- Sanctuary Saga – PC Review - September 18, 2023
- The Last Friend – PC Review - September 8, 2023
- Dead Estate – PC Review - September 2, 2023
Genre: JRPG Roguelite
Developer: Boomer’s Workshop
Publisher: V Publishing
Release Date: March 8th, 2023
Edited by AlexKnight2005
If you clobbered me a few years ago and asked me about my general opinion of RPG Maker games, I would probably not have given you a particularly favorable response. Sure, there’ve been the occasional gems like To The Moon and Rakuen, but chances are you’d more often than not run into a tired, rehashed game reusing stock assets while being incredibly generic in an attempt to make a quick buck. So, does Sanctuary Saga shift my view in a positive direction? Let’s see.
Indianapolis-based developer Boomer’s Workshop was established in 2019, and Sanctuary Saga appears to be their first Steam title, released on March 8, 2023, and developed in RPG Maker MV. They also appear to be developing a deckbuilder board game with the same name, though it is unclear as to how much overlap there is between the digital and physical titles. The game (the digital one is being reviewed here just so there’s no confusion!) is published by V Publishing, a subsidiary of Vicarious PR that tends to specialize in RPG and strategy games.
It certainly looks and sounds the part. Sanctuary Saga uses assets from Jason “FinalBossBlues” Perry, who is a prolific pixel artist with his assets being used in multiple RPG Maker games, and it’s not hard to see why, considering the gorgeous and somewhat cutesy detail to the characters and the landscapes. FBB was also ostensibly commissioned for some specific art pieces for this game, so it’s not all stock asset packages. Similarly, composer Tyler Zane has been equally as prolific, with a whole string of video game soundtrack credits (bizarrely, I don’t think I’ve played a game in which he soundtracked till this one), and the audio here nicely fits the fantasy vibe the game is going for.
Unfortunately, though the lore and dialogue are technically well-crafted to fit the fantasy vibe, it completely bounced off my memory. It was not particularly memorable, and I would completely forget what I had just read merely seconds after. An in-game encyclopedia summarising the lore would work wonders here for anyone who’s interested. I’ve not actually gone to the point of straight-up skipping through it, but I do not think that is particularly far off.
A particularly lengthy prologue serves as the game’s tutorial here, where you learn the basics of the game. If you play a lot of turn-based RPG games, most things should not come as a surprise here. You can select from a total of 6 party members to bring up to 4 (ideally, you’d want to bring 4 at all times, but should too many become incapacitated, you would have to engage in combats with less…) members into combat, and then select a single action for each member to perform on their turn. These range from basic attacks to skills specific to the character to guarding. Combat proceeds with each member of your party and the enemy team taking turns until one party is completely wiped out — hopefully, not yours. The problem here is the game just throws books at you for you to read most of the time. I’ve always maintained that ‘learning by doing’ is the best way; this is not supposed to be an exam where you try to memorize the contents of your book and fail miserably.
The bulk of the actual combat is rather simplistic in nature, with barely anything extraordinary you need to worry about. There’s a somewhat complicated formation system that ties into the unique skills your characters have, which can be fun to strategize around. I have found a system that sort of works for me, though, so I can focus on worrying about the key mechanic behind this game: the argument mechanic. To simplify matters, the more a character gets hit, the higher their argument meter rises. At a certain point, when the argument meter gets too high, the affected character would rather argue instead of carrying out their combat action. Combat is thus a do-si-do dance of somehow killing your enemies while keeping your party alive and happy. A relationship system is also tacked onto this, adding even more complexity, where you’d have to tactically improve relationships between certain party members via your choices and battle prowess. In all honesty, I found it quite a chore to manage and base an entire game around this, especially when you’re not even allowed to heal characters outside of combat or revive knocked-out enemies until defeating a mini-boss or returning to the caravan, which serves as your home base. It certainly doesn’t help that there’s an alarmingly large chance for my party members’ attacks to just flat-out miss, which can quickly lead to a death sentence.
In a sense, Sanctuary Saga is thus pretty easy to pick up. You select an expedition, explore an overworld from a specific biome, and fight enemies and bosses before finishing your expedition. Though I was lured in by its billing as a roguelite, I genuinely struggle to find where these elements are located. Character equipment? Though they are semi-permanent upgrades in the sense that they can be unequipped (but why would you want to), this is a bog-standard RPG feature, not a rogue-lite-exclusive feature. Overworld generation? I’m not entirely sure if they are randomly generated, but perhaps that’d explain why there were random passageways leading to absolutely nowhere. If those were purely handcrafted (as opposed to handcrafted chunks being procedurally stitched together, which would then imply a flaw in the map generation algorithm), then that would be even more inexcusable.
In the beginning, you have to take on a mandatory expedition before you even get access to your caravan, your base of operations. You can select from two difficulties at the start, but in practice, even the easier one gave me trouble for the variety of reasons I’ve covered above. Under the mistaken impression that this was more roguelite than it was, I tried to see what would happen if I lost a battle — the answer was a resounding game over. Great.
Thankfully, Sanctuary Saga features an ultra-forgiving save system in order to mitigate screw-ups. You can save and load at any time as long as you are not in combat. This allows you to at least re-try combats as many times as you want, though the exact enemies you fight in a combat encounter get somewhat randomized, so you can’t get the exact same combat upon reloading a save file. As you aren’t allowed to have the sanctuary of your caravan at first, save-scumming becomes almost imperative in order to finish this first mandatory expedition. I’m not sure how that’s conducive to deriving enjoyment from this game, but whatever.
Pros:
- Pleasant audiovisual design
- Ultra-forgiving save system
- Interesting argument mechanic in theory, but…
Cons:
- …it is an absolute chore to micro-manage
- The story does not resonate
- Excessive reliance on text tutorials
K3W3L gives Sanctuary Saga a Drastik Measure of 6.5 out of 10.0 (65)
I realize I’ve been sounding like I’ve been only bashing this, but in reality, Sanctuary Saga is overall a decent, middle-of-the-pack RPG that has its moments and is an example of the RPG Maker engine being used to produce a decent result. It’s just that I feel it can get particularly annoying to play; you kind of need to be in the right frame of mind to really appreciate this. At the least, at $14.99 on Steam, it shouldn’t set you too far back.
