Niklas Jansson
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Sprites from Sa-Ga aka Final Fantasy Legend
🕑 Added 2024-05-23 20:03:51 +0000 UTCI remember this game having a pretty great atmosphere, but never managed to fully play through any of the three gameboy games. They're a bit different from your typical jrpg, with limited lives, disposable weapons, random evolutions.
Anyways, I wanted to do some sprite pixel-overs and picked the first and second game, mainly reworking the outlines, volume shading and proportions so the sprites match side-by-side. Gameboy sprite work tend to be quite high contrast because that shows up better on a real LCD screen. It's easy to forget how those looked, especially in motion. With static/non-scrolling art one might get away with more subtle shading like I've done here though.
I didn't bother to look for analog artwork (as reference) but did find a Wonderswan version with "16-bit" style colour sprites. Those seem to mostly be straight up colourized versions of the gameboy sprites though.
There are about four times as many enemy variants as sprites, so the images are actually used more as decoration ingame. For example, the Ammonite is also Amoeba, Clam, Kraken, Octopus, and Squid. It almost makes me want to do the whole bunch of missing sprites as well, but that would be a huge undertaking...
Comments
Boone
I do think the third one was the one I tried, on a similar recommendation that it's the most palatable one for a more traditional RPG fan. Still managed to lose me somehow, though I did enjoy making my party and giving them names and such!
Niklas Jansson
Usually with these games I have the most fun creating a party though. I wonder if it's possible to greate a game around that. Sort of like the old game ProgressQuest which played itself. The player just manages/inspects the party once it gets back to town.
Niklas Jansson
There's an ancient VLP on youtube by a HCBailly that I looked through. It explains a bit. Each Legend / Sa-Ga game changes the formula though. I think the third one is more traditional JRPG'ey.
Boone
Nice!!! I did try one of these games after seeing the nice spritework online, but found the gameplay difficult to wrap my head around. It's nice seeing some attention being called to these old things.
