Further complicating things is what happens to you once you're on a new grid. Depending on the special skills or attributes of your characters, players may or may not detect traps, monsters, treasures, or all three. Each square is different and despite not being randomized for every new game, does a great job of appearing that way. Anyhow, once the player is on a square with possible action points, several things can happen: An enemy will either attack them and thrust them into battle mode or they'll be able to select what type of action they'd like to perform for that turn (investigate the square, open a treasure, or perform a preemptive strike on the monster). It's also possible that the square might contain a trap of some kind (spikes, pitfalls, and the like) with the only way of avoiding it being to successfully hit the right icon on a rotating slot.Slots (or reels as they're known in the game) play an important role in several aspects of UNLIMITED SaGa actually, and whether you're avoiding a trap or participating in battle, honing your skills properly is key to finishing your opponents quickly and concisely. Given five commands per round regardless of how many party members you have, players will have plenty of chances to bring the hurt on at any given time. Of course, the real challenge is figuring out what attacks will be successfully against your opponent or whether or not you should "hold" onto your aggression (re: a buffer command that allows you to skip one or more of your five attacks per round) in order to create linked or chained moves. Success still depends on the proper manipulation of the slot wheel, and once the more advanced techniques are exposed there's just as much difficulty in determining what attack to use as there is in beating the enemy itself. The system isn't going to please everyone, and will probably serve as the biggest point of debate amongst its fans.There are other interesting segments of UNLIMITED SaGa that are sure to create arguments as well. Town navigation, for instance, is limited to clicking on names of buildings from within a photograph and buying items or weapons can become confusing as to whether or not your new equipment is an improvement (that's bad). On the other hand, U-SaGa also allows you to collect ingredients for making your own weapons and armor at each town's blacksmith in order to grab things you normally can't buy, and healing yourself on the world map is as easy as pressing L3 or R3 on the Dual Shock (that's good). It seems to be a recurring theme in UNLIMITED SaGa, as for every cool aspect (customizable level gains), there's something that holds it back (the interface is confusing as hell with little documentation). For those of you who decide to stick with it though, you're looking at more than 100 hours of gameplay and adventure. With seven different main characters and quests for each of them expounding beyond the requirements of more recent RPGs like .hack and Dragon Quarter, it's conceivable that most of us will never find everything that there is to do. Not to mention that the sheer difficulty of the latter enemies and non-linear nature of each quest and its multiple scenarios make that possibility even more likely. Which is why we liked to hop back to the menu screen and watch the included ten-minute Final Fantasy X-2 trailer in between beatings; it helped to clear our minds for the inevitable ass-whooping to come.GraphicsIn the still photographs UNLIMITED SaGa looks magnificent. Sporting designs and illustrations by the respected Yusuke Naora (Final Fantasy X) and Tomomo Kobatashi (SaGa Frontier 2), the game's visuals are a stylized mixture of scenic landscape paintings and traditional two-dimensional RPG artwork. We could easily go on record by saying that UNLIMITED SaGa is among the most beautiful-looking PlayStation 2 games on record; but of course, it would come with a single, distinguishable caveat: only if it's paused.
Once in motion the character animation is almost completely non-existent, with only minimal use of movement for humanoids, beasts, insects, and whatever else happens to be floating onscreen at the time. Magical spells and special attacks are more eventful, and some of the more powerful attacks are actually pretty cool to look at. But the aforementioned lack of animation and a distinct absence of variety in the over world ends up holding the game back more than it should.SoundUNLIMITED SaGa's most valuable asset, could be its excellent audio. The first Square Enix title to incorporate Dolby Pro Logic II, sound effects, voices, and music are all incredibly rich in both quality and positioning. Granted, the auditory effects are a little on the bland side but its convincing presentation is enough to warrant a few extra mentions. Ditto for the Saturday morning cartoon-inspired voices.The soundtrack, however, is another story entirely. Successfully mixing several different versions of the same collection of themes, the orchestral combination pieced together by composer Masashi Hamauzu is probably the best in the franchise so far. Utilizing a wide range of themes that travel the scales from light-hearted and peppy to depressed and foreboding, the score overshadows all other aspects that U-SaGa has to offer. It's a shame that the rest of the game didn't live up to its standards.