude. The cheap nature of the project shows here as the number of monster overworld sprites is about half of the monsters you’ll actually be fighting. The other misfire is when wandering the overworld, you will be assailed by a generic monster, say a purple wolf, yet when you transition to the battle screen, you’ll be fighting a dragon. The incongruity of the main characters’ map-view and battle sprites can be a bit off-putting (though both look decent). However, at times, the mish-mash of graphics turns Brave Battle Saga into a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. The spell effects in battle look very close to the SNES’s Mode 7 effect, and there is plenty of parallax scrolling in the backgrounds, making for some truly beautiful looking skies. The wide variety of worlds, from caves to castles to waterfalls, look very nice and detailed. Also, the majority of them are real graphical treats to watch.Īs this is both a late release, and many sprites were “borrowed” from the graphically-capable SNES, the game looks exceptional. These bosses range from paladins to dragons to fairies, and they can turn the tide of many fights. There are also optional bosses that when beaten, can be summoned in battle as a spell (a direct homage/ripoff of the FF series). Party members can attack, use spells and items, or flee. The battles here are menu-based, but real-time, which adds a quick-thinking element to them. You wander the world map, eventually getting assailed by monsters, and are transported to a battle screen. The party will encounter a wide variety of enemies that range from typical fantasy fare like skeletons and dwarves to more science-fiction types like robots and mechs. The main gist of the game is a lot of side quests and fetch quests, but there are also a lot of fun little scenes such as one where you must find ingredients to assemble a potion that will allow two people to switch bodies or where you must take control of a secondary character to go on a search for the Goddess of Life. The party must stop an evil emperor from gathering the four plates that will reactivate the doomsday weapon. You start out as Tim, a young man who is unjustly banished from his village and forced out into the wilderness, where he runs across a girl and becomes part of a quest that takes him across the land to different kingdoms and eventually to an ancient space station. The world has separated into the technology-based humans and the magic-based demons. The story is at times hard to follow and may smell a bit generic to players well versed in SNES RPGs, but it still manages to feel epic in its own right. The translators did a great job at preserving the context and humor of the game. Despite its rather infamous backstory, I enjoyed this game a lot. While it’s no all-time classic, Brave Battle Saga borrows so much from better games that it can’t help but be competent. All of this would seem to paint this as a buggy, uninspired cash-grab from some Chinese pirates, right? Wrong. In some regions, the game was marketed with the generic title Final Fantasy, blatantly attempting to fool consumers into thinking they were getting a new FF game. The sound engine is the same one used in High Seas Havoc, and many of the game sprites were culled from popular SNES titles like Breath of Fire and Final Fantasy VI. The game starts off with two strikes: it’s an unlicensed Chinese game, and it is pieced together with sprites and engines stolen from other games. So is this a quest worth undertaking or should you just leave Tim and his buddies at home? Imitation is the Sincerest Form… Brave Battle Saga: Legend of the Magical Warriore was inaccessible to the rest of the world until 2010, when the dedicated Djinn and Steve Martin of released a free translation patch for English-speakers. The Genesis was home to many RPGs that flew under the radar and never garnered much attention, which gives them a certain underdog type of charm. RPGs are designed to let you lose yourself in the story and become a part of it, and the 16-bit era produced some legendary masterpieces that have stood the test of time. Old school grind-fests, turn-based battles, clunky menus, and wandering strange worlds on epic journeys.
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