Small Soldiers
RPG lovers will fondly remember the SNES days of 16-bit adventures throughout their childhood. Countless hours taking proud (and mostly silent) protagonists and their comrades through perilous endeavors with sword and shield and magic abound. Since then, the indie scene has worked commonplace game-engine magic to relive the glory days and to tell stories just as grand, but sometimes a little smaller than you may be accustomed to.
Aptly named, Small Saga tells the story of Verm, a mouse who has his life changed in the blink of an eye after trying to “steal from Heaven”: pilfering a bag of sunflower seeds from a local grocery store. Verm loses his tail in a confrontation with the Yellow God, and must live with the horror of losing far more than expected for trifling with a place he never should’ve been in. Filled with anger and needle-pointed to a single plot of revenge, Verm seeks a rematch with the Yellow God by any means necessary.
Set in not-so-current day London, Verm travels throughout the bustling underground cities of Rodentia. These cities, made with honestly whatever they can find, have been peppered with what are considered “Godly items,” human objects that have been acquired through whatever means possible. Lighters, cocktail skewers, electrical gadgets; these hodge-podge pieces of plastic wield fantastical qualities and provide stateful empowerment to those who own them. Each city is run by a different set of Kings or Clans, but the Cardinal Rule is followed by all: never attack a god.
Your goal as Verm is to break the Cardinal Rule. Traveling through each city is wonderfully crafted through the 16-bit styling of miniature-sized English towns, treetop civilizations, and dingy swamps. The artistic pop of each area is wonderfully crafted and each area is a treat to rummage through. Characters as well are brimming with personality and the fluidity to each of their actions within the battle system are satisfying to watch. The battle system is fairly simple and straightforward, running your standard turn-based JRPG style. There’s a decent amount of depth to it in regard to comboing characters’ actions, which we will explain more later, but the system as a whole doesn’t take any real challenges or deviations from the formulaic. Not a bad thing, just know there isn’t a deeper piece to the puzzle.
The story feels very A to B in its opening hours but nicely opens up once your party starts to expand. Verm will delve more into the underbellies and political undertones of each area he travels to, sometimes against his own will, working to find clues on how to find the Yellow God and exact his revenge. On his path he will befriend many different allies, from flute-playing Red Squirrels, to lab-mangled White Rats, to bureaucratic-rebelling Moles. Stories are well played into the world of Rodentia and offer inadvertent guidance to Verm’s quest and how he handles himself within his mission.
But not everyone is down for Verm’s challenge of the Gods. Small Saga’s boss battles are such an aesthetic treat on all ends. Poem-reciting krakens, cannibalistic stoats, and darkness-laden vipers (my personal favorite) all show the top-tier art design strewn throughout the game. The bosses in battle, as well as your partygoers, all have crisp animations that are a treat to witness. Big multi-hit attacks show off flashy moves that hit as hard as they look good, and re-using these moves over and over never got old watching the move in action.
Small Saga ran me about 7 hours to complete, though I know I missed a few sidequests after some post-game research. This was probably a little on me for not doing the proper JRPG move and searching every nook and cranny before the final area, but having no quest tracker at all makes it easy to miss potential side-quests unless you are text-checking every NPC after every chapter to make sure nothing changed. This could also be a potentially big issue if you take a break from the game for a period of time, as you’ll have no way to harken back to where you currently are and have to fumble around each area to remember where you were.
Another minor gripe applies to item management. When characters leave the party for plot purposes and are not usable within your team, the items affixed to that character do not go back into your inventory and are lost for that period of time. It can be very annoying prioritizing certain items on certain characters because they could utilize them best, but not being able to use the item at all is worse than not having it regardless. Thankfully any time away from the group for any of the main characters is short, but still is unnecessary to have to manage around.
The real reason the above isn’t a huge deal is that Small Saga is very, very easy. If there’s a Game Over screen for losing a battle I do not know what it looks like. Leveling in Small Saga also is based on reaching certain points of the game and not the amount of enemies defeated. There is no random-battle system, no EXP counter to show progression, and no permanently consumable items (items held can be used once per battle but are replenished after battle). Each character has a pretty large skill tree, but these only serve to make your characters even more absurdly powerful as opposed to keeping up with the difficulty curve.
High-profile fights, especially the later game 1v1s for story purposes, are laughably easy. Once you find The Combo that works within your team’s synergy, nothing even has a sniffing chance of defeating you. I, for instance, turned Siobhan (the lighter-wielding mole mage) into a suicidal glass cannon. Shoutout to the Hoo Helm and Brass Knuckles. Overclocking her lighter, having Bruce, the red squirrel bard, perform a move to give Siobhan an extra turn, and then using her fire attack (while also having skills that boost her fire attack if she was at Full HP) would finish fights before they ever really started. Verm also gets hilariously powerful with his Berserk multi-hit combos that allow him double damage. The cannibalistic stoat I mentioned before? Got three hits in before it was defeated, and the way the boss was presented did not indicate it meant to lose that quickly.
It’s entirely possible to take the above as more of a positive than a negative. Small Saga could be more interested in providing a serviceable battle system and removing the difficulty to avoid adding artificial hours to the game, showing the growth of the characters through added power and skills and showing adversity throughout each challenge presented to them. I just wish there was a little more fear in the battle with an expectation to coordinate more than what you would do in Pokemon games: hit the enemy a lot, ignore every other skill, heal when absolutely needed, rinse-repeat.
Small Saga is a proper love letter to the 16-bit RPGs of yesteryear that has the plot, polish, and personality to lift it over its smaller setbacks. I loved the characters and their motivations, the smooth animations, the overall graphical quality, and especially the bosses. Even though the battle system was more of a plot device than a main facet, Darya Noghani has done a fine job making a big success out of his small compadres.
Reviews as Fair as a Die Roll 