SaGa: Emerald Beyond is a bizarre game and the only one I can think of where two of the main characters are an anime-looking man who talks like a good ol ‘Southern boy and a Vampire who dresses like a Japanese pop star. It’s a game overflowing with wonderfully dense gameplay systems and complex combat, but simultaneously packed with busy work. SaGa: Emerald Beyond is engrossing, frustrating, and bewildering all at once, but boy, is it compelling.
Emerald Beyond largely carries over the formula used in the series’ last game, SaGa: Scarlet Grace, focusing on dynamic storytelling that puts a huge emphasis on player choice. However, the key difference is that Emerald Beyond doesn’t take place in just one world but over seventeen different ones. The basic setup is something about “Conjoined Worlds,” a kind of multiverse that each protagonist makes their way through.
Each protagonist has their own reason for visiting these worlds, and while there is an overarching story, the focus of Emerald Beyond’s narrative is exploring these wildly disparate worlds. There are little self-contained stories to see while you get to know more of the character’s quirks at the same time. In a roundabout way, the easiest way to describe SaGa: Emerald Beyond is an interactive “choose your own adventure” story.
“SaGa: Emerald Beyond is engrossing, frustrating, and bewildering all at once, but boy, is it compelling.”
Using the right trigger, you can visualize lines that lead to activities. A green line shows you where to continue the story, blue lines denote side quests, and red lines optional battles. As you make your way through each world, you can engage with as much or as little side content as you want, and every little story is heavily based on player choice. This encourages replayability, and means that you’ll see new layers to the stories as you replay. At the same time, different protagonists will visit the same worlds but see different characters or elements of that world’s narrative.
This creates a staggering amount of content to play through, but it can also make the overall narrative feel disjointed. Anyone used to the SaGa series’ unique brand of storytelling will likely be unbothered, but it’s easy to see anyone jumping on with this game could be turned off. Piecing together its story, digging up side quests, and replaying each protagonist’s story multiple times can be sluggish and monotonous. But it’s the utterly bizarre worlds that help keep things interesting.
One world has you helping gelatinous talking white blood cells fend off a hostile invasion of the massive body they live in, while another is a scientific facility researching the ethereal power of triangles. While not every single world is equally interesting, by and large, the sheer absurdity of everything works. Seeing single-eyed white blood cell blobs pine about the meaning of life is strangely compelling, and the way these stories are layered out feels rewarding to anyone willing to put in the dozens of hours on each protagonist.
SaGa: Emerald Beyond’s dense and complicated story is matched only by the complexity of its gameplay systems, and chief among those is its phenomenal combat system. Battles are turn-based but put a particular emphasis on character builds and a combo system that encourages linking together your party member’s attacks.
It’s a vastly complex battle system that easily takes dozens of hours to learn, so I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds. But essentially, every character in Emerald Beyond can equip a number of weapons, like swords, daggers, guns, etc. Each weapon has a wide array of different techs or spells that you can learn, and using any of these in battle has a point requirement.
During battle you constantly see the action points you have on the bottom of the screen, represented in stars, along with the action timeline that lays out which order your characters and enemies are attacking in. Essentially you’ll want to use the right moves so that the gauges on attacks line up, leading to a combo, while also juggling the amount of action points you have.
“In a roundabout way, the easiest way to describe SaGa: Emerald Beyond is an interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ story.”
That’s going to sound extremely complicated on paper, and it is a bit complicated, but actually using the battle system, it starts to make a lot of sense pretty quickly. While it takes a bit to learn, combat really shines in the sheer complexity and variety of options you have at your fingertips.
You can outfit your party with different weapons, swap around combat roles, try out different formations with different bonuses, and so on. Your characters level up and learn new abilities as they use specific moves, and it’s pretty common in battles to suddenly have a character use a “Glimmer” that teaches them some dazzling new move. There’s a lot of depth to dig into, and RPG fans who love complex battle systems with layers will likely be in heaven in Saga: Emerald Beyond.
It’s a good thing the battle system is so stellar because, boy, there’s a lot of battling in Emerald Beyond. If anything, that’s my biggest complaint with the game, the pacing can be all over the place. Some worlds throw one battle after another at you, while others are slow, plodding affairs heavy on narrative.
“There’s a lot of depth to dig into, and RPG fans who love complex battle systems with layers will likely be in heaven in Saga: Emerald Beyond.”
There are other systems to grapple with as well, as SaGa: Emerald Beyond has an involved trading system for items, combat missions that yield rewards, block puzzles mixed into the story, and more. On top of this every protagonist has a different special ability that alters combat. For example, Tsunanori Mido can equip party members with differents “Souls” that alter their parameters, while Formina & Bonnie can “capture” monsters and unleash them during battle.
SaGa: Emerald Beyond is a game filled with disparate elements that sometimes clash against each other and sometimes work together beautifully. At times, it feels like Emerald Beyond is designed to be as obtuse as possible. This is a game that wants, almost demands, you to spend dozens of hours with its systems and story to truly understand them. It revels in complexity. In this case, that’s both a good thing and a bad thing.
The same can be said for the game’s presentation. Static character portraits can sometimes be beautiful, but other times slow down the narrative, where a cutscene could have worked better. The exception is the soundtrack, a fantastically eclectic mix of pop, jazz, and rock that really gives Emerald Beyond a unique personality.
It’s abundantly clear that SaGa: Emerald Beyond is a game made for fans of the franchise, those who are already onboard with the weird, obtuse way SaGa builds its systems and story. In that respect, it’s one of the best entries the series has seen, and there’s a lot to love between the weird characters and bizarre self-contained stories of each world.
But it all comes with a caveat of slow pacing, of knowing you’ll spend dozens of hours in battle and running between quests. SaGa: Emerald Beyond is undoubtedly rough around the edges, but it’s like one of those candies, the chocolate ball with a prize. If you can get through the generic chocolate, there’s an oddball prize awaiting you at its core.
