Small Saga (Demo) (PC) - Part 3 - Guest Post

Previously on the demo of Small Saga, our hero Verm and his new friend Siobhan had a disagreement with a cat and rescued a pigeon from a wheelie bin. Now airborne, the pair continue their journey to the rodent capital Murida.

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Hey! A world map!

Double Hey! It's London!

Look, it's that famous wiggly river from that TV show that I hate with all those gross, horrible people yelling at each other.

Before you scroll down to the next image, if your London knowledge is strong (perhaps you even have 'The Knowledge' (Wikipedia link)), can you tell where Murida is located?

It's the Palace of Westminster! (And Siobhan calls it the 'West Palace' because she is a smartypants.)

Dizi calls it 'The Belfry'. I suppose pigeonkind would know all about it.

But our destination, Murida, is down in... the sewers. Hurrah.

Verm is overcome with a moment of deep contemplation. For some reason.

"The Underriver..." ... yes, you were there in the intro, and presumably live close to it? And see it often? And came through it on your way to Cranbaile?

"Our business is our own, nosey."
"I apologise for my companion. He's just a little cranky from the long journey."
"I am not cranky."

These vast copper doors mark the border to Murida!

That was fast. Small Saga doesn't really put obstacles in the characters' way. I mean, except for this big door right here. The game's just zapping along. Verm says he's going to do something, and then he does it.

Hmm, how should we proceed?

None of the choices help us because the border is closed, no ifs, ands or buts. Especially to scruffy ne'er-do-wells like ourselves. Well, like Verm is. Siobhan's as royal as anything, but apparently not enough for this guy.

We'll have to find another way into Murida. While we're at it, we'll also take a couple of seeds from the chest that's right there for some reason. Mabye it's a taplap jar?

But then!

It's Bruce, a friendly squirrel bard ("Psh. A lousy pacifist...") in a mysterious mask and comfy looking jimjams, who's so obscenely Scottish he radiates bagpipe music whenever he approaches!

His clever plan is to use this wide open, completely unguarded service tunnel to sneak into Murida behind the guardsmouses' backs. He suggests travelling together in a group for safety, since we might bump into a nasty bug or two along the way.

"Something smells fishy..."
"Don't be a cynic, Sir Verm. Does this kind stranger really look suspicious to you?"
"Extremely."

He kind of does look a little bit suspicious. But mostly very snug.

"Stop being silly."

"We would be happy for you to join us, Mr Squirrel."
"Magic. Name's Bruce, by the way."

Bruce has joined the party.

Yaaay! A mysteriously masked ridiculously Scottish squirrel. Just what I've always wanted. He's got a flute made out of a pencil and a mysterious chequered mask...

Which he refuses to remove. Oooooh.

"Performer. Bruce plays a variety of supportive and healing melodies."

It's off to the service tunnel!

"Oh, they're gone."

I like that each of the save points is unique and has a little story or quote to go with it.

The plaque reads: "Beauty can be found in all things." - Buildmaster Vishruvius, first architect of Murida.

Vishruvius may plan ahead, but I haven't found a single regular shop to sort out my consumable goodies, so my battle plans continue to revolve around hitting things until they fall down and eating bandages or applying the peanut at the last moment. I only get what the game's giving me, and it hasn't been giving me a whole lot.

We're entering...

THE LABYRINTH
What denizens lurk within?

You know I just said that Small Saga wasn't the kind of game to put pointless, video-gamey obstructions in the heroes' paths and just let them breeze from place to place getting their stuff done? Well, the game's gotten bored of letting me have it easy and decided to not only have us go through the sewers, but the sewers of the sewers - a maze of disconnected passages ultimately linking together six identical valve rooms marked with roman numerals. Vishruvius may think beauty can be found in all things, but in a boring boxy sewer where the rooms are exactly the same, he might think again.

"The ocean floor was my domain,
I dined on fish to keep me sane."

As we turn the valves, a spooky voice begins to emanate!

Hey, look. It's an encounter that isn't a boss. I don't think there's been a single one of those so far, only three normal bosses and a couple of in-battle boss cutscene sequences.

And Bruce isn't going to help. He's just here for moral support.

Verm's new Cleave move attacks twice in one turn but costs two pips. But! It works with Berserk! I have tactics now!

It's a bit redundant with only weak enemies to splat, but it's nice to be able to practice. And we get the happy music back!

I suppose I should say here that I don't much like the tiny markers indicating the current party member and target. They're mostly invisible and I feel like I'm controlling the battles by instinct.

I found a Button Shield, which goes in one of the consumable slots and provides +1 Defense.

I still have empty item slots so I don't have to decide between taking items into battle or having better stats yet. How much is +1 defense worth anyway? I don't know if there's any way to tell. The game feels unclear about certain number-crunchy elements, like Berserk might actually only last two turns and not three, and you have to stare at the numbers to figure out how much extra damage it does.

We're exploring the sewers and turning the valves so we can unblock all of these pipes, all of which look (surprise) identical. Every time we do we get a nice conversation amongst the guys (and gal).

"Hey, mouse. I can't help but notice... You dinnae have a tail."
"So what?"
"Just curious where it went, s'all."
"The Yellow God took it."
"Yellow God?"
"Sir Verm is looking for him. He's headed to Murida to find leads."
"Then I'm going to kill him."
"Wait, what?!"
"A mouse who wants to kill a god? Yer one mad lad..."

I wonder if this was meant to be a surprise to the player as well? Siobhan must've just not been around Verm when he asked the shopkeeper for a weapon to kill titans and gods.

"The sea went dry as fish ran few,
I ventured far for something new."

I said they were identical, didn't I? I can prove it's not the same place - the exits on the bottom edge of this final room are different.

Never ever, ever, ever have multiple copies of the same room with the same colour with no decorations or anything to distinguish them in your game for heavens's sake.

I found an avarice spider.

Good job I just saved.

On the one hand, every battle consisting of Verm Berserking and whacking stuff until it fades away is wearing thin, on the other hand Verm calling a giant spider a 'twerp' made me laugh.

Another valve turned earns us another couplet. It's just like playing Jumping Jack!

"Pursuing tastes of sweeter meats,
I braved foul streams for gourmet treats."

"Just a wee bug. Ye've got this."
"That's not a bug, you flea-bitten fool!"

Uh oh! A big squiddy fellow! And I haven't saved since the avarice spider thing a few rooms ago, ack. It's not a huge disadvantage since the game doesn't have persistent HP between battles, and the peanut and bandages magically grow back too. I'm as prepared for the fight as I can possibly be, I'd just have to fight the spider again if I died.

"Now here I stand. Thy lives forsaken
Commit my name for I am Kraken."

You're not standing! And you can't rhyme 'Kraken' with 'forsaken'! Not on my watch, at least.

BATTLE WHOOSH.

Yay! Go, Bruce!

And the battle music blasts into manic bagpipe screeching hard rock.

"That's not helpful!" shouts Verm, who is a buffoon who has never played an RPG before. The bards always have all the tricky, useful stuff. It's standard manoeuvres for the two damage dealers: Siobhan will use whichever of Wyrmfire and Smack works best against the Kraken and Verm will Berserk up.

Bruce has nifty tricks. He can donate his turn to Verm or Siobhan with Encore 🔷🔷, or heal them with Sweet Melody 🔷🔷. His Skills board lets him upgrade Sweet Melody to erase status effects, and one of his star benefits is to gain extra 🔷 when he takes damage, so the cost of his moves isn't an issue. Basically Bruce is brilliant, and Verm needs to lighten up.

Surprisingly, Bruce can't affect the Kraken in any way. He can't use a lullaby and has no way of disrupting or redirecting the Kraken's attacks. If both Verm and Siobhan are ever KO'd, I guess Bruce is doomed to stand there singing healing songs to himself for eternity.

"I'll dice you into calamari!"

Verm's attacks still work, but he's spending most of this fight Stunned by the Kraken's Nerve Toxin attack. I could use Bruce to help him out of it, but I'm going use Encore to let Siobhan do more SUPER!s instead.

The Kraken's weakness is whacking it with a heavy object. Hands up if you saw that coming. Siobhan's Fire Wand blasts are useless but bludgeoning the Kraken with the butt of the weapon hits the spot. All that training dragging god items into the secret room paid off. Why can't Verm do that with the body of the Titan Reaper?

"What strength... such tiny creatures bear,
You force my flight... to an empty lair."

We did it! The Kraken's sprite is vaporised - another foe banished to the plane of defeated adversaries.

That fight was over quickly. All the fights have been over pretty quickly - without many options to choose from I don't spend much time in the menus and the animations fire off quickly, not that I'd skip them if the game let me.

Oh, the Kraken isn't dead either? We sure do have a strange set of rules when it comes to which creatures we end up killing and which we don't. If a mouse cut up a squid with a pen-knife there'd be ooze gushing all over the place and it would be thrashing about like mad. I don't want to imagine that at all, that's terrifying.

With some more fun dialogue between the animal goobers, we're free to enter the very truly final pipe and sneak into Murida, so Verm can finally make some progress on his quest to track down the Yellow God.

Aw, that's it?

Oh well. It's a good place to stop. I've got way too many pictures here as it is.

CONCLUSION

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Small Saga is a wonderful game that is excellent in every way. I suggest you download the demo (external link) and play it right now!

And then when you're done, stop playing it and don't think about it again until the game comes out. I've been overanalysing this thing for weeks trying to write something nice here and I've thrown away more pages of nitpicks than I'd like to admit.

The problem I have with Small Saga is that I'm greedy. The parts of the game with lots of unique animation and music look so damn good, I want more and more and more. I want proper Defend animations and enemies like Tiger and the Kraken to be able to do more stuff. And then when I think of the walking-around parts like Cranbaile I struggle to remember what happened because of those distractingly clean, straight lines and sprites that just stand there with their backs to me not doing anything. And that's mean, because this was all drawn and composed and written by one guy.

This demo looks like a prototype; like the details haven't been put in yet. Everything and everywhere looks meticulously clean. Underground passages should look crumbly and crooked and mucky. I can picture Siobhan burning off her frustration about not being able to do anything about Tiger by compulsively planing all the surfaces in Cranbaile flat. I'm hoping that the developer will create the rest of the game's plot up to the standard of the demo, and then go over the whole thing again and add in all the odd things and details so I get the sensation of life that I don't get from over-precise isometric graphics. Inherit the Earth had intelligent animals wandering around isometric towns too, but it had more characters moving about and background details. The lower resolution and coarser palette also helped make things look less pristine.

Small Saga also isn't much of an RPG, which isn't what you want to hear in a post about an RPG. When I play an RPG I like to be the characters' quartermaster and general, with lots of menu things to fiddle with outside of battles and different, interesting, flashy things to try when the swords come out. That's not this game. Up until you get Bruce right at the end of the demo, Small Saga really is 'attack them until they fall down'. It's only the start so I suppose I'm asking a bit much for my bam to be boozled right away, but I suspect that the game isn't going to get many more moves or mechanics since it isn't really that kind of thing. There's so little RPG involvement it feels like an adventure game or visual novel with RPG elements.

The cinematics leading into battles reminded me of Final Fantasy XIII, and Small Saga has more than a scoop of 'the corridor' about it. I've got no complaints since I'm the world's FF XIII fan - but XIII wants you to keep your eye on the ball much more than Small Saga's prologue does. It's not impossible to lose, but you'd have to be hammering the button to get there. I was also surprised to not get a Game Over when Verm was knocked out. Also, having your HP and items refilled automatically after every fight means there's no dungeon tension. Weirdly, the most variation the game gives you in tactics or gameplay comes from hunting for the unique healing consumables hidden around the maps. I don't know if that's supposed to be a deliberate element of difficulty. I wouldn't be surprised if the game balance is still up in the air.

Small Saga Demo 2019
The old browser demo of Small Saga has the 'card-based level-up system' that I was expecting to see since it was mentioned on Kickstarter. In the new demo, there's the Skills board instead. I'd feel a little bit swizzed if I'd backed the game expecting a card system and didn't get one. Never mind. The old demo was captured on the Internet Archive if you'd like to see the old interface and hear the old soundtrack.

I was inspired to have a snoop at some other games that seemed similar in gameplay or visual style, like Golden Sun, Lunar Legend and Illusion of Gaia, and heavens those games had me screaming, screaming in frustration trying to figure out what the damn plot wanted me to do. If Small Saga wants to be a wonderful, comfy and slick rollercoaster of cute and exciting animations like the Yellow God and Tiger that you occasionally have to survive with a few button presses, that's fine by me. But I'll still be wanting more.

Basically the best thing the developer can do is keep on doing what they're doing and ignore fools like me on the Internet. Except for those repeated rooms in the sewer maze. Those can go.

No, thank you!

Small Saga (Demo) (PC) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

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Personally I would've put an exclamation mark somewhere in that text. Like "Thanks for reading! Please look forward to the new Super Adventure soon!" Okay maybe two is too much.

Anyway, I hope you feel inspired to leave a comment and I wish you luck in guessing what the next game is.