The Alliance Alive

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Renita Lukins

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Aug 5, 2024, 11:13:42 AM8/5/24

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Experiencethe world of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered in a new light! New visuals, an updated interface, and more await you in this epic tale of trials and triumphs.

Humanity has been shattered by invading Daemons from another realm. To reclaim their home, an unlikely fellowship of heroes will band together to spark a fiery revolution. Explore various Daemon-controlled realms, awaken your inner strength in the heat of battle, and form alliances to amass a force strong enough to stand against the invading forces.

SaGa games come with a reputation for being difficult, obtuse, and designed to punish the player for engaging in behaviors that are considered typical for other JRPGs. They punish grinding, reward sticking to one plan, but also require exploration to find the best plans and builds to use due to a combination of opaque complicated mechanics and convoluted trees of skill unlocks. Getting into them is a bit of a challenge (and one I have yet to actually fully tackle myself).

Getting started in SaGa presents a newbie with a couple options for easier experiences: SaGa 3 (preferably the DS remake), SaGa Frontier (where restarting a chapter is far less punishing if you screw up and the remake adds help systems), or Scarlet Grace (which is newer and comes with some QoL and learning options). These are all undoubtedly very "SaGa" and throw you into the deep end with their systems. This week I discovered a new option that serves as a far more mild (and charming) introduction to the SaGa systems: The Alliance Alive.

To call TAA just a softer SaGa doesn't really do it justice. TAA is a completely unique concept with an incredibly endearing aesthetic, plot, ambiance, and feel to it that just happens to weave SaGa concepts into an easier, softer package incredibly well. Originally a 3DS release, TAA has seen an HD remaster release on practically everything; with varying quality depending on platform. I played through the Steam version, which I don't necessarily recommend but I'll get into that.

Once your duo of Galil (a rather flat, calm, very unwilling would-be hero) and Azura (an extremely energetic borderline domineering magician) are out in the field, the mechanics come in pretty quick. Your first battle presents you with the SaGa trappings: the ability to swap between weapon slots, skill rosters per weapon type, HP that recovers itself after battle, very limited magic points (SP), a complete lack of experience points in favor of gaining stats in small chunks each fight, and sparks. You'll probably spark something or other in your first fight, just so you get to see how it looks.

Sparking is the main unit of currency in SaGa progression. In short it boils down to "You use an ability, but your character randomly decides to use a different ability and you learn it forever". This can result in frustrating situations where your sparked ability is not what you wanted, but it's rare and, typically, sparking grants you a far more powerful move. Each weapon type in TAA has a pool of about 20 moves costing anywhere from 0 to 15 SP, where you can expect to have a max of 60 SP by endgame. Big splashy moves are expensive but oh so good. Sparking them is a treat. Sparking however also depends on the difficulty of the foes and, in TAA at least, there seems to be a limit on how far you can go based on what you're fighting.

In practically every battle you can expect to gain a couple of HP or an SP on someone in your party. Over time these rewards build up into a smooth progression of character power. Your base stats however like Strength and Endurance are static and only changed by equipment. Between getting more SP so you can use bigger moves and sparking new skills, you have the complete SaGa growth experience, but TAA adds a couple more mechanics to give the player more tools if they find this constraining.

Every skill in TAA has three power levels, associated with what role the character is playing in the party. Whether your character is in Attack, Guard, or Support posture determines which level is referenced for the skill's total power. Using a skill in a given posture has a chance to increase that skill's posture level so if you go the entire game casting one spell from the Attack posture, it'll level up and become more powerful when used that way. This represents a significant portion of how powerful a skill is to the point that using one skill for the entire intro of the game might render it more powerful than even end-game skills unless you go grind. This isn't a bad thing really. Being able to tear enemies in half with a free skill because you spammed it all game is pretty neat.

Attack, Guard, and Support postures are determined by formations. Formations are customized layouts of your party on a 3x5 grid where placing a party member in a given row gives them specific buffs and debuffs, then giving them a specific posture gives them yet more tweaks and sets what posture levels their skills use and train. Other SaGa games have formations but for the most part they're not this clear, well-explained, or customized. Romancing SaGa 3's formations, as a comparison, are absolutely obtuse.

This entire system gives you a sort of back door into the SaGa world where, if you're having trouble getting rolling, you can resort to just slapping your party into hard-set postures and training your skills to level them to the point that you'll get powerful enough to progress. This translates to "grind" if you're having trouble, which is fine in TAA because TAA also completely disposes of the concept of Battle Rank. BR in SaGa games is an ever-present threat where enemies get more difficult the more battles you fight. This is typically how these games punish grind; TAA doesn't.

You eventually get access to nine party members (or twelve if you find three optionals), and can field five at any time. The remaining members sit on the bench and don't gain anything, but the game only mandates specific character choices a couple of times, and the times it does all fall within the same hour or so of gameplay to force you to eventually field everyone; then never again. If you truly only want to field five specific characters the whole game, you can and not really be punished for it. They will get very strong.

Every character comes with a stat bias toward a specific combat style but you can ignore it and stick any party member with any weapon. Want to give the white mage aspected lady a greatsword? Sure go for it. It won't ever be as good as giving it to someone with high Strength but it'll work in time. Everyone will eventually get the same skills via sparks (with the exception of two "special" party members who have limitations).

Given all this, you're pretty free to experiment and change up your build any time you want and you'll spark, gain, and level back up to where you were pretty quickly. This is a freedom you don't really have in other SaGa games because of Battle Rank. However I found as long as you pick a strategy and stick to it, you will very quickly and consistently outgrow the difficulty curve of the game. Any strategy really should work.

Once you forge the titular Alliance, you can start allocating staff and resources to one of five artisan guilds. This forms the meat of the mid-game where you are given the ability to travel the world and can find, recruit, and rescue NPCs into your alliance and assign them to work under a specific guild. Each guild levels up based on how many members it has and produces new rewards for you: the Blacksmith Guild can make you gear that outstrips what you can get normally, the Signimancy Guild can give you powerful new spells, the Library Guild can give you assorted benefits in combat based on your world exploration and such, the Recon Guild gives you free rest spots in dungeons and increases various battle rewards, and the Tactics Guild gives you new formation options.

These are essentially just free value. Because you're free to build your Alliance any way you see fit, the game is not balanced around the presence or absence of these bonuses. Going all in on leveling up a guild will give you tools the game does not require or expect; yet another way to just overpower the game if you want it.

But that's not all. In order to get some sense of battles directly translating to numeric power, TAA adds talents. Talents are buffs on each character that are unlocked by gaining talent points. These work just like experience, so there's a system where you're gaining something each fight, even if you don't spark or gain HP. These are mostly quality of life things like SP cost reductions on skills, but balloon out into some pretty big game changers like the threat control talents that change how often enemies attack various slots in your party. It's all, like the guilds, just extra value.

This is all a long-winded way of saying you can't really "build wrong" in TAA. At worst something you try isn't working and you can just grind it until it becomes effective, or change it up and spark skills rapid-fire to catch up. It does translate to an easy experience, but that's okay too. You'll come away feeling like you get the basics of how SaGa works without getting your teeth kicked in by a water dragon because you walked into the wrong cave and are now stuck.

Alliance Alive came on the heels of Bravely Default taking off. Initially releasing on the 3DS very late in its lifecycle, TAA takes a lot of cues from that series. The art style, interface, general battle look and feel, and even some of the major mechanical gimmicks (like zooming out in town if you don't move for a moment) all scream "Bravely Default at home". In a way this should serve to give a player a comfortable starting point before diving off into SaGa mechanic land: the comparisons to Bravely are surface level at most.