Uninformed

Why didn't anyone tell me that Unlimited SaGa is most likely the shittiest RPG ever created?

Oh, yeah. Nevermind.

That's the danger of browsing for cheap, used games and selecting on the basis of ignorance. Everything about the case said, "This might be a sleeper hit." An RPG with seven different overlapping storylines. Square-Enix. A needlessly complex battle system.

But the game communicates nothing except the worst ideas -- executed in the worst ways. Static back-and-forth dialogue bubbles over a painted background. Instead of walking around in real-time you choose locations on that same painted background. Movement on the world map is like a boardgame, choose your direction and move a space, then repeat. The voice acting . . . my god . . . it's like having your eardrums raped by Sanrio characters.

The graphics are ugly. The battles are nonsensical. The needlessly complex battle system is unfriendly, obtuse and actually saps fun directly through your thumbs. At one point a character had 0 hp, yet still fought. And nary a slow-moving, unskippable tutorial in sight. It seems like an attempt to innovate absolutely everything about Japanese RPGs without any reason or direction.

This is a dud. I should have known when the cashier told me it wasn't ten dollars, but five. "Hooray," I thought. "Cheaper than I thought."

And worse than I imagined.