Depending on who (and where) you ask, SaGa Frontier is either a little-known cult classic JRPG or a best-selling building block of a famous franchise. It's engaging, it's complex, it's repetitive. Now it's remastered, 24 years after the original release.
"We want more gamers, especially those from the West, to play games from the SaGa series, which has a long history in Japan," says Hiroyuki Miura, the producer of SaGa Frontier Remastered.
I played SaGa Frontier as an awkward, angsty teen in the late ’90s. I spent hours leveling up my characters, then getting mad at myself for failing to save before wiping again. I'd pause to switch over to the family computer, looking up game tips and painstakingly detailed walkthroughs on old-school forums. My devotion to the game was amplified by the fact that none of my friends had heard about it. It was my game.
As the years passed, I periodically returned to the world of SaGa Frontier. I took my empty PlayStation to college and bought a third copy of the game off eBay (my original copy long since scratched to hell, the second accidentally shattered). The game brought me joy, but the precariousness of the aging tech worried me. If this disc became unusable, too, how many were left in the world?
Concerns about limited availability resonated with the SaGa team. "We’ve received a lot of requests from players asking to be able to play these games again. We feel that it is important to fulfill these requests," says Miura. "These plans can only be carried out if there is demand from the players, so we are very thankful to be able to release this game worldwide this time around."
