Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 125: Final Fantasy Legend aka SaGa

Episode Date: November 13, 2017

By patron request, we continue our Final Fantasy deep dive series by looking at a trilogy of RPGs that aren't part of the series? The Final Fantasy Legend spun off from Final Fantasy II, but they became their own thing almost immediately.

You normally have three opportunities per year to see Retronauts Live. This year, we've been to Midwest Gaming Classic, Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, and Portland Retro Gaming Expo. But it's almost Thanksgiving, so we're going to give you one last reason to be thankful in 2017. Chris Sims and I, which is to say Retronauts East, will be putting in some appearances at Super Famicon in Greensboro, North Carolina, just down the road from where we live, as a bonus 2017 live appearance. Look for us on the floor and on panels on November 18th and 19th. be talking to Luke Edwards, star of the wizard,

looking at the history and impact of night trap with the guys from limited run games and more. That's Super Famicom Con in Greensboro, North Carolina,

November 18th and 19th. Be there, or wait for the live recordings, I guess. This weekend retronauts, there's opium in your bananas. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of Retronauts. We no longer have any clue what number of these will be when we record them, and that's okay.

I'm Jeremy Parrish, sitting here cluelessly in the studio, and here with me on this day, sharing my befuddlement, we have. Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and when Jeremy told me he wanted to do this episode. I was going to punch him, but my fist broke. You can break your fists in these games. Yes, that's correct. That was a joke. They call that a joke in some places. That's why I did a rim shot.

And also, Hi, I'm Shane Bettenhausen. When Jeremy asked me to do this episode, I was going to attack him with a sword, but I had none left. So here I am. Yeah, that's right. We're talking about saga. Well, actually, we're talking about the Final Fantasy legend. This episode has been requested

by Bobby Nijeri. Najari, sorry. As a Patreon request, if you support us on Patreon, there is a tier where you two can pay a set amount of money per month to make us play video games and record an episode about them. And here we are, taking it on the chin. Okay, but it's not your fault. I thought you wanted to do this one. No, but I do like these games. I recently played through the Final Fantasy Legend for Game Boy Works.

I guess that was like three years ago now. But it stuck with me. They're good games. really well-made. You probably played it after like three Majan games and it seemed really good at the time. We hadn't hit Mahjong at that point. Okay, okay. Well, you're right.

These are important. It was a big deal when they came out. And I think how they were given to us especially is really an interesting bait and switch. And it goes off to be a really crazy series that spans until today. So it is relevant and it was relevant. You're right. This deserves to exist. Yeah.

Even now, the series creator, Akitoshi Kawazu, people keep saying, hey, are you going to bring the 25th anniversary game? over to the U.S., which was, what, Scarlet Grace? Scarlet Grace. For, was that a Vita game? PSVita. Yeah. Wow.

That seems like a doomed proposition. They didn't even bring over the remakes of Final Fantasy Legend 2 and 3 for DS at the height of the DS's popularity. But Kowazu has said on Twitter that he's still looking into bringing the game to the U.S. And that game came out like last, you know, fall 2016, and it did, you know, respectively. And I think there's always been a core audience for these games. you and I know that. They exist. They're fans. And you count yourself among them. I do. But is there enough of an Atomey element to really

work on the Vita in America? It's an RPG, not a visual novel. And there's no girl touching. Persona for Golden is still one of the most best-selling and revered games for Vita in America. Yeah, but that came out years ago. Yeah, but all those people would still probably maybe like this game. Who knows? I would try it. You would try it.

I'm talking about current market conditions. It's true. I would like to see Scarlet Grace, but I don't have my fingers crossed. When this game originally hit the Game Boy, the market conditions were ripe. And, like, I know you've already had many an episode about Final Fantasy 2, but we were kind of chatting about that. We didn't really talk that much about Final Fantasy. I heard it. It was part of another one or something, but it was good.

Anyway, this, you know, we would never get to this game had not Akedoshi Kawazu directed Final Fantasy 2. And I think this game is kind of a direct descendant of that game. Oh, absolutely. And that's what we're going to talk about. Oh, okay. ...notes... ...I... ...the...

...and... ...the... ...the... To begin with, I'm just going to do you, no gimmicks, no preamble. The Final Fantasy Legend games came out, beginning in 1990 in the U.S. I think the original version of the game, the first game, came out in Japan in 1989, and that made it the very first portable RPG ever created.

And you might think, like, a portable RPG would be very simplistic and very just like bare bones, but no, instead, they kicked off the world of portable RPGs with a game full of esoteric systems and lots of complexity and things that you never see in any other RPG. And that's saga. That's Final Fantasy legend. I would say, you know, obviously Dragon Quest and then Final Fantasy were huge landmarks in Japan. And I think this

is less user-friendly inherently by design than either of those games. It would have been easy just to do Dragon Quest and copy Dragon Quest. Well, the combat system is very similar to Dragon Quest. But then you have all these underlying mechanics that you would not see in Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest is very

streamlined, very approachable, very intuitive. This series is very, like, what the hell is going on? Do you think that, like, a lot of those difficult systems might have been lifted or inspired more but from Western PC RPGs? Yeah. Western PC RPGs were a big influence on Kauazu,

but even more than that, board games. He really loved tabletop RPGs and board games. Statistics. Yeah. And I didn't realize that, but I interviewed him like five or six years ago, and it was like, so what's up with this? And he was like, I just really love board games.

And wanted to take those ideas, like stuff by River Hill. By the time of Unlimited Saga, it was clear he loved one. Oh, for sure, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, that was a pet project. I think Unlimited Saga, which we're not really going to talk about this episode. Unlimited Saga was an example of an executive who had decades of tenure with a company calling in all of his chips.

For Passion Project. To publish a game that he wanted to create even though he knew no one else would enjoy it. Like, that is, you know, that is executive. of privilege in the truest sense. And I'm sure that's why we don't see him anymore because he burned all of his capital with that and they're like, okay, head over to the corner office now. But I think FinalMaz you too had done really well because there was a huge demand for it. So they were like, oh, maybe people are really into this.

Let's let him make his own series. I guess. Man, what a soundtrack on that game. I can't believe all that music was just in that one game. Are you talking about a limited saga? A limited saga. Yeah, it's a fantastic soundtrack. Was that a Kenji Ito soundtrack?

I think so, yeah. I think it was the people that would later do all the Final Fantasy music. Do you think this game, you know, the first, you know, saga, which it has a full name, like, it does. We'll talk about that in a minute. What was your question? I was going to say, do you think this was in development for a long time?

Do you think it had more than a year? I doubt it. Because back then, things were turned around in like six, nine months, right? I doubt a lot of time was put into this, which is why it's very buggy, very weird. So to begin with, we should actually talk about Final Fantasy 2. And we did touch on Final Fantasy 2 somewhat in the Final Fantasy 4 episode. but it was very brief and I think we didn't really go that much

into the systems but Final Fantasy 2 followed obviously on the heels of Final Fantasy and instead of just doing the same game they did that they did that NES second child thing

where the second child is always the weird one like Zelda 2 Mario 2 Castlevania 2 and then the third game goes back more toward what you expect from the original game The difficult second album of rock.

Yep. Every time they were like Japanese devs were just like, okay, we've made a really good NES game. Now let's do something similar but different. And in many cases, that didn't work out and they went back to their original concepts for the third game. But in this case, that took the form of an RPG that threw out a lot of mechanics and concepts that defined Final Fantasy. So consider the spell system. In Final Fantasy, spells were ranked by levels. You had eight levels of spells, and your mages would gain the ability to cast a spell of a certain rank X number of times, like the higher you leveled.

You had the opportunity, you didn't use MP, like a manna point pool. You had X number of charges on level three spells. You had like one fewer charge on level four spells. Which is straight lifted from Dungeons and Drive. I was going to ask about that. It's a D&D. It's a very D&D. system. But most of their

RPGs at that point were using monopoles. So Final Fantasy 2 goes over to monopoles, but it gets rid of the idea of tiered spells altogether and just gives you, you know, like Final Fantasy now, you have Cure, Cura or Firea, Fire,aga. So like there are different

spells of you know, like the same element but at different levels of effectiveness. Final Fantasy 2 didn't do that. It gave you a spell, and the more you used that spell, the more powerful it became. So if for some reason

you liked turning enemies into toads, you could take the toad spell, and you could level it up to 16. And that would be an extremely powerful toad spell that would very likely turn anything into a toad, including the final boss, which wasn't supposed to happen, but, you know,

there's a lot of bugs in this game. It's really kind of an ingenious system, though, and I do like it in concept, but it's kind of, it's taken to a crazy extreme and not just with spells. So is this a Nassir Gabeli program game? I think so. I could be wrong, but he did a lot of their NES and Super NES stuff up through Secret of Mono. I associate him with ambitious but buggy because of all of what he was asked to do.

Well, he was originally, I think, an Apple II programmer. So, you know, the NES worked on a similar chip to the Apple II, but it was, you know, a different system. So I think he wasn't necessarily working in his comfort zone. It was familiar but not identical. goal. And also they were asking him to make some complex as hell games. And Final Fantasy 2 definitely is a complex as hell game. So it also got rid of levels. Your characters do not level up. Your characters gain stat boosts based on the actions they perform in battle. And there's no real rhyme or reason to this. It's a very random sort of system. Like if you use an attribute, like if you attack, then there is a chance that at the end of the battle, your attack, will grow in strength. There's a chance that if you are attacked, if you take damage

or magical damage, then your physical resistance or your magical resistance will grow. But it's a random chance. It's a random chance. There's no way to guarantee it's going to happen. So basically, your characters don't have levels.

They just have stats that grow organically based on their actions, which actually is a pretty cool idea. It's, you know, gaining expertise and experience. But it's, they did not balance it out very well. It's more of like a Bethesda idea, I think, in this era.

Yeah. You know, because it felt punishing. Many times I've tried to play this game, it feels like you really have to, you know, just grind, grind, grind, and the grinding might not really work for a while. You know, like it's a tough game. Yeah, I mean, I get what they were going for. Like if you do something in battle, then you'll get better at it. But it had a lot of disadvantages.

The first of the disadvantages was that, like, final. Fantasy, it didn't have a row system. There was no front row, back row for your four-member party. But basically, the character at the front of the, you know, the top of the screen was considered like the front character, and the character at the bottom of the list was the back row. So the character in the back would take fewer attacks and become targeted by enemies less frequently.

Well, that means that your character in the front is going to grow significantly in physical stats because they're going to take damage. they're going to, you know, have to build up their defense, whereas the characters who don't take many attacks never really grow their hit points or their defense. So they stay very weak throughout the game and you have to like consciously make an effort to pull them up to the rest of the team. And that can take different forms. Maybe the most intended form would be to move the back characters to the front row or to

the front of the party. But usually what happened was players would just attack their own team members. And so you defeat all but one enemy and, you know, before killing that final enemy, take turns smacking a party member. Tupping you up. Yep. And then, you know, the characters who didn't take damage normally in the course of battle would kind of bootstrap up to meet the rest of the party. It's almost as if Kawazu wanted you to exploit his system. Do we know what the Japanese audience

Do we know what the Japanese audience thought of this game? Because in hearing about this and having tried to play this a lot, I feel like it eliminates one of the major appeals of JRP's in that if you fight enough enemies, you will eventually will get strong enough to move on. In this game, that's not necessarily true. You have to fight them in the right way, and you can kind of screw yourself, you know, out of possibly beating the game. Yeah, I think this is a somewhat, this game had a somewhat mixed reception in Japan even.

And that's why Final Fantasy 3 went back toward a more traditional Final Fantasy 1 style. Right. Well, Kawazu took his evil designs onto Saga. Right. But there were a lot of other things that Final Fantasy II did that were very very. very interesting. You had... It was darker in tone, more adult, kind of more mature.

It was darker in tone. Well, you had a predefined cast of characters. You didn't have four blank slate light warriors. You had four characters who started out the battle. Like the game begins in Medius Res with you fighting an over, like an impossible battle. You've got these like enemy horsemen who just kill you. And then your party wakes up in an end, having, you know, been rescued from the brink of death. Is this the first JRP to do that?

Because it kind of became a trope. It might have been, it might have been. But you have like four characters, but one of them kind of disappears. And so then you have a cast of revolving characters who come in and out of the party. And they're, you know, sort of like temporary guest characters. And they don't join you permanently, but they can be very helpful in the dungeons they appeared in. Like there's a guy named Min Wu who shows up early on and casts a lot of white magic. So he's really helpful for keeping your party alive in the early game because he will, you know, cast magic.

on you to cure you. So that was pretty cool. There was also a key item or key term list. Like as you went through the game, certain words would be highlighted in conversations, and you would learn those words. And then you could go around and ask other NPCs like, hey, what's up with this? So it really does represent an attempt to make the console RPG more like a real RPG where you are talking to people and conversing.

All of those mechanics do persist today in JRPGs. I've seen all of those in the last five years. Yeah, like Chrono Cross brought back the keyword system with key items. You could bring up an item and ask MPCs about it. I forgot about that. Oh, yeah, hey, yeah. That's, you know, that's valuable somehow. But the problem with the key item system or the key term system is that you ended up going around like just talking to each MPC

and bringing up the question list and running through the list one by one. So it became very tedious. So that's kind of the definition of Final Fantasy 2, like really ambitious, lots of good ideas that kind of get to the heart of what an RPG is, but didn't really work out so well. And, you know, bearing in mind that it came out less than a year after Final Fantasy 1, you can kind of understand why maybe it was pretty rough because they just threw it together. It wasn't made by, it wasn't entirely made by the same team that made Final Fantasy 1. And the lead designer who stepped in in place of Hironobu Sakaguchi was Akitoshi Kowazu. And he really liked, like, he was sort of the driver for these ideas. And he clearly held onto them and believed in them because Final Fantasy 3 went back toward the more traditional class system style.

and you had Hero Yuki Iko Ito step in and create the job system. And once that happened, then Kawazu went and started making variants on Final Fantasy 2 in the form of the Final Fantasy Legend games. And I guess that's where we get to next. So I mentioned that Final Fantasy legend was the world's first portable RPG. I dare someone to tell me that I'm wrong. I don't think there were any RPGs on the Epic Pocket game computer. There definitely were not any on the microvision.

And I can't imagine that any LCD game and watch. I've played a Dungeons and Dragons LCD handhold game. I don't think that was a real RPG. It had elements of it. I was kind of surprised. But it wasn't, you know, it was no saga. Yeah. Yeah.

So it launched in, I want to say, November, 1989 in Japan and about a year later in America. And in Japan, it was called Makaitoshi Saga, or like the saga of the evil universe or something like that. In America, it was called the Final Fantasy Legend because, Square had big ideas, big ambitions for Final Fantasy. They were going to bring over Final Fantasy with Nintendo, and then they were going to publish Final Fantasy 2 and Final Fantasy 3 for NES. And then the Saga games were going to come over as Final Fantasy Legend.

And they all had this unified branding. It was like this funky sort of futuristic typeface. And Sake and Tetsu as Final Fantasy Adventure. Yes. Yeah, right. Because at the time, we were aware of this, at least I was, I was, like, I bought Final Fantasy. I loved Final Fantasy for NES.

And, like, I think EGM or, you know, some of the magazine, but, you know, let me know that these games were not. Like, you know, because you knew about three of them. You knew there's all these things were coming. It was like, where did all these Final Fantasies come from? I was like, oh, wait, they aren't actually Final Fantasy. They're just kind of similar games from the same publisher. But we kind of bought it. Like, I remember, like, feeling like I didn't expect it to be a sequel exactly to what I played on N.

Yeah, Final Fantasy, plans for Final Fantasy two and three coming to the U.S. fell through because Final Fantasy 4 came along right around the time two would have launched. And I think Square looked at the fact that the NES was fading in America and the fact that Final Fantasy 4 was a damn good game that looked really impressive and said, well, we could publish that one or we could, you know, make a real impact and sell a lot of games by bringing over this one. So they just dropped two and three and brought over Final Fantasy 2 and sort of moved over to the more like seraph fonts and very classy, bold color packaging.

And they dropped the branding that they had in mind, that they put in a lot of promo packages for retailers that have shown up on the internet. But they did keep the name Final Fantasy Legend and Final Fantasy Adventure for the handheld games because Square wasn't making Final Fantasy actual handheld games. So there was no disadvantage to bringing over these portable RPGs. And so they did. the Game Boy was still, you know, early days and the first year and a half of Game Boy

in America, you know, it was exciting in a way, but even its most ardent fans kind of knew the games weren't as deep and rich as NES games. And like, you know, it's fun as it was to go back to Tetris or Alleyway or Super Mario Land. You know, there wasn't something that could hold your attention for hours at a time.

So I think there was a lot of... Pennsylvania wasn't that good on... The slow jump in Simon with the eyeballs, that's terrible. No, so this was... This seemed like, oh, you know, for people like you and I who had played N.S.R.G. This seemed like, you know, this beacon of hope on the Game Boy to give us a rich, deep experience. Would this be the first Game Boy game where you could save

your game then? It was the first, yeah. Battery game? In Japan, I don't know about it in the U.S., but it was the first in Japan with a battery backup and with the ability to save. And not just save, but save anywhere outside of combat. At any point, you could just click save because I think they said, you know, people are going to be picking this up for a little quick bursts of play, so we need to make it easy for them. Or your batteries could be dying and you would have no way to find a save point. Do you remember, was this game $10 more than the others?

I think it was. It might have been. I think it was. It came with a, like, a poster. So, you know, it felt like it was worth it. A big manual. Yeah, I don't know if it was the first, I didn't look. I don't know if it was the first RPG to come to the U.S. on Game Boy.

Sort of Hope might have beaten it here. I think sort of hope did beat it. Yeah. But still, like, this was, hey, that NES game. Now you have it on Game Boy. I went to play that. Nintendo Power did a big cover on Final Fantasy. So this is going to be cool.

I can play Final Fantasy anywhere I want. Well, no. So did you guys actually play Final Fantasy Legend back in the day, or have you played it since? What's your history with the game? I don't think I ever played it back in the day. I did play through these emulated, like, I don't know, almost 20 years ago, just because I would read about them in Nintendo Power. But I always thought they seemed a little too weird, a little too off. So I never thought about actually buying the cartridges.

But, yeah, that's really my experience with these games. They're just sort of like these kind of things off in the periphery that would become something I would. wouldn't like. I could deal with these, though, for the time being. The first year and a half of Game Boy, I wasn't a huge fan, actually. And I did not own one. I think I was full on to Sega Genesis fandom at the time. I was waiting, hoping that the hardware got better because it was so blurry, so hard to see. So it really wasn't until Game Boy Pocket came out, that I actually played this game. But I bought all three of, I think all three them were out by that point. And I purchased all three and I started with this one with great

intentions of, you know, getting through it. And I think I got about a third of the way through it. And I think I ended up playing the most of the third one because it was much more advanced than the first one. But I did give this a try because my, I had friends who were really into it who had like, you know, who said, if you actually stick with it, it's really good at the end. But the mechanics eventually got the best of me on this one. I just remember reading about how you could eat monsters in this game. In the first game, you can do that too, right? Yeah, it's like snake eater.

It just seemed like, I guess when I was eight or nine, I just put images in my head of how grotesque that would be. And I was like, that's just too weird for me. I don't know. They drop a neat little hunk of meat and you can eat it. It's like that monster hunter meat, the perfect meat you never see in real life. Yep.

Yeah, so I feel like I played this back in the day, not on Game Boy, but on Super Game Boy. Like when I went back to play it again years later, it all felt really familiar. I was like, oh, I've played this before. But I don't really remember it. that well. I just remember having played it. I think I bought a used copy of it, like a record store or something, and played it a little bit. It was like, what? Because by that point,

I was, you know, I'd been playing RPGs and it played Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 3. And it's kind of hard to go back. Yeah. So, so the, you know, the Super Game Boy came out, or at least I got mine after that. So going from Final Fantasy 3 and illusion of Gaia and that sort thing back to Final Fantasy Legend. So you probably didn't play it until like 94 or something? Yeah. Okay, so I probably played it in 19, you know, 92 or something where it was a little more, you know, I remember thinking when I finally played this, you know, two in two years after it came

out, that the field graphics, like walking around the towns and the dungeons, it looked pretty good, especially for when this came out on Game Boy. However, the battles were an eyesore. Like, they definitely were not much to look at, and there were a lot of them, and, you know, the counter rates very high. I like the monster designs in these games. They're really weird. They are strange, but I guess they're not the Amano-esque monsters I wanted.

So I went back and replayed Final Fantasy Legend years later. I think when I was working with the GIA, Gaming Intelligence Agency Online, and the sort of common wisdom around these games is they were not very good. So I believed that, and I played it just out of a sense of obligation, like, ha, I'm going to play this bad game, and didn't really get very far into it. But later, I don't know exactly what it was. It was maybe like 10 years ago working for one-up. I sat down and really decided to play this game.

I was really curious about it. And I discovered that I like it a lot. It's really interesting. It's a very inventive and... Mechanically interesting. Unusual. Well, also the world idea. Like the concept of behind the story and the world,

there's just nothing else quite like it. It's a very interesting game. And I've never been able to finish it, but I enjoy it. I like what it does. And I feel like that kind of defines my relationship with everything Kowazu does. Like I maybe don't have the fortitude to stick through it all the way, but I do enjoy it. And I do think that there are interesting systems underneath everything that no other RPG really tries to do.

And I appreciate that. So I take you're not a big fan. Well, you know, I thought it was very interesting and strange. Specifically, you know, we talked about how, you know, your punch can break or you've run out of attacks. You run out of things to attack with. Right. You have, you have... You have an inventory of attacks.

You have degradation on your, on your weapons. Right. Armour is fine. Armour never breaks. But weapons, you have a limited number of uses and you can't recharge them. Right. And I'm not, I'm generally not a fan of weapon degradation in any game. And in this one, you can actually, like, you know, I remember you see, I was at the stock up.

You're like, oh, buy 99 swords before you go into this dungeon. That was the mantra I was like, it was kind of. I felt like the game forced you to be this overly cautious, fastidious player. There's nowhere you need 99 swords. Maybe the last dungeon or something in part three. I just felt like the game was forcing like a yoke on me, making me do things the way it wanted me to do them if I wanted to succeed in the game. But see, weapon degradation only really affects you if you have human characters. There are three races in the game, and humans are the only ones who really rely on their weapons.

I think I was a humanist. I think I believed in only hiring. legal humans. So in a weird localization choice, there's also a race called mutants, which should be called Espers. They're like mages, basically. But for whatever reason, they call them mutants. I think I never chose them because they sounded like

the terrible mutants. Right. I probably should have had mutants. They're not like malformed or something. They, I think they're called mutants because of the way they learn magic, where it just like randomly mutates new skills. But mages are basically, or espers, sorry, mutants

are like weaker versions of human characters. They have decent physical stats, but not really good ones. But their abilities are more magical. They learn spells and they can cast them. And you do have a limited number of casts, but it's like whatever PP stands for in Pokemon, where you use them and then you go rest and they're recharged back to max. And then there's a third race called Monsters,

And they're the ones that, you know, where the eating meat comes into play because a monster is exactly what it sounds like. You have a party member who is exactly the same as one of the monsters that you fight in the, throughout the, you know, the random battles. And sometimes when you defeat a monster, it will leave behind meat that can be devoured and your monster will eat the meat and it will turn into not necessarily that kind of monster that it devours, but there's a very complex system that determines what you're, your monster mutates into. They should be called mutants, actually, because they do mutate. But it's very complicated. You can go from having a very powerful beast. Like if you eat the meat of a boss, like one of the four zodiac, Chinese zodiac beasts,

the turtle or dragon or whatever, you'll become very powerful. But then if you eat the wrong thing after that, you'll lose all that progress and stunt your growth. I think I remember that happening to me because I thought the monster, this was pre-Pokymon. It was like the idea of having this familiar monster with you. And, like, I think that might have happened to me. I might have had a monster power down. And, you know, it was young and didn't know what I'd done. Yeah, it's a system that could reward you or hurt you.

I think that's a very kawazu kind of thing. And there is a logic, an internal logic, to how monster mutation works. But it's never explained in the game. It's never explained in the manual. You have to basically figure it out on your own. Unfortunately, there are facts online that are, you know, just charts. And they're like, if you eat this kind of meat and you are this kind of monster, then here is what you will turn into.

And basically, like, each type of monster falls into one of, say, 12 different categories. And within those categories, the different monster sprites are different tiers of power within that category. So, like, it's a complex determination based on what category your monster is and what tier they are and what category and tier of meat you eat. But it's very complicated. And, like, the game's UI is pretty primitive. Like, really trying to explain all these things, you know, it's original Game Boy. And, like, the localization, as we mentioned, isn't, you know, on par with today's standard. So it's a bit of a labyrinthine game to return to now, I would think.

I'm sure they had no letters to throw around with describing items and naming items. Like four characters or something like that. But, you know, there are a lot of things that I also like about the game, beyond just the kind of, like, what's happening in combat. The setting is really unique. I mentioned this before. but it takes place in like this world that is physically impossible because the world there's a like the world you start out in there's a tower like you're at the base of a tower and when you go inside the tower you start to climb the tower your goal is to reach the top of the tower

and meet the creator of the universe okay that's interesting that's very like you know tower of babel kind of thing but inside the tower there are worlds other worlds like the one you start out in and each of those worlds contains the tower. So it's like this physically impossible tesseract or something where the tower contains worlds that contain the tower. And it kind of gives them freedom to play with lots of different settings and doesn't have to make sense physically, you know? Yeah, I mean, the tower itself is pretty much just like a dungeon

that you just keep going up. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the Palace of the Ocean King and Spirit, not Spirit Tracks. Phantom Hourglass. Yes, Phantom Hourglass, Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass, in that you keep going back to this tower and you keep making progress and then you'll come to a point where you can't

go any further so you duck into the next world and complete a story there. And each world has its own sort of design. Like there's one world that's pretty much just a bunch of islands in an ocean. There's another world that is it's like

fields full of people laboring and they're all like slaves. It's all very esoteric. And it seems kind of medieval, but at the same time, human characters have a sci-fi element to them. You can get

laser weapons and submachine guns and, like, grenades and tanks. You know, but it's interesting because you say, oh, it's a blend of fantasy and science fiction, but to me at the time, it didn't come off as well as, like, a fantasy start, because it just it did feel a bit of a mishmash, like just throwing everything

in here, like, you know, like, it never, I didn't get a cohesive feel for the world, but it was an interesting journey through these different places. But I think that was kind of the point because the world is just like this artificial construct, all these little places inside of a tower. So I think that was kind of the... And, you know, we're not going to go too far into the future of the franchise, but that kind of interesting melange of different settings and styles and narratives, it comes to be a hallmark of this series, and it's a bit bohemian and strange, yeah. Yeah, like Saga Frontier has an area that's just junk. It's like a planet of junkyard. It's a robot, yeah.

But those don't come into play until Final Fantasy Legend, too. But, yeah, I think the sci-fi element came through a bit more clearly for Japanese fans because the Japanese box art is like this anime-style artwork of sort of like, you know, very 80s anime manga kind of style with like pieces of armor and sci-fi laser weapons and stuff. Whereas here, it's very traditional fantasy. Yeah, like the American cover is, it's very classy. It's very nice. It says the Final Fantasy legend and there's a shaft of light and a helmet and a sword.

It's very like, oh, take up your weapon and go. But that's not really what the game is like. The game is much more like, you know, a girl in a metal bikini. With an afro. Like her crazy, weird eyeball monster who's her battle companion. Like that's saga. Not classy swords and helmets. So how does this game end since I never finished it?

Do you remember? I've never beaten it myself, but I've peaked ahead. And you make it to the top of the tower to meet the creator. And he's like, yeah, good work. Is it Kawazu? It's not Kauazu, but maybe it is. But anyway, you kind of realize that God is sort of an asshole. So then you kill him.

Spoiler alert. Yeah. That's another trope of JRP. But what then? This might be the first RPG, JRP where you kill God. Oh, I doubt it. Come on. Really?

Well, I guess maybe Megami Tensei. But that's different. But yeah, it was Kawazu, maybe ahead of the curve. I didn't realize this game was so huge in Japan. Apparently, being the first RPG on the Game Boy,

it was a boon for Square because it says here it was their first million-seller game. The first million-selling game. Not even Final Fantasy 1 and 2 could do that. Yeah, they were kind of slow to catch on. Well, this came out two years after Final Fantasy, less than two years. they were still kind of picking up traction at that point.

But yeah, having an RPG on the go, like this was the thick of Dragon Quest mania in Japan. So, you know, being able to give people that experience to be the first out of the gate. Yeah, I'm sure that did really well for them. And there is a lot of affection for Saga, I think, in Japan. This game has seen a couple of remakes. So it's clearly well regarded. You know what I don't regard well? The inner cap between Sautangah.

Don't like it. There's also a little symbol between a circle. What do you call that? Like an option eight. Yeah, a bullet. A bullet. Yeah, there's like essay, bullet, G.A. Do we want to get into what that even means or does it mean anything?

I don't think it does mean anything. It's just like fun stylization. Like saga in Japan is written with Katakana, which means it's like a foreign loan word. Right. So I think it's just, I think he thought it was saga. Cool. But because it's written with two characters, Saw and God. Except the limited saga.

Does not have the intercapping there is to say, like, this is weird even for saga. But then we were talking about the most recent one, Scarlet Grace, is clearly like a self-referential SG. I think he's a stylish kind of dude. He just cares about that thing. I believe so. So let's see. What else is there to say about the Final Fantasy legend? So when you, I mentioned that combat is very similar to Dragon Quest in that you, it's, you know, first person perspective.

You don't see your party. You just have a set of menu commands. you see enemies as static sprites and basically one enemy represents a group of enemies they're all like stacked on each other so there's a lot of sort of automatic targeting

and sort of discretionary AI control over what happens yeah it felt a little more automatic and like I think because the Game Boy can't display too much like the enemy sprites are nice well drawn but like the battles feel very static

more so than even Draquay you know Draquay um yeah Yeah, but I mean, that's kind of a limitation of the space. And you do get these battles where you have like 12 enemies to fight.

But, you know, a lot of the abilities you have can hit an entire group. Like a submachine gun, I think, can hit an entire group. I would hope so. Yeah. And certain magic spells can hit an entire group. So it becomes very, you know, like there are ways to sort of mitigate that. And then monsters, you know, their abilities vary according to what they are. so you can change into something that has like really great skills and then not level up or you know mutate your monster for as long as possible like eventually their stats will lag behind and they'll stop to be stop being useful against the new monsters you're fighting but until then it's like hang on to this monster because it's really cool and really effective in battle mutants you don't have that luxury though because mutants you know they can they can battle physically but you really want to use them as mages and casting spells

The thing is, though, they learn spells completely at random. As far as I know, there is no system to determine what spells a mutant learns. And they have like four slots, I think, for their attacks. And sometimes a new ability will just appear after a battle. And it doesn't tell you. It's like you go into the next battle and all of a sudden you have different skills. Like sometimes you'll have something added. But sometimes one of your abilities will be overwritten.

and you'll lose it. So you can have a mutant go from like having, you know, two instances of 20 fire spells. So, like, they can cast spells 40 times to having those abilities overwritten with something like sleep or, you know, some other... Thanks, game. Yeah, like some sort of buff ability.

And all of a sudden they can't deal any damage to enemies. So that's the one part I don't like because there is no way to predict that, no way to control that. And no way to deal with having lost your great abilities except to reset the game and go to the last save. And the game doesn't even tell you when you get new abilities. It does feel again as if Kwaazia likes the randomness that could be good or bad,

the player may be thrown this curveball that makes their game harder. Something else I find really interesting about the game is that there's permanent death. Like you create generic characters at the beginning of the game, and you can carry those characters around with you, but you can get rid of them in any time and start up a new character if you want to for some reason. But if your character dies in battle,

then they have like a life count. You don't really know what that number is for until they die and it goes down one. So a character can die like four or five times and if they run out of lives, like if they die in combat X number of times, they're gone forever. So you can later in the game

buy something that will replenish those life points. Right. But that's something that would show up been a much more concrete fashion in later Saga games. Like Saga Frontier had life points and I was like, why did my character just like lose a number

and it doesn't seem to affect them? It's because a character was actually like an enemy was attacking their life points. Hit points and life points are the ones that matter. Yeah. Yep. So there's a lot of interesting ideas here, but it is a pretty crazy game. Well, I remember many kids, because we were kids and this came out, having

kind of suffer through this and it was a tougher RPG than I had played on console. So we've talked about the races, right? Yeah. Your beloved mutants. I haven't talked about the music. Oh, yeah, the music. But it is Game Boy.

No, the music is great. The melodies are great. Yeah. The Game Boy had a very good sound chip. I don't understand. Like, if you listen to it on headphones, it sounds really good. If you're listening to the little monaural speaker, then... Right, not so much.

Like, there's some really great music on Game Boy, and this is some of it. It is Uimatsu. It is. Nobu Oumatsu, composer of Final Fantasy, composed for this game. Future games, they would keep the title screen theme that he created, which is beautiful. And then Kenji Ito would perform, you know, compose all the other music. But this one, it's Uamatsu. So there is that Final Fantasy connection.

It's the creator of Final Fantasy 2 and the composer of Final Fantasy teaming up together to create a game that's not Final Fantasy. And caller, for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Tollas. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, shit. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast,

nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus, get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. You're listening to a podcast about old video games, but if you're like me, being a fan of the classics doesn't mean you don't have room in your heart and schedule for new releases too. And Gamefly is the best way to buy and rent them. You can check out new games and decide if they're worth buying, or if you should save your pennies and put them toward buying that box copy of Earthbound you've had your eye on. At Gamefly.com, you can pick your favorite games and have them mailed directly to your door. It's the leading video game rental service, and it offers more than 9,000 titles to choose from, including Super Mario Odyssey, Assassin's Creed Origins, Call of Duty, World War II, NBA 2K18, and Madden 18. Try them out for as little as 54 cents a day and keep

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Unsure of how his victim was killed, the doctor completes his autopsy with more questions than answers. The serial killer podcast. A little boy, as it turned out, was to kidnap Billy Gaffney. In crime and sports. He's pulled over in Dallas and found in possession of, A crack pipe. Let's just say the lawsuit didn't go anywhere. He didn't win. Exclusively on Podcast One and Apple Podcasts. One of my favorite gaming memories as a kid was always the ride home from picking up a new game.

Sitting in the backseat, pouring over the manual of a brand new purchase, anticipating the moment I'd get home and finally be able to play this game I've been saving up my allowance for. Now, I'm the one who has to drive home, so there's no more reading in the back seat. Plus, no one even prints game manuals anymore anyway. The realities of being a grown-up gamer may lack a certain rose-tinted romanticism, but at least there's True Car to help you find the right car to make the ride home a little smoother. True Car can connect you with the network of more than 13,000 dealers and give you a look at their actual inventory of more than 700,000 pre-owned vehicles. On top of that, once you register with True Car,

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I'm not a lot of Oh, I'm sorry, I'm Thank you. All right, so the past two episodes I've recorded, I have not been able to read listener mail. But by God, we're going to do it this time.

We're throwing in right now a surprising number of people who wrote in to talk about the Final Fantasy Legend games. So let's jump in. Feel free to comment at any time. from this episode's patron, Bobby Najari, dang, I did it again, Bobby Nijari. Hi, Jeremy, really looking forward to my requested episode. Final Fantasy Legend 2 will always hold a special place in my heart, having received it for a birthday present when I was 12.

It was my first RPG since I got the Game Boy earlier than the NES. The different worlds throughout the game really captured my imagination. Having guest characters temporarily join your party added a dynamic element that I longed for when I later played the original Final Fantasy. Apollo's betrayal was a surprising twist. They gave me extra motivation to finish the game and settle the score. Plus, the music was so catchy that it was the first game I would listen to using the sound test mode. Final Fantasy Legend 2 opened my eyes to the fact that games could transport my mind to other worlds,

just like books had been doing. Um, Mark Duyungen. I don't think I could vouch for Final Fantasy Legend 2 being great on objective terms, but I will always have fond memories of it. It's hard to underestimate the importance of this being on Game Boy. For an elementary school kid that made... That, for an elementary school kid, that made all the difference. I played this extensively in fourth and fifth grade,

with lots of that playtime happening in hospital rooms while my grandpa passed away. Having a storyline touch upon a missing, reappearing father, and his subsequent sacrifice spoke to me on several different levels since my father passed away at a very young age. With hindsight, I know this game didn't deal with any of these themes with true maturity, nor should it have. But I find it interesting that I still have such fond memories of the games.

It speaks to the power they have inside of us, right? Yeah, it does remind me. I remember my friends who were really into, these series, like, they did feel like it was this, you know, giant, you know, giant adventure in the palm of your hands. You could take with you, play in the car in the back seat, pull out. And, like, yeah, that was unique at the time. Like, we had those at home, but, like, yeah, to be able to lose yourself in this giant

world of your own, you know, where you're in control of the battles, I think that was a really innovative thing for the time. I mean, that same appeal is why I really, really loved Nintendo Switch because it's a system that works as, you know, like a home console, but also as a portable system. and it has a ton of really great games on it that you can play anywhere. And I've always been drawn to portable systems, but I feel like this is the first one that really works kind of universally. As much as I enjoyed 3DS and Vita and so forth,

like this hits something that all of them never quite managed to achieve. So what I'm saying is I would like to see Final Fantasy Legend for Switch. You'll probably get Crystal Chronicles instead. That's okay. Carry the cage. From Tim Kyo. I'm writing to share a brief story of my first RPG. It was 1998. Final Fantasy 7 was the topic of conversation among nerds in school.

It inspired artwork and classes and materia set-ups dominated the lunchroom debate. Unfortunately, I could only imagine what my classmates were talking about. My parents were too poor, or maybe just too cheap, to buy me a PlayStation, and I only had a hand-me-down Atari 2,600, and a Game Boy at home. But I was determined to play Final Fantasy, scarred my FuncoLand Price Guide newspaper, and discovered the Game Boy had not one but three Final Fantasy's. Convincing my parents to take me to the nearest store, I bought the only version in stock.

Final Fantasy Legend, too. Obviously, this was not the ideal RPG for novices. I didn't know what HP was, so when my mutant inexplicably lost his heel spell or my dinosaur reverted to a slime, I was baffled. I struggled for months to make it out of the first world. But I was obsessed. Using my aunt's newly acquired gateway computer, I scoured the internet for any info on the game,

learned its basics, and made it all the way to Apollo. I never beat the game then, but in the years since, I've probably replayed it more times than Final Fantasy 7. Few JRPs veer from the standard battle system conventions, but Saga games offer it all, a unique world, distinct characters, and a novel battle system that can challenge genre veterans. If you're willing to accept that these games are different, you're in for a really engrossing experience, one that is rarely matched. I think this letter really sums up what I like about the Saga series. I like how he reminds us that those anti-consumer systems of possibly losing your spells and having the arcane monster. monster evolution persisted in the sequel. I just like, keep him in.

He mentioned the late 90s. All of these games were republished by Hudson, weirdly enough. Oh, it's Sunsoft. That's even weirder. Slightly different box art, right? Exactly the same box art, but the Sunsoft logo is on it. But they're like Final Fantasy 7 is huge. I don't know what kind of handshake was made by Sunsoft.

I think they came out in 1999, so they were like a much more pick-up of him. It was like 98 or 99. Yeah. From Riley Brandt. Final Fantasy Legend on the original gay boy was my first introduction to JRP's with turn-based battle systems. I found it so off-putting, I didn't touch another Final Fantasy game until FF12. I think that's the more common experience. I don't know. Everyone who's written until now has been positive. I really wanted to like it, but I was mostly left confused and asking myself,

is that what I'm supposed to do? Just navigate menus in battle? Why isn't this like Zelda? The whole concept was so foreign to me. I stopped playing the game. But when I was a kid and rarely got new games, even the ones I didn't like got played eventually. I dived into the thick manual and made it pretty far. However, I came to the conclusion that turn-based battles weren't for me. Fast forward 25 years later, and JRP's have become my most beloved genre. Turn-based battles are now my favorite. Recently, I decided to revisit the game that turned me off to all those that turned me off all those years ago. Unfortunately, even with my understanding of JRP mechanics, progression, party building, etc., I still found the game very cryptic and frustrating. If I had played

Fantasy Star back in the 80s, my JRP journey might have been different. Paul Masterson, says, growing up, my main gaming system was the venerable Gameboy. So it's really no surprise then that my most played RPGs were in the Legends series. Despite the obtuseness of Legends 1, which I still haven't beaten, I eventually ended up picking up the other two games, and those games

awoke my inner RPG player. I might be an outlier to this day. As to this day, I still have never played any mainline Final Fantasy for more than a few hours. There was something endearing about this series. The quirky, exploitable battle weapons mechanics, the even stranger meets parts,

system, or the smattering of sci-fi elements during a time when most RPGs on the Nintendo side stayed firmly in the classic fantasy realm. Outside of Breath of Fire, too, I could easily count Legend 2 and 3 among my favorite console RPGs. In a time of downskilled ports and compromise mechanics, it was refreshing to see the sheer audacity of not just one, but two, full-on, large-scale RPGs grace the Game Boy in a pre-Pocomon world. The time travel of legend, the time travel aspect of Legend 3 alone was revelatory and remarkably well-handled years before Ocarina of Time would attempt something more linear with only two time periods. In a way, it's strangely fitting that these games were so far ahead of their time on such a compromised platform.

I think in general, we're all being much, much kinder to legend than we were to adventure. I'm not saying that's unfair, but I think the ambition in this case did pay off even if it was alienating. I think the turn-based system in this game actually works in its favor, because a big part of what I find frustrating in adventure is that, that you are dealing with such brain-dead AI. You're, like, wandering around, and it feels very clumsy, and the enemies are stupid, and your companion characters are stupid, and it's just... Everybody's stupid.

It's very stupid. Whereas this game is obtuse, but you take it slowly. It's turn-based, so you have the time to kind of, like, stop and figure out what's going on. I don't know. I feel like turn-based RPGs hold up better in some respects. And this game is a lot more, like, contemporary and player-friendly than PRC, PC-R-Gs of the era. Not necessarily deeper, but just moves at a faster pace, I think. Well, you know, I think back in the day, I remember, you know, of the era, Final Fantasy Adventure was the good one among action gamers.

But if you wanted to have a, you know, like a Zelda-style game pre-Zelda, that was it. But I think in hindsight, you're right. Like, this series did more to influence the future. And as people, as you mentioned about three, three is. to me a lot better than the previous two because of the setting because of more narrative

yeah and because of Kowazu didn't work on it Really? We'll get to that. He did not. Deca Tars says this game may have been

my first true RPG and really threw me into the deep end. I was fascinated by how strange and arbitrary everything seemed especially the constant monster transformations.

It had so much going on that I felt compelled to keep playing. I eventually reached a point where I simply couldn't figure out how to continue but I remain intrigued by the game

and would like to complete it someday. Man, there's a lot of these. Camden Hutchinson says, Final Fantasy Legend 2 for Game Boy was the first RPG I have ever played. This is a really common theme here. I was probably 11 or so at the time, and a friend from school let me borrow his copy. From the haunting opening melody and mysterious mythological backstory,

I was immediately hooked. Having mostly played arcade ports on my Sega Master's system, I had never experienced anything so deep. Leveling up, equipping weapons, cannibalizing other monsters. It was all new and wonderful. Although the details are now a bit hazy, I remember being particularly impacted by the game's story. The drama of traveling between worlds and fighting gods was certainly nothing I'd encountered in video game form before.

I even tried to persuade my parents that playing this highly sophisticated role-playing game was the intellectual literary equivalent of reading books. They weren't convinced. Yeah, there's a lot of reading. Anyway, Final Fantasy Legend 2 began my long, if now faded love affair with JRP's, and it will always hold a special place in my memories. So, apparently the trick to loving Final Fantasy Legend is to have played it as the very first RPG you ever touched. It's a bitter pill, but it addicted them.

I'm sure a lot of people did do it that way, did play it that way. Clearly, look at all these letters. Stephen Finley. Final Fantasy Legend, too, took a while to grow on me. My biggest stumbling block was the inventory system. Breakable weapons are to this day one of my least favorite game mechanics. On top of that, your mutants and monsters would gain and lose power seemingly at random. It was the story that kept me coming back.

Like David Banner or Sam Beckett, you and your party would wander from place to place, writing wrongs and intervening in everything, from weddings to heroin, I mean banana smuggling, from a desert world to a giant world to the inside of a body. It always kept me guessing. One really weird aspect was Odin. He would bring your party back to life if they died early in the game, but eventually you met him and were forced to fight him. Once you killed him, he could no longer resurrect you, a concept that blew my mind.

Just a few more to go. Andrew Dooley says When I saw you were taking mail for a saga retrospective Especially the early games I had to write in The first three saga games on Game Boy are etched into my memory Especially the first game Which I knew is the Final Fantasy legend This game stayed in rotation with Pokemon

Links Awakening and Final Fantasy Adventure For close to a decade of my life And I still remember car trips where my Boy Scout troop Would pass the game back and forth Designing parties of mutants and monsters Trying to parse out their hidden Almost nonsensical leveling mechanics To this day, I still don't know what ESP does in that first game.

I didn't load the games up all that often. I don't load the games up all that often anymore, but I credit them with one of my other gaming passions, tinkering with rules in games like Dungeons and Dragons. Even when I was only 12 or 13, the first Final Fantasy Legend game had me jotting down monster transformations and trying to figure out how to translate that into my D&D game.

Based on what I've learned of saga since then, in large part, thanks to Retronaut's posts and videos, that spirit of experimentation and tinkering feels like the great greatest legacy of those early saga games. And fine, oh, no, two more. Will Haight Miner says, Never before has a game benefited

more from its flaws. The awkward spare translation, the aggressively unfriendly game mechanics, sadistic, game-stopping events like forcing the player to answer an obscure riddle, or to choose one correct orb out of hundreds of monster containing decoys. Suzaku, the invincible roving beast

that wipes your party out instantly, unless you score unless you flee or score a chains eye hit. The menu system. It makes sense that this game is miserable to play. That's the whole point. Your party is trapped in the mad dream of a false god. Like in a Philip K. Dick novel, reality is broken and diseased, riddled with meaningless suffering and

death. Maybe in paradise, stat boosts are affordable, but not here. This is one of my all-time favorite RPGs, and I never want to play it again. I think that encapsulated the experience. Pretty much. And finally, from Kevin

and Boyer. No crazy story is just personal opinion. I love the Game Boy Legends series, especially two, and Mystic Quest. I very much missed the time of breezy square RPGs. After playing the Octopath Traveler demo, I have hopes that it will continue that simple, fun, 2D RPG that

has unfortunately been the domain of mobile and cheap 3DS ports. And yeah, that is important to mention. Well, we'll maybe talk about that at the very end. But the spirit of Final Fantasy legend does live on with a square inyx game that has no connection to

Akitoshi Kawazu whatsoever but it's available as a demo on switch right now called Octopath Traveler and as you might guess from that name which is oblique and weird it seems to be very much in the spirit of the Final Fantasy Legend games. I think more romancing saga actually.

Oh okay, the saga games. But you don't get in these games where you get on those is like these different vignette characters you start the story from these different points of view which it totally reminded me of romantic Saga when I played the demo. Yeah, the Game Boy games are very much

just kind of like straightforward RPGs, but starting with the Romancing Saga through Saga Frontier. Yeah, the series is like pick a character and follow their story. Usually like six to eight, you know, I thought it was a very interesting way for this franchise to go. Yeah, I think it's usually seven, isn't it? I think you're right

actually. I know romance or final... Saga Frontier is seven, for sure. Saga Frontier was seven. It was supposed to be eight. There was going to be a guy, named Ring, I think, who was going to tie all the stories together, but they ran out of time. Man, I'm going to say,

I think this is probably the most played saga game ever, and it was all downhill from here in terms of popularity. Just based on when it came out, what it was to the audience, and what followed. You mean legend?

Well, I mean, just saga in general. I want to say this is probably the most played saga game, period, just because of what it was. No, but I'm saying saga Frontier, or the Final Fantasy Legends. Yeah, Legend one, yeah. Saga Frontier, I think,

was pretty heavily played, too, because it came out right after Final Fantasy 7 and people were like it's a game from the people who made Final Fantasy 7? Yes, I gotta play that. It was a... What the hell is this?

Million seller and also a million returns on that one. So let's move on to Final Fantasy Legend 2, which seems to be the game that holds the bulk of affection. I've never really spent enough time with this to have a firm grip on it, but I have done a lot of reading on it and am familiar with it in passing just because people talk about it a lot. It seems to be the one that kind of balances the first game's ideas with more refinement and also an actual story, as opposed to the first game where you're just like, go find God. This one is about lots of gods who are all kind of trying to one up each other and engaged in this quest for something called Megai, which is, there's like 77 fragments of Megai throughout the game. And when you collect them, they boost your stats. But if you bring all of them together, I think you can become a god or something.

And so these demigods, like Apollo and Isis, and it's like gods from every pantheon, every religion, are all competing to get the Megai. And the game begins with your father waking you up in the middle of the night and, like, saying, you need to go on a quest. And then he jumps out your window. And he appears throughout the game and eventually sacrifices himself to save you in the final battle. battle. But it's a very kind of big story, you know, like it's not enough to go fight one god. You're going to fight a whole bunch of gods. There's a lot of really interesting ideas in Final Fantasy Legend, too. One of them was mentioned in the, um, in one of the letters. Yeah. Yeah. The Odin thing. Yeah. So this game got rid of the life points concept. And when you die, Odin resurrects you and says, you know, you've fallen in battle, but I'll bring you back, keep fighting the good fight. And Odin's like the one god who isn't a dick. But in the end, you have to fight Odin, and he, like, forces you to because it's, you know, part of the natural progression of things. And so there's a good reason to fight Odin. But when you kill him, that affects the game mechanics.

Once Odin is gone, he doesn't resurrect you anymore. So when you get a party wipeout, it's game over. And that's interesting. And I think, again, the player has this kind of safety net for a while. And then at a certain point, it's like, it's time to go on without this. So, once again, you create a party of blank slates. They're not predefined characters, but you do have a lot of temporary characters who can tag along and team up with you, including your father, but also other characters. And so there's more of a story, like I said, more defined characters and more of a, like a predefined quest.

I mean, the goal to find 77 Megai is, you know, pretty much like standard go find all these widgets. But it does still have like the wildly different worlds that you're traveling. But yeah, almost to a more crazy extent, right? I remember it being more inventive. I didn't get very far in this one either. Yeah, apparently when you collect Megai, it helps you travel through worlds. So there's lots of like really small worlds, very self-contained spaces that you're traveling through. And like one of the letters said, they're all very unique.

And I think the most infamous one is sort of this tropical paradise where there's these smugglers who are smuggling bananas. and it's like a crime syndicate. And it seems really weird that bananas would be such a hot commodity. But if you look into it, according to the legends of localization by Clyde Mandolin, the bananas were opium in the Japanese version. In the remake of the game, it's just contraband, which doesn't specifically say what it is, but apparently includes, you know, drugs and other stuff, including maybe bananas. I don't know. It's pretty gritty. Yes.

And it also continues the Final Fantasy legend tradition. of being very buggy. There's a weapon that will allow you to kill the final boss. You can kill God in a single hit in Final Fantasy legend

with the chainsaw weapon, I think. Whoa. But here... This is I got to see. Here there's another glitch that works in your favor. According to something I found on TV tropes

of all places, depending on the Game Boy model you're playing on, you can have a random encounter as you load the game. If you're in any non-town area, This is exploitable. Saving the game and restarting the system resets the RNG, the random number generator.

So the first encounter on turning up on the system is a battle that gives you a stat bonus or an item drop. Saving and then restarting the system after each battle is guaranteed to trigger the same battle with the same reward. Finding a battle with an HP, strength, or agility increase, and exploiting it in the first couple of worlds could give you a character with 99 hit points, 99 strength, and 99 agility. so it's not very well. You have to be a bug or a secret thing put in by closet. Probably a bug. The game plays with the concept of weapon durability

because your weapons still degrade, but this time around you have a new race. There's the mech race, which should not appear in the first game. These, I think, appear in pretty much all the subsequent soccer games, and once again kind of underscores that sci-fi element of it. So mecks are weird because they don't have any stat boosts whatsoever. Basically, what you equip on a mech determines its stats. So the better armor

you give it, the better at stats. Also, they use weapons just like humans and espers, but their weapons degrade twice as fast. They get half as many uses. On the other hand, if you take a mech to an inn and rest, the weapons that it's equipped with will recharge. So you can actually get back those weapon uses. So there's kind of something that offsets the weapon degradation element. It also plays with weapon durability in a few other ways. It has extremely powerful weapons with very limited use. The seven sword hits seven times per use, but you could only use it seven times.

The glass sword ignores defense for enormous damage, but it breaks with a single use because it's class. Isn't the glass sword from Ultima? I might be. I think it is. and there's a hypercanon that can only be used three times, a nuclear bomb that only works once. And then there's the Excalibur, which is a single sword that appears in the game,

is extremely powerful and has no durability issues. Was that before Final Fantasy had Excalibur? Or did Final Fantasy 2 have Excalibur? I don't know, but I do know that Saken Dinsett's original subtitle was the emergence of Excalibur. I definitely remember... So the idea was bubbling beneath the surface there.

And I definitely remember using glass swords in Ultima 6, and they broke after you use them once. That could be from, like, a myth or something, and not just Ultima, I'm guessing. It kind of reminds me, it makes me think of Nausica, where they used ceramic weapons, which aren't the same as glass, but it seems like, you know, ceramic is very strong on one edge and very fragile on the other. So, like, they would fight with ceramic blades. How quickly did this game come out after the first one in Japan? It was about a year later. Yeah, because, you know, like, and they kind of arrived here in rapid success. too. And I think that's why a lot of us maybe didn't get as deep into this one, because

like, I just remember, you know, I got them all at the same time. And I think they all came out pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah, I think people just kind of remember the one that they played, whichever that happened to be. And it's kind of hard to look at them and see the box. It's like, one has a helmet. The other is blue and the other is purple. Like, what, what are these games? But I would think that this, the team that made the first one went directly into making this one because they're very cohesive. This is a Game Boy Works 1990 game. I think I think it's October or November 1990, so a year after the visuals are a little better, but pretty similar.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same thing. But again, it does have more of a plot. There's even a plot twist when you collect all 77 Megai. Apollo betrays you and steals all the Megai for himself. And then he uses them and dies because there actually were 78 May Guy. And he basically... It's the oldest trick in the book. It is.

His hubris. The hidden Megai. But then it turns out it's all part of like some grand scheme created by ISIS to continually renew and reboot the universe. So she like broke up the 77 Megai and hid them until they could come together and then the gods could be reset. I think the game ends with the May guy being separated again. It's a interesting heady story. I like, you know, definitely a step up in the first one. But that story has nothing on Final Fantasy Legend 3.

Wait, can we pause for a second? I have to ask a question. Okay. What about the DS remake of this and three? Do we know anything about that at all? Like what it added, what it did? I know there's a fan translation for two. It's been finished for years now.

I think three also. For three, too? Okay, yeah. I just, I don't know if you, I was just reading about it before the show. And apparently, Kawazu stuck to his guns and it's like, no, this is still going to be like a 12-hour RPG. So they didn't change that much in terms of, you know, adding content to it. I just don't know if this is maybe with the DS version.

version be the ideal way to play these games, the remakes? Yeah, I mean, if you can play the DS remake of Final Fantasy Legend 2, which is called Saga 2, Darkness and Light. No, Saga 2. Legend of the Reliance. Yeah. Of the relics? It's Saga 2, Legend of the Relics, Goddess of Destiny.

Okay. Yeah. Yes. And then Saga 3 is Darkness and Light. I say Venmo, Kowazu, like, five bucks, and then just, you know, play them online. Do you think there was a chance that those versions would ever have an event? official release here in the distant future? I can't, like, they,

I just don't see them, I don't know. Maybe ported to mobile or something. Yeah, I don't know. I asked Kowazu about it when they were first being launched. I interviewed him about Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, the, whatever, the action one. The Crystal Bears, that's it.

And I was like, so are you bringing over the DS remakes? And he was like, hmm. So I think Square just doesn't believe in saga in the U.S. No, I think this is also before the mobile version would also be the Vita version and the 3DS version or whatever. They weren't thinking like that back then. I'm curious to listen to those soundtracks, actually, for those DS versions, how they re-ranked.

They're nice. I picked up both of them and played a little bit of each. And they, you know, refine the graphics a lot. Obviously, they're like 3D now and they look nice. What do the battles look like? I don't remember, actually. It's been so long. I'll go check it out.

I kind of forgot those existed. Yeah, they're out there, and there is a fan translation. So, yeah, go for it. It's probably the way to play Final Fantasy Legend 2 and 3. The original Final Fantasy Legend, like I said, was remade for Wonder Swan, but there's never been one for a more. I think also mobile, but only in Japan. All right. So then Final Fantasy Legend 3, like I said earlier, it was not made by Kawazu.

Cozzu moved along to Super Famicomps, Brini asked to make a romantic saga to take his baby and make a real game of it. And finally, after being relegated to the slums of portables for a couple of years, he proved himself and yeah, the fact that that was Square's first million selling game probably did a lot for his status within the company. And I think the innovations he came up with for Romancing Saga were interesting and visually it was on par with what the fundamentalistee team was doing as well. And I think Final Fantasy Legend 3 is regarded here in America maybe as the best one. You know, like, I remember having friends.

This is the one that's like, if you're going to play one of them, play this one. So Final Fantasy Legend 3 was made by a completely different team than Final Fantasy Legend 1 and 2, and it mixes things up. It was produced at Square Osaka instead of in Tokyo, and the development lead was a guy named Chihiro Fujioka. And he also was the designer on a game called Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, which in Japan was called Final Fantasy USA. No way. Which is Japan's way of saying Americans are too dumb for a world Final Fantasy game. But it's a fun little game. It is, but it is a little game.

It really feels like when you know these games are connected, you kind of understand why Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is so simplistic. And it's actually more simplistic than this in some ways because the plot line is a lot more linear. You only have two characters in combat as opposed to four. This game has four plus guest characters. Do you want a hot pro tip? Cast, heel on the last boss. Yeah, it's like the baby's first RPG. It's not bad.

It has rock and butt music. Oh, the music is great. Last Boss music is spectacular. I'll put it right here in the show. So anyway, So anyway, yeah, like, as a result, this still feel, this feels like a very different take. on Saga. So I booted it up earlier this week for the first time

because I'd never played it before and I live tweeted my results because I was like, what is happening in this game? Because I was really expecting something more like a traditional JRP but no, it's still Saga. So this game gets rid of the monster race and the MEC race. So you can

only pick a team, well you can't pick a team at all. You have four named characters. It's set. Yeah. There's like Arthur and I don't know who else. Like four two guys. I think that's why my friends liked it because it felt more like Final Fantasy two, four. Yeah, very much. It's two men, two women. One each

is a mutant, one each is a human. And so you have these four characters, but there's no mech and there's no beast. But what happens is at the end of battles, if you beat a robot, it'll drop bolts. And if you beat a monster, sometimes it'll drop meat.

And you can eat that. Or I guess install the bolts on your body. Eat the bolts. And your character turns into a monster or a mech. And so the systems work basically the same as in the previous Final Fantasy Legend games. It's just that anyone can be a monster at any time.

And you can choose to turn yourself back to revert to your original state by eating the other races leavings. So if you're a monster, eat cyborg parts and you turn back into a human. I feel like the player had a lot more agency in this one to control the experience after the previous two games

had kind of controlled them. So there's some really, really cool stuff about this game that I feel is really unconventional and forward thinking for a game of this era. This was 1992, maybe 91, I don't know. But the first thing is that it's a game about time travel, and your vessel for time travel is literally a vessel. You have a ship, the chronos.

This is pre-chrono, many, many years. This is like three years, four years before chrono trigger. But you have a ship that travels through time, and as you advance through the game, you get system upgrades for it and that lets you go to other eras. So you use this ship as like your main base, which, you know, it's like taking the lunar whale from Final Fantasy 4 and saying, what if instead of just shuttling you back and forth between Earth and the Moon, the lunar whale were like the core of the game. This is where everything was like, it was the hub for everything. This was 91, Japan, 93 U.S. There was two years between the two releases.

And visually, it's a leap forward from the previous two games. Yeah, the character designs, the monsters are like super. super cute and weird. There's like little blushing fairies and crazy witches, but yeah. So I didn't realize that you could turn an Esper into a mute or into a monster by eating meat. So an enemy dropped meat. And I was like, okay, what happens if I eat this? Because I don't have a monster in my party.

And all of a sudden, Sharon turned into what basically looked like Zoidberg. And I was like, or maybe Cthulhu. That's weird. So then I got into battle. you know, monsters can still attack like normal, but then they have skills. And I couldn't figure out what skills were until I got the monster in my party. And then it turns out skills are the specific combat abilities unique to a specific monster race or cyborg race or mech race.

So it turns out Zoiburg, Zoidberg, can dual-wield fire swords. Wow. So it's even better than, you know, citizen snips. It's pretty amazing. So there is still randomness within the monsters you've become. but you can choose to become the monster or not. Well, it's not random. It uses the same system.

It uses the same system. So it's like your monster will, like you'll become a monster based on what you eat. Which type of monster meat you eat? But then your character will automatically evolve as you level up. Like there is more traditional leveling in this game. And that affects your monsters. Like you don't have to eat other kinds of meat to evolve. You just, you know.

Are the life points back? I think they are. I didn't make it far enough to die. It could be. But, yeah, the same thing works for the mecks. Like you stick bolts on someone and they become a robot. This director also directed another really weird-ass RPG, Treasure of the Rudras for Super Famicom. It is their last Super Famicom RPG.

Now, that's Bahmint Lagoon. I read it was their last. Baumett Lagoon's an S-R-PG, but that was the final. Okay, okay. This matters. But what happens in that game is you basically, you build spells out of words you have. And that was also

fan-translated and God bless those people for making sense of that and making that into English. But that's another very weird system. I remember that same era was like Live-A-Live and Treasure Hedger G. These interesting games that never came to the States. Yeah, it was just too complicated for translation

at the time with the size, limitations of ROMs. The word system, like, create your own spell that also appeared in Cartia, the word of fate. Do you remember I played that was a really good game. Well, it had a mono art. It was beautiful.

Yeah, it was an Atlas game, but it had a mono art and kind of played like Final Fantasy tactics, except you were creating your, well, maybe more like Fire Emblem. But I think that game in Japan was called Rebus. It was. Yeah. But I liked that one a lot. I wish I had not gotten rid of it. Deep cut. Better than Hoshigami.

Yes. A lot of things are. So, yeah. What else is there to say about Final Fantasy Legend 3? Great music for the system. There's also a DS remake, and that's also translated, like we said, and probably the best way to play this if you can do it. I heard really good things about those games when they were released for the DS and a lot of sadness when they didn't come here. Yeah, I really enjoyed them, and I was really disappointed that didn't come to the U.S.

They looked and played really, like, I don't know what it was. I'd have to go back and revisit them, but they felt a lot more approachable than the Game Boy games. It was the most sort of like, here's saga, but in a way that, you know, kind of makes sense for JRP fans. Yeah, maybe we're not going to get this far in the future, but there is a PS2 remake of romancing saga two that did come out in America. And maybe that didn't do as well as they'd hope it had that been a big hit. Maybe they would have gone, you know, deep in the saga for North America. But alas, they didn't. But still, the saga spirit does live on today.

We're going to skip over romancing saga. Saga frontier. I'm going to do quick interjections. I did import the first romancing saga as my second Super Famicom import after Final Fantasy 5. And I made it really, actually, I made to the end of Final Fantasy 5 using facts written by people we know. And then Romancing Saga, I remember, there wasn't a good fact.

And one of the big changes they made there were like, you know, these different characters you chose. And then like a lot of dialogue choices that actually started to affect the game. And depending on what you chose, you know, like, it branches apart. So like it became, you know, if someone who didn't speak Japanese with a dictionary in front of me, it was just too much. I had to give up. Yeah.

Yeah. I know Saga or Romancing Saga 3 is so complicated that it's never been fan-translated. It's pretty uncommon to have a game by a major publisher like Square Nix in a major franchise that has not been fan-translated after all this time. But last I checked, which is about a year ago or so, there is no, like, working fan translation of Romantic. Because those branching storylines get increasingly complex through one, two, and three. I think by three it is like this crazy labyrinth of possibilities. which sounds really interesting. I would love to be a Japanese teenager who could have the time and literacy to play through that game and find all of its gooey center goodness.

So, anyway, the saga spirit does live on. Of course, Kawazu is still making his saga games. There was, there have been remakes, there was the Scarlet Grace. And I think the 20th anniversary project was something else, too. There was a browser game. There was a mobile game. Yeah, and I think, you know, Unlimited Zog, we're not going to talk about it too much,

but, you know, it's interesting. You know, it's, I think it's worth checking out because it's probably not expensive, and it's one of a kind. It's like, it's like 12 bucks. Yeah, I think, like, you'll never see anything else like it. The music's really good. The art work is gorgeous.

It looks like this water, you know, kind of this weird watercolors, like, and it's pure kawazu, and it's, like, distilled form. Yeah, and there's a lot to like about these games. They have, you know, the ones that have predefined characters really break away from RPG conventions. You have like, you know, some of your typical protagonists. But like in Saga Frontier, you have, who all of their characters?

There's a Beast Boy. I think. Yeah, there's a Beast Boy who's looking for something. There's a singer. There's a woman who's been betrayed and, like, accused wrongly of committing murder. There's a robot. There is a robot. And then there's a superhero, like a Spider-in superhero who has, like,

a nemesis that he's locked an eternal struggle with. I made it through five of the seven stories. Wow, that's impressive. Yeah, it was part of my when I tried to go through every PS1 RPG in order and it was the one that broke me.

I finished Alundra. I finished beyond the beyond even. I couldn't finish all that. I can't make it through a Camelot game. And I remember they re-released Saga Frontier one and two in Japan, these collector sets. They came with the Millennium Collection.

With teacups? I have one of those. I knew you would. I was kind of coveted those teacups. I found one really cheap that I used games. It was like 15 bucks. Do you sip Earl Grey? out of your Saga Frontier T-T job?

I don't know what happened to it. It's, you know, I've moved around the country since then, so. But it was on display at my one-up office. Well, and I'll say the sequel, you know, is a much more tightly controlled, you know, made game. I'd say it's maybe one of the best ones. Yeah, Sagar Frontier 2 is like no other game in the Saga series because it is like, it's not only linear, but you have like two characters and you're just like experiencing their stories as they sort of converge. And it's very steeped in like medieval history.

You know, that, a remake of that would be good. Yeah, I mean, take it and give it like octopath traveler visuals, because it already had great visuals, but, you know, make them a little more up-resed for today's graphics without just putting a filter on them. That was the one I spent the most time with, but it still broke me, even though it's the one that makes the most sense. There's like eggs or something that you have to cultivate. There's a system in there that just destroyed me. But, you know, great soundtrack, too. Having recently, you know, listened to the retinauts about Second Dead Setsu, and I think maybe this series saga actually all told is a more cohesive. thing that has been treated

better by its producers and like the through line is there you know it doesn't it hasn't gone his wayward yeah I mean it's it's not a franchise so much it's mostly a kowazoo joint you know

it is a franchise because you have themes final fantasy well no like franchise in the sense of like farmed out to other people it's a corporate entity as opposed to like a single person's passion project but but it is very much like Kawazu's vision.

But the thing is, his vision has trickled out to other people. And you have games like Legend of Legacy and the Alliance Alive and even Octopath Traveler that take elements from the saga series. And, you know, they're created by other people, but they're people who have worked on saga. And clearly something about the saga series resonated with them. And they take, I don't know, pride in it or they really believe in the concepts there. But Legend of Legacy is pretty much. a Saga on a game in disguise.

I don't know if you guys played that. The Atlas game on 3DS from a few years ago. I think I heard Christian not complaining about it. Yeah, that's why I didn't play it. I think I didn't pick it up because of him, but maybe I should go back and grab it now. I mean, it's kind of obtuse, and there is a lot of grinding.

Like the balancing is not very good, but it's, you know, one of those where you have one of seven characters you can play out. One of them is a frog prince. And you're basically kind of exploring the world, and pushing out to just like uncover maps and make more and more progress into places. And then there's like these super bosses. It's almost a little bit like Etriy and Odyssey in a way.

It doesn't feel like Etriy and Odyssey, but the idea of like exploring and then watching out for the super bosses that attack from nowhere is part of it. And there's like world tendency and just a lot of other mechanics. And yeah, you really have to kind of jinkey around with it to figure out what's going on. So it kind of rewards people who take the time to explore it. But I played that, you know, like on a flight to Tokyo or something and spent as long as I could until my DS ran out of juice playing it and really found it ingrossing. Jeremy approves of this. I do.

Did you review this or anything? I didn't review it formally, but I did write a piece for U.S. gamer just talking about why I like it. And it was probably more effective than a review because I didn't put a number on it or anything. I just said, like, hey, this is pretty cool. It won't be for everyone, but here's what's nice about it. And then it has a sequel coming or a follow-up called The Alliance Alive, and Atlas is publishing that for 3DS in 2018. Maybe we'll release this episode to kind of tie into that.

It's written by one of the lead writer of the Swikodon series, the original writer. I can't remember, I think her name. Junco Co-O. I think that might be it. Junco Coano? I think so, yeah. So at the very least, it should have an interesting story with good characters. And that's going to be, you know, one of those late-era 3DS releases that people are going to completely overlook.

could be a collector's item. I don't know about that because, you know, digital releases sort of moot collector's items, but at the very least, it's going to be like a sleeper. Like, people aren't going to see that game, especially because it's coming out at the same time,

around the same time as Strange Journey Redux and a few other Atlas RPGs on 3DS. There's so many RPGs coming out for 3DS. They have like five, Atlas has like five games coming out for 3DS. It's crazy. And that's the ones that they announced for the U.S. There's also like a remake of Shin Magan,

or the original Shin-Magame Tensei, I think, that they haven't announced but could end up coming over here. Who knows? Anyway, so to sum it up, the Final Fantasy Legend series and saga in general, they're weird and they're difficult and they're kind of tough to love, but there is something lovable about them.

And I really feel like everyone should at least go into one of these games and commit like three, four hours to them to say, like, I'm going to give it this much time to see if the system start to make sense to me, to see if I can kind of unravel everything, and, you know, to give it just a fair shot and see how I feel at the end of it. And you may go away thinking, like, this is trash and I hate it and I was always right. But I don't know.

They're really unique in the RPG space. And there's so many like Me Too games and predictable games and, you know, games that are just kind of feel like they're going through the motion or that seem to strip. everything interesting out in order to appeal to the largest possible audience. These games don't do that. They are confident in what they are, and they feel like you can take them or leave them, but they are going to be what they are. And I respect that.

I respect Akitoshi Kawazu for being a man who knows what he likes to make and doesn't really care that much if it's popular or successful. That's a rare form of artistry in the video games industry. These games are not on virtual console or anything. They're not. There hates virtual console in America. Yeah, but the original cards are pretty cheap. Again, if you have the ability to play ROMs, like fan-translated ROMs of the Saga games, or DS games, Saga 2 and 3 are definitely the way to play those games.

Very nice remakes. Or you could just play, you know, The Legend of Legacy and you'll get the same kind of general experience. I think this discussion has given me a little more perspective and, you know, these titles are more influential than I remember them being and I hadn't really thought about a generation of gamers a little younger than myself

who this was their first entree into JRP's and how, you know, that that shaped their perspective. And I think you're right that also I've always felt that Kawazu was kind of an uncompromising designer. And, you know, you think you and I both interviewed him and he's always very proud of these games

and I realized like, oh, they're meant to be like this. It wasn't an accident. And that's, you know, and it does take me back to playing D&D as a kid. And like, you know, it's, I think these games had a strong influence. I think, whereas a lot of other franchises from Square, like, modernize themselves in lots of ways that some people may or may not like this franchise always kind of stay true to his vision. Yeah.

And, I mean, it's not like everything about the games has been intentional. I asked him, like, did you design the games deliberately? So characters, people would attack their own party members. And he laughed and he was like, no, we never thought that would happen. Oh, good. Okay. So that didn't, that was not deliberate. And, you know, with each game, they tried to iron out some of the quirks and the bugs and the flaws and exploits.

But the core idea of this sort of somewhat unpredictable game based around incremental organic growth of characters and sort of going its own way. That part hasn't gone away. So I do respect the saga series and the Final Fantasy Legend games for that. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure if I sold anyone on the artistic validity of these games, but I enjoy them and I'm glad that we had this patron request because I'm glad I had the opportunity to talk about

this little quirky corner of video games that I wish I could spend more time with, but find fascinating. All right, so to wrap it up, I'm Jeremy Parrish, as you already knew. This is Retronauts. As you also knew, Retronauts is on Retronauts.com, on popular podcast services such as iTunes, and, of course, on the Podcast One network. We are supported through Patreon,

at patreon.com slash retronauts. If you go there and subscribe for $3 a month, you get all sorts of cool stuff. If you subscribe for even more than that, you can get even more cool stuff like physical goods or maybe even the opportunity to request an episode topic like this.

I'll come visit you if you give me enough money. I swear. Is that like a threat or a promise? Both. But you have to feed me and wash my clothes. Bob won't come visit if you keep giving money to pay me. I'll stay away. Yeah.

So anyway, as for myself, you can find me on Twitter where I spend most of my social media time as GameSpite. And, of course, I have a YouTube channel where I talk about old video games, surprise, and sometimes I stream, and who knows what else. Anyway, that's me. Bob. Hey, everybody, I'm Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, and I betrayed our Patreon by starting my own, because how can one man live off of one Patreon alone? My other Patreon is the Talking Simpsons Patreon.

go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons for that. We do a ton of bonus stuff there. But if you just want to listen to the show Talking Simpsons, it's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons on the Lasertime podcast network. Every Wednesday we release a new episode. So just go to Talking Simpsons. Or look for Talking Simpsons on your podcast device, and you will find it, and I think you'll like it.

Do you make Talking Critic for free? We make it for our patrons. So if you give five bucks, you can listen to all of the critic episodes with the Talking Simpsons treatment. Because I couldn't find that on iTunes. I was like, what's up? You got to give me that money, Shane. Behind the payroll. Critic Cheta.

Because, you know, I remember that show. It was a good show. It's very good. My name is Shane, and you can find me on Twitter at Shane Watch, all one word. Okay. Well, great. Thanks everyone for listening. And thanks.

Crap. I forgot the guy's name. Jacob, I think. Remember what was his last name? I can never pronounce it correctly. So I'm not even going to try. But thank you for making this request. Hope you got your money is worth.

And we'll be back next week with another podcast. And on random Fridays, alternating Fridays, not random. We're not Coahuazoo here. Alternating Fridays with a micro-episode. Thank you. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of...

Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck.

Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide net. network can get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month, plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall.

becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Edonohue.