Moving forward, I believe we’ll continue to apply this remastering approach to the remaining series titles. We were able to do this because of the prowess of Hiroyuki Miura and Naofumi Ueno, the producer and director of SaGa Frontier Remastered respectively. Ichikawa: Thanks to many people, we are now able to revive elements which were considered lost in the past, and also pursue game pace and playability for the modern era, which we weren’t able to do with the remastering of Romancing SaGa 2 or Romancing SaGa 3. How might this change how remasters are handled going forward? The SaGa Frontier Remastered release involved making the game look better and bringing back things thought to possibly be lost forever. That said, it was also fun as we were developing something new. As we didn’t have much data, like text, from when the original was developed, it was a lot of work to create the scenario based on concept alone. Hiroyuki Miura, Square Enix: The Fuse scenario, which was the biggest additional element, involved a lot of people and took a lot of time to develop. What was the most challenging element to restore? With SaGa Frontier Remastered, so much lost content was restored. I believe the bottom line is that we need to communicate more with the community. From our perspective as the developers of the game, we thought this would be quite a surprise for the fans, but it seems they were perplexed, as they were waiting for a different character-Matriarch. This is a takeaway for the future. In the Global version, we decided implement the characters that were released in the Japanese version when SaGa Frontier Remastered launched much earlier than if we had stuck to our regular schedule. This was a surprise, as we thought there would of course be some differences in the reactions between Japan and overseas, but in the end, the reactions ended up being similar. However, this collaboration ended up being very popular amongst overseas players, with people embracing the various Japanese elements, such as the traditional Japanese clothing. Of course, we didn’t have this same concern with Japanese players. As for the Saga Prefecture collaboration, given that it is a collaboration with a prefecture in Japan which many overseas players likely were not aware of, we were worried about what kind of reactions we would get. Ichikawa: The Saga Prefecture collaboration and 1st anniversary events were popular, but it seems conquests have been the most popular overall. Which events have been most popular in the global version of Romancing SaGa Re univerSe? How has the reception compared or differed from the response in Japan? The project started with a play on words, as SaGa and Saga Prefecture have the same pronunciation-I don’t think many people overseas knew of Saga Prefecture before this, but the collaboration characters were very popular.
What especially surprised me was how very successful the Saga Prefecture collaboration characters were. I initially thought there would be a difference in reactions between Japan and overseas on these points.
I believe there are various factors that contributed to this, but it seems like popular characters in Japan also spontaneously became popular overseas as well.Ĭharacters originally from Romancing SaGa 3 but featured in Romancing SaGa Re univerSe, such as Matriarch, seem to be spontaneously getting popular as well. Masanori Ichikawa, Square Enix: I was surprised that the reactions we received were better than we had expected.
Jenni Lada, Siliconera: Based on usage statistics, how have global users of Romancing SaGa Re univerSe responded to banners featuring characters from games that didn’t appear worldwide? To get a better idea of what went into both games, Siliconera spoke to Producer Masanori Ichikawa and Producer Hiroyuki Miura about all three games. Square Enix even brought back more older games with Collection of SaGa. Square Enix not only released the new Romancing SaGa Re UniverSe mobile game worldwide, but also a remastered version of SaGa Frontier. It’s been a good few years for SaGa fans.