PLATFORM PS2 BATTLE SYSTEM INTERACTION ORIGINALITY STORY MUSIC & SOUND VISUALS CHALLENGE Unbalanced COMPLETION TIME 40-60 Hours OVERALL + Doggies! + Definitely something different + Tries to bring the series forward - Takes a few steps back as well - Skills cost money!? - Not enough motivation to explore Click here for scoring definitions

   When you've played enough of a series, you eventually get the urge to play every game in it, just for the sake of completion. Such was the case with me and the Metal Max series. It came to the point where there was only one non-remake in the series left for me to try, and oddly enough it's also the sole iteration to come stateside: Metal Saga, which has the Japanese secondary title "Chains of Sand." Now, RPGamer already has a perfectly good official review for this game, so if you want an open, fairly positive opinion on this title, then you should look there first. I'm not approaching Metal Saga with a clean slate; I'm looking at it with the eyes of a long-time fan who's played all of the other (mostly superior) games that came before and after. If a score's what you're needing, there's a nice 2.5 over on the side there to show my level of interest and eventual disappointment.

   Metal Saga represents an interesting point of transition. Released almost exactly a decade after the remade Metal Max Returns, it was Success's attempt to capture the magic that had made the SNES games into cult classics, but while the company owned Crea-Tech (the series development studio), it didn't control the trademark for some reason. So the games published by Success have different titles from the rest, and include a lot of experimentation that reshaped the format of the series. Some of these changes lasted all the way to the current iteration, Metal Max 4. Others were rightfully abandoned and never revisited.

   One of the net positive changes is the attempt at including story arcs and quest lines. Despite claims to the contrary, Metal Saga isn't truly non-linear. It has a core plot that gets touched upon rarely, and a definite end-point to the story. Like pretty much every other game in the series, it puts more emphasis on the exploration, but it's possible to imagine the sparse plot points getting daisy-chained into a coherent narrative. However, that makes it sound like Success succeeded at managing linear and non-linear elements — it didn't. The overall plot is nebulous and feels like there aren't enough lines to connect all the dots. The game manual explicitly states that the player is to go out and explore, and that adventure will find the hero soon enough. However, the game does a half-hearted job of motivating the player to explore it. While some of the Wanted monsters and criminals have storylines to follow, even interesting ones, the game doesn't run with it nearly as far as it could have. Why did Colonel Blueberry have a Tankasaurus in his basement, for example? What strange secret was powering the Phantom Legion? How far did Father Muscle's Cult of St. Arnold and the Blessed Turboflex (great localization!) infiltrate society? How did Alex get his group of black-suited investigators together, and where were they based? It's all in bits and pieces, and it really feels like some fell out of the box before it shipped. The fact that it's possible to get all the way to the front door of the final level without triggering all (or any) of the scenes necessary to actually enter speaks volumes. Still, kudos to Success for trying, and for inspiring later games to try harder.

   This game also tries to make advances in battle, taking things beyond just the use of vehicular force. In the first two Metal Max games, characters were limited to either their equipment or their tanks when it came to action in battle, with the tanks providing the tiger's share of the options. Metal Saga was the first in its series to give party members the chance to learn special skills. This does raise a few questions to ask the developers, however. Why limit the characters to a max of six skills, for instance? Why make it so no active skills are usable while in a tank? Why the heck do they cost cold, hard cash to use? That last is what's really exceptional about skills in Metal Saga. Even passive support skills can cost a lot when they activate automatically at the start of battle, and later on it's possible to consistently lose money on low-level battles. Big bosses tend not to give any cash, and only a pittance of experience, but they usually have bounties on their heads instead.

A view to an apocalyptic playground.

   The developers also changed the inventory layout, switching from individual storage for each character to the bag of holding system that's been standard in RPGs since well before the PlayStation era. However, in a game full of cars, tanks, and other vehicles, why is there a limit on group inventory space? There's only room for sixty-four things, and items of the same type do not stack. The handy trunk room tops out at just two hundred items. With all the healing items, hand grenades, equipment, protectors, minor quest items, potentially useful junk, and outright useless junk one can find in this game, inventory management is a headache.

   The protectors in particular are an interesting case. This type of equipment was added in Metal Max 2, probably after complaints of character squishiness in the first game. The idea was that a protector could absorb up to a specific amount of damage per attack, but any damage above that threshold would shred it. Metal Saga expanded on this, making protectors the primary defense against most special damage types. Wearing a fire-resistant protector would reduce heat damage to practically nothing, but it would break when hit with anything else. The remnants must be traded away in the first town, because they're otherwise useless wastes of space. The thing is, MM2 also allowed characters to swap out equipment mid-battle, so shredded protection could be replaced. Metal Saga doesn't do that, but it still makes the things extra flimsy. Notably, it's also the last game in the series to deal with the things, as all subsequent titles went with giving regular bits of equipment different bonuses versus special damage.

Just your average, generic bar.

   The battle system has seen something of an overhaul, with changes made to the basic structure of combat. Few if any of these changes survived past this one game. Metal Saga trades in the very traditional turn-based combat of the rest of the series, in which all commands are entered at the start of a round, and replaces it with an action order bar similar to Final Fantasy X or the later Atelier games. This in itself isn't a problem. What is a problem would be how speed and frequency of turn order are decided. Player characters can have drastically different rates of action depending on whether they're in tanks or on foot, whether or not they're fully equipped, and (most strikingly) the current weight of the tank. Adding ablative armor tiles can actually reduce the tank's effectiveness in combat, as it increases the likelihood that the enemy will get multiple strikes in before the player can do anything. Keep in mind that these armor tiles are effectively the tank's HP, and that without them any strong hit is likely to damage something critical. The items needed to replace these tiles in the field barely restore anything, and with the restrictions on inventory it's difficult to carry enough to keep a tank in good shape for long periods of time.

   There's one other thing from previous games that was left out of Metal Saga. It's minor enough that it normally wouldn't warrant a mention like this, but the effect it could have had on the gameplay is disproportionately large. This item is the tracking beacon. In MM2, it is used to tag Wanted monsters that have the habit of running away, and allows the player to track these monsters so that they can be found more easily. There are multiple big monsters in this game that either will run away at the drop of a hat or wander around the landscape largely at random. Any means of making them easier to find again would have been sorely welcome.

   Tank customization has moved in a good direction, but doesn't really go far enough at times. Any piece of tank equipment can be jiggered with to change its weight, defense, or power output, but the results aren't always worth the effort. Engines in particular have lousy rates of return, with usually one ton of carrying capacity (or about 100 HP in armor tiles) added per upgrade. Because of the previously mentioned issues with weight, armor tiles, and rate of attack in combat, it's generally not a good idea to add too much to a tank, and the engine issue doesn't help matters. For more cosmetic customization, it's possible to change the paint job of the various tanks found in the game. However, the player must make a separate save file on the PS2 memory card in order to do so, and the paint jobs must be loaded every time the game is started up.

Fry! Fry, my pretties!

   The developers did try and include more things to convenience the player, though their effectiveness is variable. For the first time, a means of retrieving tanks remotely was added, but it was tied to the tanks' CPUs, which had to be manually set for retrieval. Even then, if the tank is too badly damaged (often because the party is wiped out), it's forced to sit where it is until the player is able to return with rental tanks for a tow. Since this is most likely to happen at the very feet of a powerful boss, it's not as useful an option as it could have been. The main character's personal computer is far more handy, with the ability to send and receive messages, download music and mini-games from various sources, keep track of quest notes or (some) of the Wanted monster whereabouts, show the currently known map of the region, and direct tanks to wherever the player desires.

   Experience is oddly weighted in this game. Only one hundred points are needed for each level up, and so by necessity EXP is determined by how much higher the enemy is. The actual levels for monsters have little to do with actual challenge, however, especially in the later stages. Tank equipment and grenade stock are much bigger determinators of if a battle can be won, and it's possible for the party to take out enemies significantly higher in level. The EXP maxes out at twenty-five per enemy, so it's completely possible to stake out an area and gain levels every single battle for quite a while. The only reason to level up is that a tank's evasion and defense are tied to the driver's level plus a number determined by the computer unit, so while the final dungeon is survivable at lower levels, the attrition rates are awful. In my final push through, I could storm the ramparts with a lot of difficulty, but ended up taking four hours to gain sixty levels and making it far easier.

   Since it's the only post-SNES non-portable game in the series, Metal Saga is singular in its graphics in many respects. On the one hand, it tries hard to work with the 3D aspect of things, but the transition to polygons for its monsters has not been necessarily for the better. The human characters are actually well done, but the game rarely zooms in close enough for them to be appreciated. There are a few scenes in the story where this happens, but not nearly enough. The character portraits are a little bland and unemotive, unfortunately. The post-apocalyptic world of the setting is by necessity rather scorched and brown, but the locales aren't as varied (or insane) as they were in some installments.

   Metal Saga is one of the few games featuring a soundtrack by Satoshi Kadokura to be released in the West — possibly the only one in fact. The entire series relies on this man's original soundtrack in endless permutations for its tunes, and it continues to rock after almost two and a half decades. It sets the tone wonderfully, and is one of the best implemented elements of the game.

   While I am certainly being harsh here, this isn't really a bad game. It just cannot hope to live up to the potential of its immediate predecessors or the awesomeness of its successors. Metal Saga was created in a weird moment in the series' history, and with its DS counterpart, Season of Steel, it marks a period of great transition for Crea-Tech. Both games tried to do new things with the concepts provided, and both made major blunders along the way. If you took all the things that the PS2 game got right, however, and crossed them with all the things the DS game got right, then you'd have a really good game. This is essentially what happened after Crea-Tech went to Kadokawa Games, and the results were excellent. So if nothing else, Metal Saga serves as evidence of how game studios can learn from their mistakes, abandon problematic elements, and go on to bigger and better things. It's unfortunate that western gamers never got the chance to see that happen.