Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered International Review

Love is in the Air.

When we first moved into our house, it wasn’t perfect. The deck needed some work, we had to replace the sink and install a new filter, and the walls had small blemishes and areas of peeling paint. It wasn’t perfect, but it was home. As a stay at home dad, my days were mostly spent finding new and interesting ways to keep my then 2-year-old toddler entertained. One thing that was apparent was just how much he loved to draw and paint. Pages and pages of paper with eccentric and wild scribblings filled our floors and covered our furniture. But every time I’d step away for a moment, I’d come back to find those uncontrolled doodles found their way onto our walls. While the markers and paints were all “washable”, the specters of their existence remained — faint pigment that could never truly be erased. It was here that my wife and I had a decision to make. Do we try to stop the behavior, continuously cleaning the marker in perpetuity, or do we find a way to make it work for him and us?

I won’t try and extol the virtues of letting your child draw on the walls. I’m not certain the message we sent in those early days works for everyone, but as our walls were already imperfect, I found little reason to hold their appearance in high esteem in the first place. After all, we were just going to paint over it anyway. So we drew upon those walls together. What started as small scribbles turned to shapes and spirals, which then became smiley faces and stick figure bodies. These days, our walls are also home to treasure maps and shaky letters that spell out a mixture of real words and nonsense, invented language. The walls of our home have become a living document to his growth and our lives here together.

Publisher: Red Art Games

Developer: Square Enix, Bullets

Platform: Played on Nintendo Switch

Availability: Released December 9, 2025 on PS4/5 and Nintendo Switch.

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In many ways, the past relationship between Square Enix and their development teams felt much like that of my son and I. These teams were given the freedom to experiment, to draw on the walls, to find new, creative, and inventive ways to tell the stories the way they wanted. It didn’t always work, of course. Plenty of titles underperformed expectations, or didn’t capture players in a way that would lead to everlasting fealty. But what it did do was let these teams grow, find their voice, and make art. 

Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered International is one such game. It’s experimental and obtuse in ways that most games (especially Square Enix games) simply aren’t anymore. While most RPGs are linear stories told over the course of sequential, increasingly dire events, Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- takes a more open approach to its structure. To begin, you’ll choose one of eight playable characters to begin your journey, with each character having their own unique introductory quests to work through before the world opens up. And boy does it open. Quests and quest givers aren’t explicitly marked on the map, and what you’re “supposed” to do is never really intimated to the player. Instead, you’re meant to find your own way, talking to people, picking up quests and party members, and making choices in the sequence of your own making.

For someone who has never played a SaGa game, this structure was both surprising and a bit daunting. As you fight, a little dial advances in the menu that essentially denotes how much time you’re taking in-game to complete your quests. Quest availability is dependent upon this ranking, with many quests only available within a certain range, or after having completed other quests beforehand. Quests are entirely missable, characters who could join your party may never become available, and items or equipment that you want may never show up — all of this is dependent upon your own actions and path through the world of Mardias. Eventually, all paths lead to the final face-off against the game’s antagonist, but how you get there, and who you get there with, is unique to each person. 

Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- is an absurdly vibrant game.

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That freeform and underexplained structure extends beyond just the quests. The battle mechanics and strategies one might employ are very lightly explained, at best, with many only making themselves known in tutorial form after you’ve performed them or discovered them in the course of a fight. And the combat is fascinatingly deep and complex. There are a large number of varying classes, each with different strengths and weaknesses that really only reveal themselves as a product of your character's stat progression or ability availability. These abilities are learned by random happenstance in fights, and depend on what weapon or ability you are using, and which mode your weapon is in. Weapons do different damage depending upon what row you character is in, abilities take different amounts of BP depending upon class, and so on. There’s too much going on to adequately explain here, but the point is that it is impossibly open and complex, yet they do not tell you much of anything about it at all. You learn it by doing. 

And I love it.

Every aspect of Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- is left for the player to engage with naturally and discover. This structure doesn’t really lend itself well to telling involved or completely fleshed-out storylines — something the developers seemed to have understood, as they did not really attempt to. That isn’t to say the game is devoid of a story or meaning. Rather, the journey is what you make of it. I can’t help but reminisce about days of playing tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. In tabletop games, even when there is a story or throughline to follow, the adventure is always more about what you and your party create together. By working in tandem and interacting with one another, and through collaboration with your DM, you craft your own, singular saga. In a similar sense, Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- is a collaborative tale, a tapestry woven together through the collective efforts of the players and the developers.

This is contrasted heavily by Square’s more paint-by-numbers modern approach to games. They have shifted to an almost exclusive adherence to traditional narrative structures and safe bets. Everything in a game is pointing you to your next objective, or giving you tips on how you can complete a task. There is value in telling a straightforward story, and many Square titles over the last few years have turned out quite good under those constraints. As a remaster of an older title, Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- is not completely free of those chains, either. New additions like an adjustable game speed toggle and a more robust New Game+ smooth out, or otherwise alleviate, issues players had with the original entry.

Every aspect of Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- is left for the player to engage with naturally and discover.

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But through playing Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song-, I’ve come to miss how often they’d take big swings like this, even if they never panned out. Where they’d set the developers loose and let them play with player expectations, to make a game that does little to hold your hand and instead gives you a pat on the back. To play Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- is to sit down with the developers of the game, to take their work of art blemishes and all, and draw upon the walls together.

Verdict

Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered International is a breathtaking RPG that offers a freedom seldom found in modern Square Enix titles. Its free-form structure and less-than-clear gameplay mechanics will inevitably lead to some confusion, but through playing it you will create a journey that is uniquely yours.

Image Credits: Red Art Games and Square Enix

Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.