I have had two previous experiences with the SaGa series. The first was way back in the day, but I had no idea it was a SaGa game yet. I was playing Final Fantasy Legend on Gameboy. My friend let me play his Gameboy in like 4th grade and I thought it was cool because it was Final Fantasy (even though I now know it WASN'T!) My second experience was SaGa Frontier 2, which I have consistently named in the Top 3 of my most hated JRPGs of all time (Shadow Madness and Suikoden III being the other two if you're interested.)

So, with this being said, I didn't expect to like SaGa Frontier. It intrigued me, however. Everyone kept talking about how hard it is, and I love challenging JRPGs. Also, you get to pick between 7-8 different characters/mini-JRPGs, which is cool. I decided to give it a chance and:

LOVED IT. First, it IS a bit harder than most JRPGs. However, with Battle Rank, it kinda discourages grinding, so it's not tedious, and ends up just being fun and having challenging boss fights. You gain stats or skills constantly, which makes the lack of levels work really well. I like when I get a new character, and I can't just look at their Level to see who is more powerful, I have to look at their stats. Wow, King Sei is way more powerful than Riki, good to know...

The game ends up being like a Hard Mode Live a Live, but fails in one major area. Unlike Live a Live, which had fully fleshed out plots and characters for each of its mini-JRPGs, SaGa Frontier has a few characters that have no plot or direction. They call it open-world, I call it lazy. Blue's quest is my absolute least favorite. Your plot is literally, "Go learn magic. Kill this dude with it." Lute's is even worse, but people were acting like Blue's quest didn't suck so I made a point to mention that one haha. However, some quests are really fun and have that quirky Japanese feel, like Red and T260's quests.

It's addictive for anyone interested in RPG character building, and also fun to kill a Saturday morning with. It can be played in bite-sized chunks.