Makai Toushi SaGa

The first game in the SaGa series, released in 1989 for the Game Boy. It was released in North America as Final Fantasy Legend and received a remake on the Wonderswan Color in 2001. An English fan translation for the Wonderswan version can be found here.

The tower at the center of the world is said to be connected to paradise. Long ago it was sealed off due to the hordes of monsters ushering from it. Dreaming of a life in paradise, many have challenged the secrets of the tower, but no one knows what became of them. A party of adventurers formed from humans, ESP-using mutants, and monsters now challenges The Tower. Their journey will take them through four worlds and pit them against Ashura and his four fiends.

"spoiler:God: You've come at last. Congratulations. You are the first to complete this game. Leader: Game? God: This game, with it's splendid story, which I created! 2nd Char: What do you mean? God: I had become bored with a peaceful world. So, I conjured Ashura. 4th Char: What were you thinking! God: Ashura threw the world into chaos in a most entertaining way. But after that brief moment, he too, began to bore me. 3rd Char: And so, the game? God: Yes! Quite so!! I wanted a hero to strike down the devil! Leader: Everything that happened was part of the plot you wrote. God: You are quick to understand. There were many who could not become heroes and disappeared. I found it thrilling; the spectacle of tiny beings, burdened by their own mortal fate, desperately fighting to survive."
 * A Taste of Power: The King Sword can one-hit any enemy with a weakness, the King Armor provides +20 to defense and immunity to all elements, and the King Shield gives the whole party an elemental barrier. You get all of these in the first world, likely within the first half hour of the game. Of course, you don't get to keep them - to get the Black Sphere and enter the Tower you have to return them to the Statue of Hero.
 * Abnormal Ammo: Rocks. Contrary to popular belief, that is an accurate translation, and it's not a mistranslation of "rocket".
 * Affably Evil:.
 * Artistic License Economics: HP600 potions cost 5000GP, and will boost your max HP by a random amount from 5 to 20 points as long as your maximum HP is under 600. For that same price you could buy 50 HP200 potions which will still boost your maximum HP by one point apiece even if your maximum HP exceeds 200.
 * Badass Biker: So-Cho. Better still, he lends you his Cool Bike.
 * Blessed with Suck: Among the possibilities that can come up with Mutants for a new power is a vulnerability to an element (or all of them).
 * Blind Idiot Translation: It's not that bad, if a little stilted and lacking some of the subtleties of the original Japanese. But then you have items like "Balkan" (Vulcan) and "Catcraw" (Cat Claw). The ending credits are also completely missing from the NA version.
 * Something was definitely lost in translation during the final encounter with . Your character is for some reason offended at being offered exactly what he/she was expecting as a reward for having climbed the tower, and decide that punching out the Creator is the only option.
 * It seems as though the characters took offense at not what was offered, but how.  put a lot of people-and entire civilizations-through a lot of pain, only as a mere test for those who would climb the tower in the original NA release, and as entertainment in the remake (see For the Evulz below).
 * It's also a result of Nintendo of America's censorship policies at the time -- they couldn't refer to
 * Broken Bridge: The party must obtain the Sphere in each world to proceed further into the Tower.
 * Bubbly Clouds: The Sky World.
 * Cain and Abel: The Sky World resistance leader has twin daughters. One is part of the resistance and the other works for Byak-ko. The latter is brought around by her sister's.
 * The Cameo: Some graphics are reused from Final Fantasy I, such as the "Machine" Mini Boss, whose depiction is shared with FF1's WarMECH. (In the Japanese versions of both games, this enemy is called "Death Machine".)
 * Chekhov's Gunman: The man in the black hat.
 * Contractual Boss Immunity: Subverted. Nearly every boss prior to the very endgame is susceptible to being instantly killed by petrification... and in the original Gameboy version, the final boss can be one-hit killed by a chainsaw due to a glitch.
 * Cool Boat: How about a sailing island?
 * Cosmic Plaything: The party is naturally less than pleased at this revelation.
 * Cut and Paste Environments: Practically every map in the game, from the world map to the area maps, seems extraordinarily monotonous and rectangular.
 * In the Wonderswan remake, the environments and battle backgrounds are now fully colored, with the designers going into enough detail to actually show crosswalks and road signs in the Ruins.
 * Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The final boss is.
 * Disc One Final Dungeon: Arguably, the whole Tower;.
 * Disc One Nuke: You can take a monster PC and, with a little work, take them to Rank 13 before even leaving the first world. For comparison, you won't encounter any Rank 13 monsters until near the end of the game.
 * Due to their rampant growth potential, mutants can easily become these without too much effort, as well. As for humans, it's not really possible to really cheese them too early on without some serious cash grinding.
 * Empty Room Psych: The game is loaded with these, to the point that players are usually surprised to actually occasionally find something in them.
 * Evil Chancellor: While the title is different, the disagreeable King Shield's steward definitely falls under this, as
 * Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Tower around which the game revolves.
 * Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The places you visit in the World of Ruins are based on their real-world counterparts in Tokyo. The town in the southwest is implied to be Shibuya. The skyscraper district is Shinjuku, though only mentioned by name in the original Japanese version. Ameyoko is a traditional-style shopping street just as it is portrayed in game. Akiba, where you can find the ROM, is a famous electronics district. Their locations on the map are roughly the same as in Real Life.
 * For the Evulz:

"We barely made it to this shelter. We've run out of food and water, so we won't last much longer. Ken and Yuki, forgive me for leaving you. Akira, take care of your brothers. Creator, please look after the children."
 * Four Is Death: Ashura's four fiends, who are based on the Chinese Ssu-Ling.
 * Gainax Ending: Your mileage may vary; whether it's this or beautifully simple depends on your point of view.
 * God Is Affably Evil: The Creator.
 * The Guards Must Be Crazy: Tossing you into an unguarded jail without even bothering to strip you of your munitions (which by this point in the game should be rather copious) is par for the course, but extra bonus points for the fact that your daring jailbreak consists of nonchalantly bending the bars of your cell and strolling away as if nothing had happened.
 * Harmful to Minors: You come across a handful of corpses which are identified as children. Their father didn't fare much better. The contents of his journal and the subsequent soundtrack stray into Nightmare Fuel territory, especially for a Nintendo game of the time.


 * The last sentence is particularly hard-hitting, as
 * Healing Spring: Scattered throughout the tower; they'll restore your HP. Sometimes subverted; some of them are fake and will do nothing. Also, once you get to, there is an orb there that will restore your HP.
 * Hopeless Boss Fight: Su-Zaku will randomly attack you on his world's overworld, but you can't defeat or even damage him until you assemble the machine to destroy his force field. (Technically, you can defeat him using the saw glitch, a character with the Revenge Sword and high HP, or by simply raising your stats enough to damage him in spite of his sky-high defense, but it doesn't affect anything - he'll keep appearing anyway.)
 * Interspecies Romance: The King of Armor and his... Slime. Later in the game it's revealed they've conceived a child. Yay?
 * And let's not forget the frog that was trying to get in her pants, too. Maybe he was French?
 * This seems to be true of the Sa Ga games in general, given that civilized Monsters are considered to have the same degree of personage as Humans or Mutants / Mystics.
 * It's All Upstairs From Here: The plot revolves around a tower.
 * Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: And how! Selling a pristine weapon gets you half of its buying price. If the weapon is used, its value decreases exponentially with the number of uses. For example, a weapon with 49 remaining uses out of 50 sells for about 12% of its buying price.
 * Killed Off for Real: . Can technically happen to any fallen party member aside from the protagonist, as you can have them replaced with new characters at the guild.
 * La Résistance: The Sky World has one of these against Byak-Ko, complete with (badly translated) French names.
 * Lethal Joke Character: The Darkrose has low agility and mana compared to other late-game monster forms, but it has an attack (called "Drink") that bypasses the enemy's defense stat, making it one of the few monsters that's able to significantly damage the final boss.
 * Locomotive Level: The final part of the World of Ruins. 　.
 * Luck-Based Mission: Mutants are essentially walking random number gods, far moreso in this game before the mechanics were somewhat refined in the sequel. Your game experience can very widely depending on how their growth pans out, and what you end up with can range anywhere from a Disc One Nuke to The Load.
 * Also, the final boss can randomly reset his hit point total to max whenever he wants. Needless to say, this can get annoying.
 * The Man Behind the Man: is this to Ashura.
 * Match Maker Quest: Your party's first quest is to get the King of Armor together with the girl he loves, the "most beautiful girl in the village". Luckily, it's as simple as killing the bandit who was trying to coerce the girl into marrying him.
 * Never Say "Die": Averted, surprisingly for a Nintendo title of the time. Characters who lose all their HP are starkly put in 'dead' status. Not to mention the
 * Nice Hat: One recurring character is identifiable solely by his incredibly awesome black silk hat.
 * Number of the Beast: Several monster types have 666 hit points maximum, including Boneking, Demoking, Tiamat, and some others.
 * Obvious Beta: The game engine had a lot of rough edges. One of the most annoying was that it didn't bother to notify you if your mutant gained or changed powers at the end of a battle, or if they gained max hit points or stats. Save Scumming becomes something of a requirement, especially in the late game, as each victory in battle runs you the risk of losing your fancy kill-beam attack. Fortunately, this is one of the many issues that were ironed out in the sequel.
 * The Wonderswan remake fixed these problems as well, for all the good this did non-Japanese speaking players.
 * Ominous Floating Castle: Byak-Ko has one.
 * The Power of Love: The secret to obtaining the true White Sphere.
 * Plot Coupon: The Spheres.
 * Point of No Return:
 * Actually -- at least in the Wonder Swan remake -- you can technically leave it any time up until you start the last battle if you have a Door or someone with the teleport ability.
 * This is true for the original Game Boy version as well.
 * Save Scumming: The only surefire way to hold on to mutant abilities and get the most out of stat raising potions. The good news is that saving and reloading are both incredily fast and easy to do. The bad news is that there's only one save slot, which may lead to problems if you're not careful.
 * Shout-Out: The World of Ruins seems to be a reference to the "Neotokyo" genre, particularly to the film Akira. The game itself seems heavily inspired by the tabletop RPG Gamma World.
 * The in-game animation for the Saw weapon/ability in the Wonder Swan remake, where it shows a vertical slash bisecting the target. This is a reference to the  death animation, where he is bisected and splits apart.
 * Soft Reset: The inclusion of this feature is notable mainly because of the sheer amount of Save Scumming one tends to do in this game.
 * Stupid Sacrifice: When the party is stopped by a lethal energy barrier, wades through the barrier and switches it off. Although there may not have been a better way, he certainly didn't give anyone a chance to think of one.
 * Underwater Base: Sei-Ryu's underwater castle.
 * Vice City: The first town you visit in the World of Ruin features a biker gang in a pub, and someone outside tells you not to go there. The position on the map implies that it's Shibuya.
 * Wave Motion Gun: The Hyper Cannon — in fact, it's actually called a Wave Motion Gun in the Japanese version.
 * We Can Rule Together: Ashura makes this offer when you finally reach him.
 * What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Subverted. Glaringly non-human monsters (including, like, tigers and scorpions -- not anthromorphic ones, mind, regular ones) are treated like ordinary humans and will wander around towns talking to you.