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Riglord Saga

EmeraldNova - Today at 11:42 AM

		EmeraldNova	Today at 11:42 AM
		(Yes, it's been a minute since my last one. Sorry for the absence.) Didn’t have room to post three different box arts, but you get the idea. The SegaXtreme Game of the Month for March 2026 is Riglord Saga. You may also know it as Blazing Heroes or Mystaria: The Realms of Lore. It’s a 1995 Tactical Role Playing Game for the Sega Saturn made by Microcabin, later part of AQ Interactive. While I was always aware of Blazing Heroes as an entry I loaded onto my Satiator, tried for 5 minutes, then immediately dismissed as “What is this crap?”, I didn’t first give this game a fair shake until the September 2024 Shiro! Community Challenge.... Standard formation at the start of battle. Ridglord Saga comes off as a production of a team on the border of amateur and competent. It’s graphics are composed of prerendered 3d model sprites billboarded onto a true 3d grid environment. This lends to an impression that this is a first time venture into game development by a small startup developer in the mid 90s. This it’s why it’s so surprising to see the pedigree of Microcabin in their gameography: the MSX2 port of Final Fantasy, Illusion City, The Saturn port of Princess Maker, Mystic Formula, the Xak series, and most egregiously, Guardian War for the 3DO. You see a progression competently constructed role playing and adventure games with high quality sprite art suddenly shift into the 3d realm with… well just take a look. Guardian War on the 3DO inexplicably looks better than Riglord Saga on the Saturn. Screenshot from Wikipedia. Microcabin took this approach from the development of Guardian War and ran with it to make Riglord Saga. To be fair, it was a chance to turn around a substantially similar 3DO game to a much larger install base on the Sega Saturn, with an apparent 8 month development cycle. Part of me appreciates the hustle, but the rest of me cannot get over the comically trite writing and the...art direction. One question does come up. “Oh My God! What’s wrong with your face?” Once you do get over the presentation, you are finally able to focus on the core experience. The game is a pretty solid strategy role playing game. Not too many bells and whistles, but the characters are diverse and unique enough in their abilities that you start to play favorites with composition and develop synergistic strategies. There’s just enough depth there to keep you playing for the 20 or so hours it takes to finish. My mainstays were dragon guy, booble bee, and the edgy dude. No, I will not try to remember their names The main character’s name is Aragon. Similar levels of originality persist throughout the rest of the game. Character progression is through standard experience points and through a skill system. The more you use a class of skill, the more skills you unlock within that class. This incentivizes a lot of grinding to unlock the big end game crowd clearing skills. Most of it makes sense, like dragon form skills getting you more variety in breath and wing attacks. Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise, like the level 14 holy skill turning your priestess into a tactical nuke. You get some additional progression with the perfunctory equipment system. Polonius had a better line read. The writing is filled to the brim with cliches from western media that, charitably, may have played well to a mid-90s Japanese audience. In the states it’s just schlock. Aragorn’s mother, the queen of Queensland, is put under an evil spell by Lord Bane, and it’s up to you and 11 strangers to go fix it. Again, you’re here for the gameplay, and because you can only replay Shining Force 3 so many times. Community prizes for the Shiro! Riglord Saga Community Challenge. Image by Daniel Frederickson. I admit, were it not for the Shiro! Community, I would not give this game the time of day. By no means is playing it a bad time. It’s the game equivalent of a direct to VHS horror movie you find at a yard sale. In that way, it’s also better with friends. I wanted to write this came up for the game of the month specifically in memory of the man who may very well have been its biggest fan, Daniel Frederickson. He was a beloved Shiro! community member, a certified Blazing Shiro, and the leader of the translation effort for Riglord Saga .... The work has since been passed on to others in the Sega Xtreme community to continue. Once it’s ready to play, I will endeavor to give the sequel a fair shake and not brush it off like I did the first game.