Squandered Potential: Games that could have been so much more

[BitVyper]

Every so often I have to shed a tear for games with unrealised potential. Usually they got shafted in terms of resources and development time because they weren't known money-makers. Post some games that you think could have been world-shatteringly awesome if they'd just been fully realised.

Saga fucking Frontier. Holy shit that was a cool game. Even with its released form being barely a fraction of what the complete game was supposed to be, it was still awesome. You had space cops, vampires, monsters, robots, and even tokusatsu style superheroes interacting believably in the same setting. The combat was flat out orgasmic once you got the hang of how to get new abilities and build your stats. Every species had very unique ways of building their levels, which made them really feel like different beings instead of the usual "short humans with pointy ears" approach to different races. There were so damn many abilities you could develop and master that really, every time you played the game your characters would come out differently.


The rendered backgrounds were fantastic, and the things you could do in combat were really cool. Speaking of backgrounds, this game had atmosphere like crazy. All the regions felt like different little worlds - you had crisp, clean Manhattan, cyberpunky Koorong, backwater York... the cities didn't need to have their backstories told, you could tell just by walking around that Junk was a boom-town on the downswing, Koorong was a place where you could find anything in the right alley, Manhattan had skeletons in its closet.

The plots for each characters quest are what really suffered. You can tell from playing that there was supposed to be a lot more character interaction. Even without it though, much like Live a Live, Squaresoft really managed to capture the feel of cinematic drama, which is something I wish would have expanded to their other games. Like, playing Red's adventure actually feels like interacting with a tokusatsu show instead of a game based on one.

The incomplete plots made the game very repetitive between each character's quests though. And repetitiveness is what I think really killed it for most people. It took me quite a few tries over the years before I really picked up on what a gem SF was. It wasn't until I really got the hang of the leveling systems that I started to love it.

Asellus suffered the most in her plot. Where her ending was supposed to be based on all these little character interactions, it wound up just being based on how powerful her mystic side was and whether or not you saved Gina. Even so, her story had some heart-rending moments in it, like her mother's rejection of her, and White Rose locking herself in the labyrinth.

What really sucks is the places where you can tell something major was supposed to happen. Virgil's castle needed a lot more done with it, and the Bio-lab, fuck, the BIO-LAB was crazy and clearly had so much plot planned for it. The things that were left out of Saga Frontier stand out like great big gaping holes, but where this would just make me annoyed with most games, in SF I feel a great sense of loss like when your favourite author dies before he can finish your favourite book series. It makes the game a bittersweet experience that I just keep going back to.

I feel that the modern age of games has come with a bit of a price. It takes so much time and money to make a game that lives up to current standards that it's just not worth it for companies to experiment as much.

Edit: Oh, and the little bits of art they showed between chapters were phenomenal.