SaGa: Emerald Beyond may just be the one and only game where from start to finish, I have absolutely no idea what is going on. It has a masterful approach to turn-based combat, which makes it so there is no dull moment during brawls against flying smiling balls of evil and murderous skunks, but everything else is just… bizarre.

This is the latest entry to the long-running SaGa series by Square Enix and was in development shortly after the completion of its predecessor SaGa: Scarlet Grace in 2017. This game was simultaneously launched across consoles, mobile devices, and PCs.

Emerald Beyond Comprehension

What sets SaGa: Emerald Beyond apart from other JRPGs is that you are presented with 6 protagonists to choose from to have a grand adventure with. Each of the 6 characters has their own story and all choices tell a tale of your chosen character traversing through multiple worlds connected to an interdimensional realm called the Beyond.

While the idea of many different protagonists each following a similar theme of traveling to different worlds feels novel, the execution of the narrative falls flat as you are left scratching your head about what is going on. What is actually going on in the story? I don’t know, the game gave little to no context before plunging you into its narrative.

Take the cop buddy duo Bonnie and Formina for an example, their campaign starts with them bumping into each other while pursuing a suspect. Things just happened at an awfully swift pace and now they are able to travel through the multiverse. Their only goal in mind is to solve a crime by finding out more about a weird triangle object they found. Their goal may seem straightforward, but the entire stories go about in a weird convoluted way that adds little to build up an otherwise interesting premise or simply confuses you more.

This largely lies in the different worlds we get to explore, which are indeed diverse – there is a post-apocalyptic world now in a sandy wasteland, but inhabited by talking scarecrows, a world divided by elemental factions and environment, one where it’s mostly sea and seafaring pirates, and so on. As diverse as the many worlds are, none of them truly stands out as memorable because there is little context on what happened in the worlds and why we should care. 

The whole narrative is just basically us traveling to these worlds and immediately began helping the NPCs reside there, no questions asked. Straight up, the NPCs don’t even question you, a random person with a very different fashion taste suddenly talking to them, or maybe being only human among the anthropomorphic people. You walk to them and now you are tangled in a web of nonsense to get their troubles fixed. 

None of the NPCs are memorable in any way, as they only exist to push more quests and overly complicate worldbuilding. A good chunk of the NPCs is made up of archetypes – a blacksmith dude, a rich important lady in the town, or some scientist with the knowledge. What made them important to the story? An NPC said that they are important, and that is about it. What is this triangle thing about? Does not matter, here is a string of tasks that lead to nothing being explained but somehow the overarching narrative still progresses. How I would sum up is like watching weekly episodic cartoons where each week just tells its own story, but with absolutely no coherence in its narrative.

Repeating Door Knocks

This essentially builds up the entire gameplay loop of the game, enters a new realm, walks around a big flat map, and interacts with glowing portal doors to trigger dialogue after dialogue. Rinse and repeat, with occasional combat and geometry puzzles mixed in to break the highly repetitive monotonous flow.

Depending on the world, there are also tedious map manipulation mechanics to move around, such as needing to shift the sand wave movement or ride a bigger ship to brace a tide to progress. In other games, it would have spiced up the exploration, but here it feels like pointless annoyances added in to slow down your progression, especially when there are no explorative elements to begin with.

While there are some decisions to be made on which objectives you want to proceed with, in the end, it matters very little for your investment because there is so little context for your choices to make everything meaningful. Can’t help it when dialogues are also written confusingly, with either how wordy they can be for exposition’s sake, or how many buzz words used to forcefully make the world feel more fantastical than needed. Not to mention, how characters would speak based on their archetype, making dialogues very incoherent as the writing style shifts very often. It’s basically like substories forcefully fit together to act like it has things to do with the main story.

Keep the Combo Rate Going 

Thankfully, SaGa: Emerald Beyond is not all gloom because the combat saved an otherwise disastrous game. The combat system is turn-based where you decide everyone’s action right from the start of the round.

Your party has access to a shared pool of resources called BP, with a limited amount at the start of a battle which grows each turn. These BP points are used by characters to cast abilities, whether be Techs or Spells. Techs are like basic attacks and be used each turn, while spells take a turn to chant before activating during the next turn. What if you ran out of BP or simply chose to not cast any ability for a character? Well, said character would simply go on a Defend mode, taking less incoming damage.

What pushes the combat system to sheer awesomeness is the turn order system. Basically, the combat boils down to turn management, where you manipulate your characters’ turns in the timeline bar at the bottom center of the screen.

This marks a very important aspect of combat because your success in battle relies on how well you can manage your turns. Every time you assign an ability to a character, they may shift their positions in the turn order. Characters adjacent to each other will initiate united attacks called Combos, and the more party members queue up together in the turn order, the more potent and crazier their damage output is. Not only that, if the Combo Rate reaches a high amount, they can even initiate more attacks with no BP cost in the same turn.

The combo system makes the combat highly satisfying, especially whenever you pull off a long chain of united attacks and watch your characters unleashing flashy animations and letting out loud motivational warcries back to back.

Be careful though, because enemies can also initiate combos when side-by-side with one another in the turn order, and that will result in devastating outcomes. If left unchecked, enemy combo attacks may even straight-up defeat a character in a single turn.

This is where you will need to strategize when to chain up for a combo or strategically place an ally between enemies to deter their combo opportunity. There are many conditional-based effects tied to abilities such as Interrupts, which are basically counters to break off enemies’ combo chains. When all these puzzles fit together, the combat in this game just makes for a highly strategic, fun, and at times silly experience as you watch your party non-stop unleashing moves like going from turn-based to real-time. 

Team Emerald

Further enhancing the crazy combat is the build choices for teams and characters. You have up to 5 party members at maximum, and you can alter the way you play your team via Formations – a party-wide passive ability that grants you benefits and detriments. Formations generally affect how BP is gained, whether it reduces the BP cost of abilities after a combo is triggered, or grants you more if you Defend.

Onto character builds, the game features no traditional skill tree, instead characters either gain new abilities by random via Glimmer after an encounter or gain Techs based on the weapon equipped. You have multiple choices when it comes to weapons, ranging from bladed armaments like swords and daggers to axes, greatswords, handguns, and so on. Each armament type grants a different set of Techs, so depending on what weapon is equipped, 2 characters can have the same set of abilities. Since Techs are tied to armament types, this means characters would share the same weapon animations, which in ways, make certain animations lose their personalities such as the laid-back Brusque Slice move, but that is a nitpick on my part.

Additionally, the game also categorizes its characters into different races, affecting what equipment and abilities are available to them. For example, monsters cannot equip weapons or armor but can learn random enemy abilities. Mech, on the other hand, can equip multiple weapons as parts, therefore more Techs are available.

Since abilities are tied mostly to equipment, you will be customizing characters mostly based on armor and weapons through the menu, with all requiring specific materials. To gain these materials, like most RPGs, you either farm for them through battles or quests. But there is also an item trading system, which allows you to place certain items and gain options to trade with another item out of 3 choices after some time has passed. Note that they teach you nothing about item trading, so it’s all trial and error. 

Well, one of the most exciting parts of a JRPG is to meet with new unique characters who would join you on an adventure. In SaGa: Emerald Beyond, not only are characters boring and molded by generic archetypes, but some of them may even join you as party members. But here’s a thing… they didn’t even inform you that a new member has joined, no notifications at all. I only found out I had new members to toy with after many hours.

Don’t expect big new flamboyant party members as I mentioned, because most that join you are bland and barely appear in the story. Guinevere literally shows up, sings a cringe song, and vanishes. Yet, there she is, available on your party list. That said, you have cats as allies, and we know feline buddies are always awesome.

Emerald Visions, Not 

In terms of presentation, I have a split opinion on the visuals presented. It is fine for the most part, and I do believe most people will be okay with how the art direction is for the game. However, at the same time, some scenes do feel like it was thrown into Adobe Photoshop with the Poster Edges filter turned on, especially with backgrounds, just for a “unique” look. The 3D characters most often do not feel like they fit into the environment because of how flat the background textures are made to be. 

Meanwhile, the stories are presented in a visual novel style with static character sprites and written dialogue appearing in text boxes. As mentioned earlier, some text can be wordy and there is no voice acting in most conversations aside from a selected few, which is a bummer. 

As for audio, the music in SaGa: Emerald Beyond is fine. It has some catchy tunes, but nothing that will blow your socks off. Despite having catchy tracks, it gets tiring very quickly because of how repetitive it is with exploration, and combat music remains the same throughout even in different worlds, so none of the unique worlds truly get to shine with their own elements.

There are some odd decisions when it comes to audio design. Most audio jingles are serviceable, but there is this weird clicky sound that plays whenever you finish selecting all your skills and initiate the combat cutscene. I initially thought my speaker was busted because it sounded exactly like those poor static sounds on poorly connected AUX cables. It was truly a bizarre experience as I later found out it was part of the game. 

And the cats… use humans voicing acting as cats? Or at least, they don’t sound like actual cats. They sound weird and extremely off-putting, making me want to mute my game whenever the cat appears on the screen ready to make a move. It was just a bizarre decision by the sound team.

Not an Emerald Experience 

The best summary about SaGa: Emerald Beyond is that it is an overly ambitious game chewed on by its own ambition, marred by confusing stories and systems. If you are in for a story, the multiverse premise of SaGa: Emerald Beyond is not one that will satisfy you, because none of the world has any elements for you to care for.

From no context to what is going on to NPCs existing just to progress questlines with no personality attached, the only part of this game that is worth going for is the combat. Throughout the entire playthrough, the combat is undoubtedly the one that keeps the fun going with its highly satisfying strategic depth as you chain up character combos together like puzzles.

If you can march through the barrage of confusing stories, repetitive gameplay loops, and music, SaGa: Emerald Beyond does offer a glimmer of fun with its awesomely strategic combat system and the novelty of many different protagonists to start your adventure with. 

SaGa: Emerald Beyond was reviewed on PC via Steam, with the following specs – AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, 32 GB DDR5 RAM 6000MHz, Windows 11. 

Review code provided by Square Enix.

SaGa: Emerald Beyond

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Square Enix

Release Date: 2024-04-25

Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam

FORGE YOUR OWN TALE. The latest standalone entry in the SaGa franchise, SaGa Emerald Beyond, brings together the very best elements of the beloved series to offer each player their own unique gameplay experience.