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cosmicspear) wrote2025-02-23 09:10 pm
cosmicspear) wrote2025-02-23 09:10 pm
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Games I Finished: Erra Saga
Because I'm just the kind of person who does these sorts of things, I recently and semi-arbitrarily got very obsessed with a recently translated Japanese freeware RPG. In this case it was Erra Saga, a pretty enjoyable effort from Hakika (known for the SEQUEL games, whose name makes substantially more sense to me now that I've been informed that they're set in the future of the set of games this one's part of).
The story of Erra Saga follows a young hunter named Ryunas. He's one of the Erra, who resemble humans aside from the gems on their necks, are much stronger than the average human, and live in villages on the outskirts of their land. After an encounter with a human Erra hunter, Ryunas finds himself wanting an answer to why humans would hate Erra enough to want them exterminated. With his grandfather being suspiciously insistent that he needs to see the truth for himself, he ventures out into the wider world. The driving question, then, is what the past might hide that would lead to all this. What lies in the Erra's past? Why does everyone you meet who actually knows, no matter their walk of life, refuse to say anything about it? And what connection might it have to the suspicious gaps in the history of the empire itself? The consequences of concealing history just because you'd rather not remember it are definitely a theme here, and while I feel like it could've done with more time to explore it in detail what's there is quite intriguing.
The characters are pretty fun in their own right. Ryunas is someone I'd describe as aggressively ordinary in a lot of ways, and he regularly ends up being the straight man to his more...eccentric allies, but at the same time he's also sheltered enough that he doesn't even know the name of the country he lives in, so there are several points where he ends up needing those allies to clue him in on things. Your second party member, Spica, has enough energy and enthusiasm for three people, but she's also a lot smarter than you might expect a female lead with that kind of personality to be, and on a couple of occasions ends up actively leading Ryunas around. She also adds to the mystery of just what Erra are by having a partly mechanical body that she was somehow born with. The third party member, world-hopping pharmacist Arknoah, ends up being the least interesting of the bunch mostly because her personal deal isn't particularly connected to the main plot, but she's still a fun character on the whole. And edgy rival Zelga also ends up subverting some of the expectations you might have for characters like him in interesting ways.
On the whole, my only real complaint about Erra Saga's plot and characters is that they don't get as much time as I might've wanted them to. But really, when the only problem I have with the story is that I would've liked to see more of it, that's a pretty good place to be.
The gameplay isn't particularly groundbreaking, using the default RPG Maker VX battle system and damage formulas, but it's well-crafted. Each character has a unique mechanic—Ryunas gets arrow-consuming skills and composite physical/magic attacks, Spica learns her skills by installing new parts in her mechanical body, Arknoah uses special items she can make to power her skills, and Zelga in a somewhat comical fit of irony specializes in chasing the other characters' attacks once he inevitably joins up. The major conceit here is that your ability to equip skills is limited, as not only do you only have eight skill slots total to set them in but they also have a cost to equip given in AP, which your characters get up to 15 of as they level up. Some builds will end up hurting for skill slots to use, while others end up so AP-starved they end up with half their slots open.
There's a lot of versatility in how you set the characters up—Spica in particular can be built as a nigh-unkillable tank, a deadly glass cannon, or anything in between, while Ryunas and Arknoah's considerable spellcasting talents mean they tend toward swapping their equipped magic out from one dungeon to the next to take advantage of weaknesses. As the game goes on and skills get more expensive, it becomes a bit of a struggle to keep everything (or at least as much as you can) equipped.
i wouldn't say this was an unusually difficult game, but it's not about to just let you win either. It at leasts wants you to be awake and thinking for the boss fights, and once the postgame starts up there's plenty of genuinely tough superbosses to ram your head against.
I definitely enjoyed my time with Ryunas' adventure, and would absolutely recommend Erra Saga
The story of Erra Saga follows a young hunter named Ryunas. He's one of the Erra, who resemble humans aside from the gems on their necks, are much stronger than the average human, and live in villages on the outskirts of their land. After an encounter with a human Erra hunter, Ryunas finds himself wanting an answer to why humans would hate Erra enough to want them exterminated. With his grandfather being suspiciously insistent that he needs to see the truth for himself, he ventures out into the wider world. The driving question, then, is what the past might hide that would lead to all this. What lies in the Erra's past? Why does everyone you meet who actually knows, no matter their walk of life, refuse to say anything about it? And what connection might it have to the suspicious gaps in the history of the empire itself? The consequences of concealing history just because you'd rather not remember it are definitely a theme here, and while I feel like it could've done with more time to explore it in detail what's there is quite intriguing.
The characters are pretty fun in their own right. Ryunas is someone I'd describe as aggressively ordinary in a lot of ways, and he regularly ends up being the straight man to his more...eccentric allies, but at the same time he's also sheltered enough that he doesn't even know the name of the country he lives in, so there are several points where he ends up needing those allies to clue him in on things. Your second party member, Spica, has enough energy and enthusiasm for three people, but she's also a lot smarter than you might expect a female lead with that kind of personality to be, and on a couple of occasions ends up actively leading Ryunas around. She also adds to the mystery of just what Erra are by having a partly mechanical body that she was somehow born with. The third party member, world-hopping pharmacist Arknoah, ends up being the least interesting of the bunch mostly because her personal deal isn't particularly connected to the main plot, but she's still a fun character on the whole. And edgy rival Zelga also ends up subverting some of the expectations you might have for characters like him in interesting ways.
On the whole, my only real complaint about Erra Saga's plot and characters is that they don't get as much time as I might've wanted them to. But really, when the only problem I have with the story is that I would've liked to see more of it, that's a pretty good place to be.
The gameplay isn't particularly groundbreaking, using the default RPG Maker VX battle system and damage formulas, but it's well-crafted. Each character has a unique mechanic—Ryunas gets arrow-consuming skills and composite physical/magic attacks, Spica learns her skills by installing new parts in her mechanical body, Arknoah uses special items she can make to power her skills, and Zelga in a somewhat comical fit of irony specializes in chasing the other characters' attacks once he inevitably joins up. The major conceit here is that your ability to equip skills is limited, as not only do you only have eight skill slots total to set them in but they also have a cost to equip given in AP, which your characters get up to 15 of as they level up. Some builds will end up hurting for skill slots to use, while others end up so AP-starved they end up with half their slots open.
There's a lot of versatility in how you set the characters up—Spica in particular can be built as a nigh-unkillable tank, a deadly glass cannon, or anything in between, while Ryunas and Arknoah's considerable spellcasting talents mean they tend toward swapping their equipped magic out from one dungeon to the next to take advantage of weaknesses. As the game goes on and skills get more expensive, it becomes a bit of a struggle to keep everything (or at least as much as you can) equipped.
i wouldn't say this was an unusually difficult game, but it's not about to just let you win either. It at leasts wants you to be awake and thinking for the boss fights, and once the postgame starts up there's plenty of genuinely tough superbosses to ram your head against.
I definitely enjoyed my time with Ryunas' adventure, and would absolutely recommend Erra Saga
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I'm also not sure if you'll need the RPG Maker VX RTP (here if you don't have it, and note that it's different from the VX Ace RTP) to get it to run, but again it certainly can't hurt
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