Brave Battle Saga: Legend of the Magic Warrior

I honestly wanted to enjoy this game, but its inconsistent graphics, often tedious battles, and uninspired story prevented me from doing so. I commend Djinn and SteveMartin for their work making this game available to the English-speaking community. I just hope that their next project is a little more deserving than Brave Battle Saga.

In all likelihood, you have never heard of Brave Battle Saga: Legend of the Magic Warrior. Originally released as Barver Battle Saga: The Space Fighter, this is an unlicensed Chinese title that reportedly borrowed heavily (i.e., directly lifted sprites, etc.) from other games such as Breath of Fire and Final Fantasy. Thanks to the hacking and translating skills of Djinn and SteveMartin (links take you to their respective pages on Romhacking.net), those of us who speak English have the opportunity to experience this game.

Using my Everdrive cart, I was able to experience this title on my Sega Genesis. I approached this game with a certain level of excitement for a few reasons. First, Brave Battle Saga is a role-playing game—one of my favorite game genres—and there weren’t a lot of RPG titles released on the Genesis. Second, I had the thrill of playing something rare and forbidden. Third, this was a new Genesis experience, and it had been a very long time since I had one of those.

The game starts out with you controlling one character (unimaginatively named Tim). Tim lives in a village that chooses a town hero each year, the hero being the first to complete a task given by the town elder. Due to his participation in this challenge, Tim finds himself exiled from his town and placed on a quest that will take him to several different towns, kingdoms, shrines, and eventually to a space station that threatens to destroy the planet. The adventure is a little cumbersome at first with only one character, as you will usually face 2-4 enemies in each encounter, and they usually get to attack before your character. Waiting through several enemy attacks, finally getting to retaliate (which may or may not be enough to kill an enemy and decrease the attacks against you), and repeating this pattern until the enemies are destroyed can be tedious and sometimes infuriating. Luckily, other characters eventually join Tim, which makes the battles a little more enjoyable, though your enemies will still likely attack prior to most (if not all) of your characters.

The action during battles reminds me of the Final Fantasy games, and the action occurs without pausing while you make decisions on what you want each character to do. Each character has a bar that slowly fills up, and once filled, you are allowed to give that character a command. After the character acts, the bar is depleted and must fill up again. Much of the time, this system works fine; however, whenever scrolling through menus for a particular spell or item later in the game, you may get annoyed with the extra turns the enemy will receive while you search. Personally, I prefer RPGs that use a battle system like in the Phantasy Star series, where you are allowed to pause the action after each turn, but I can see how some may feel that pausing like that pulls you a little out of the action.

The graphics in the game are nice, but the pirated nature of the game prevents the graphics from feeling cohesive. For one, whenever Tim and his companions are traveling, they will encounter monster sprites. Whenever Tim touches a monster sprite, the game switches to a battle screen. The problem is that, more often than not, the monster in the battle screen has absolutely no resemblance to the monster Tim ran into. For example, Tim may run into a monster that looks like Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors, but when the game switches to the battle screen, he is up against a couple of giant eagles and a swordsman. The same problem exists in the character sprites for Tim and crew as well. When not in battle, these characters have a super-deformed look. Once a battle begins, the characters are more realistically proportioned and don’t closely resemble their non-battle selves.

Surprisingly, the game is lengthy, and I spent around twenty hours playing through it. Unfortunately, the story is not compelling and the battles quickly become monotonous. I remember wondering over the last quarter of the game when it would finally end. Finishing was more a matter of perseverance than pleasure.

I honestly wanted to enjoy this game, but its inconsistent graphics, often tedious battles, and uninspired story prevented me from doing so. I commend Djinn and SteveMartin for their work making this game available to the English-speaking community. I just hope that their next project is a little more deserving than Brave Battle Saga.

Not recommended

Note that, if you choose to try out this game, you will need to acquire the ROM of the Chinese game and patch it with the file that can be downloaded from