SaGa Frontier Remastered (PlayStation 4) review "I don't even know why I played this one again, but at least I don't totally hate myself for doing so. "

A reasonable person could ask why I spent roughly 80 hours of my life playing SaGa Frontier Remastered when I didn’t like how the original was executed. I could try to answer them, but they wouldn’t understand. After all, I am not a reasonable person.

Now that I’ve settled that, let’s talk about this 2021 enhanced HD version of a Square PlayStation game. Or to begin, let’s recap just what went wrong with its original incarnation.

On the surface, SaGa Frontier seemed to have everything I could want from a role-playing game. Instead of one long quest, it delivered seven shorter ones, with each seeming to be quite different from the others. You might control a young monster trying to save his homeland. Or a budding superhero seeking revenge against a villainous organization. Or a woman trapped between her innate humanity and the Mystic blood that saved her life, as she tries to decide which of the two to embrace. And that’s only three of the seven. There’s also the woman seeking to find her husband-to-be’s killer, the robot trying to achieve its purpose, the wizard seeking to learn all the magics to confront a powerful evil and the lazy dude kicked out of his house to find his own path in the world.

And a lot of these characters had their own gameplay gimmicks. Humans get more powerful from fighting battles and tend to gain stat improvements after each one, as long as those foes aren’t dramatically weaker. Mystics also do that, but add the ability to use special equipment to absorb weakened foes to enhance their stats. Monsters can snag abilities from fallen opponents to change their form, gradually transforming into more and more powerful creatures. And robots benefit from equipping all sorts of equipment and goods, with each item increasing one or more stats.

I also can’t pass up the opportunity to praise the game’s world. It’s composed of a wide variety of wildly different regions connected by transportation centers. You’ll spend a lot of time in the cyberpunk-ish markets of Koorong before traveling to the casino resort of Baccarat, the massive prison accurately named Despair, the destroyed (and ghost-infested) Wakatu, the futuristic city of Manhatten or the quaint town of Shrike and its neighboring tombs. You’ll obtain quests to learn potent magic in both Devin and Luminous and recruit a number of allies in Scrap’s pub. And if you’re, depending on the timing, lucky or unlucky, you might even wind up in the belly of the legendary beast Tanzer.

Just about every place you go will look and feel different from the other locations, so simply exploring SaGa Frontier’s world can be a treat for the senses. And depending on which character you’re controlling, the reason for visiting may change dramatically. Take Shingrow as an exception. A couple characters will need to go there in order to visit its castle and participate in its combat tournament, but everyone can visit in order to explore two different ruins. Most characters wind up in the belly of Tanzer while trying to gain a particular magical rune, but Riki the monster visits that place in order to obtain one of the many rings he needs to complete his quest.

Sadly, while there are a lot of varied places to visit, there’s nowhere near enough to support seven different protagonists. If you want to play through SaGa Frontier completely, your life will become dominated by deja vu episodes. Look at Blue’s quest to gain all those magic spells. This is a pretty robust journey that takes you to many different locations. And then you’ll retrace his steps with most of the remaining heroes because having those spells is pretty helpful and that journey will also give you lots of battles and treasure to improve both your stats and equipment.

And you can say the same about so many locations. Whether you have to visit Sei’s Tomb in Shrike or not, you’ll probably want to go there because collecting its three relics and challenging its boss can net you one of the game’s better swords. The icy mountain in Mosperiburg you scale as part of one of those magic quests contains a cave loaded with treasure, assuming you can beat the pair of dragons guarding it. After playing through a couple characters, the ensuing ones just feel tedious because you’ll be doing so many of the same things to power up them and their allies.

However, in a positive note, this remastered version does help with that. A number of additions were made to this version of SaGa Frontier, with most being minor. Asellus the Mystic had a few optional quests added to her mission, while for reasons unknown to me, an eighth protagonist in Fuse the detective was added where, after you complete a story, you can play a very truncated version of it as he investigates the events that transpired. And then fight its final boss, so I hope you added even more repetition to the proceedings by finding allies and building everyone up! Or simply took advantage of the New Game Plus option that was added.

Now, after completing a story, you can save everything and, when you start the next hero’s story, carry over all the items and equipment you obtained, as well as the stats and skills gained by each character you used. With a little planning on your part to pick up either main characters or ones who at least can be recruited by several heroes, you’ll only have to go all out a couple times and actually be able to stick to the plot with some of the stories, without having to do the same half dozen or more dungeons every single time.

I’m not going to lie — being able to start with a new character knowing that I’d soon have a party either completely loaded with powerhouses or at least close to that made things so much more palatable for me. Sure, this eventually took away the lion’s share of the game’s challenge due to how enemy difficulty is determined by how many battles you’ve taken part in and being able to avoid doing all that power-gaining did help keep that number down, but I did not care. If I got sick of this game when I played it in the late 1990s, there’s no way I’d have the patience to endure it nearly 30 years later. By using this shortcut, I was able to get through everyone’s quest and that’s good enough to me.

My advice is to pick the more enjoyable quests to build up enough characters to carry you through the rest. Superhero-in-training Red and the robot T260G both have fairly lengthy journeys that both contain a decent amount of content unique to their quests, making them great starting points. Then you can save less appealing ones to the end, so you can rush through them. With Lute, you only have one actual objective, so by doing this, you won’t have to spend hours re-doing everything you’ve done before in order to be powerful enough to actually fight his adversary. Meanwhile, with Riki, you’ll have to contend with having the right abilities and overall health to transform into the game’s better monsters and also deal with a couple of the game’s most annoying battles, so the longer you hold off on his quest, the better. By the time I embarked on his journey, I’d used him as a support character enough to have a good monster form for him and then just had to do a little research to figure out how to truly make him elite.

Sure, I guess a person could say that a game must not be that good if I’m encouraging one to exploit its New Game Plus mechanic to greatly cut down on the work that must be done to get through it, but thanks to that, I was able to complete all of its quests and wasn’t completely sick of it by the time I was done. For that reason alone, I have to at least say SaGa Frontier Remastered is a notable improvement over the original. I was able to enjoy its wide variety of locations a lot more when I wasn’t forced to visit most of them with every single character and the quests that were lighter on content didn’t feel like a ton of grinding with only a tiny amount of plot because I was able to circumvent that work. I don’t know that I’d recommend this game for anyone other than role-playing addicts, but I at least found it playable and, at times, even enjoyable.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (January 16, 2026) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.