The SaGa games are a niche series within an already niche genre. With a level-up system that was birthed from Final Fantasy 2’s unique character growth mechanic, it’s the sort of thing you either think was really neat and made grinding less of a chore, or you hated it and it’s the reason you never bought into them. Regardless, the games became a cult hit in the US with 1998’s SaGa Frontier and started drawing attention to the series as a whole. Though the games did technically come stateside even earlier than that, thanks to their cleverly named (Final Fantasy Legend) disguise, it was Frontier that first introduced them to western gamers.

So what of the earlier games? The SNES SaGa titles? They sat in Japan, untranslated and unplayable to all but those willing to run them on emulators. Though partial translations were attempted of the 3 Super Famicom SaGa titles, they were never fully completed and were mostly abandoned by the teams that started them.

That is, until now. Thanks to DDS Translations, the first of the three Romancing SaGa games has been fully translated into English. Though you’ll need to apply the patch to a working copy of the game (I prefer Lunar IPS myself), it’s worth it to be able to play one of Japan’s lost classics.