"While Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered is a great remaster of a classic game, compared to what is on the market today, it feels outdated."
I must begin by saying that I am personally a fan of the Romancing SaGa series, and I enjoy playing older games in all forms, remakes, remasters, and original retro releases, so this review is written from that perspective, and not from that of someone who dislikes the genre or older games altogether.
However after spending some time with Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, I must admit my initial impressions were not altogether positive for a variety of reasons.
Upon starting Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, I could easily excuse the very dated menu and character select screen, as many modern JRPGs appear to be stuck in the late 1990s in that regard, and personally a good old fashioned start menu fills me with a certain level of nostalgia as someone with fond first-hand memories of gaming in the 1990s.
However it is what happens next that soured my impressions of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered.
Upon starting the game, I was greeted with a poorly upscaled and very dated cutscene that did nothing to show just how amazing the remastered character models and textures look in game.
In fact the prerendered cutscene’s upscaling was so bad that many would dismiss it as “AI slop”, a term which is admittedly overused, but one that actually appears to make sense in this specific instance, as the video very much looks like it has been upscaled using AI or a similar technology.
I would have much preferred for the cutscenes to have been replaced with in-engine cutscenes, which all things considered, look fantastic.
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered’s combat system is really good for the era in which it was made and includes some nice additions, such as being able to discover new attacks by using them during combat, and heavier attacks causing weapon damage, which can result in players needing to choose between risking damage to their weapon or potentially losing a fight by only using less damaging safe attacks.
Unfortunately the frequency in which players are forced to engage in combat is a problem, especially in the lower levels.
During the first mission alone I was forced to complete over half a dozen separate encounters over the span of just a few minutes, often with fights triggering less than 10 seconds apart.
While this would not be a problem for an action combat game, as Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered uses traditional turn based combat it means frequent jumps to battle arenas, only to jump back to the map and repeat a few seconds later.
While I understand changing this is not in the scope of a remaster, I wish they had offered a way to bypass or eliminate some of the trash mob encounters, allowing players to focus on fights that actually mattered, while still allowing players to gain all the experience they need to progress, instead of being forced to farm low value encounters for XP and loot.
I must admit when I first saw the character designs, I laughed. They looked like bad 1990s action figures proportionally, but after a few moments I have to admit they won me over with their misshapen charm. While I would honestly prefer they leaned fully into either chibi or realistic character models, the broad shouldered, bobble headed little characters grew on me, and after a while I almost stopped noticing that none of them ever miss shoulder day at the gym.
Fortunately, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered’s very solid voice acting (all things considered), fantastic soundtrack, and solid narrative for the time in which it was written helped me to forget that everyone looks like they are wearing 1980s shoulder pads and have head circumferences which would make finding a hat very difficult in most circumstances, which in turn made it easy to become immersed in the narrative and the world in which it is set.
I cannot recall a time when I played a remaster with worse camera controls. It really would have benefited from updated camera options, as being forced to literally run in a circle to slowly bring your camera back into position is terrible, and enabling support for dual thumbstick camera controls would have solved this entirely.
While not a deal breaker for everyone, with so many other games in my backlog I personally would not choose to play Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered over a game that allows me to actually see where I am going without perfectly executing manoeuvres which could best be compared to parallel parking a Ford Transit
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered is a role playing game developed by Bullets Co. Ltd. and published by Square Enix, it released on 1 December 2022, and is available on Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 4 and Playstation 5.
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered supports the following peripherals:
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered is rated PEGI 12+ and contains:
The developers did a great job remastering Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song. It is truly one of the most impressive remasters I have played in 2025, a year filled with excellent remasters. Unfortunately however Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered needed to be a remake to truly shine in a year overflowing with some of the best turn based games and JRPGs we have seen in a decade.
Ultimately Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered is worth playing for fans of the series, but I would recommend waiting for a sale, as there are better games available at a similar pricepoint.
We found Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered to be a good game, meaning it is likely to be enjoyable for most players, despite having a few areas that could be improved upon.
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