Capsule Review: Sigma Star Saga DX
An intriguing story in a compelling sci-fi world with genre-mixing gameplay held back by outdated technical limitations.
A hybrid side-scrolling space shooter and top-down action adventure brought to modern platforms twenty years after its original release with bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.
Most narrative progress happens in the top-down adventure on a series of planets and space stations. This is sort of a “Zelda-Lite”; there’s combat, exploration, traversal puzzles, secrets to find, and new abilities you gain as the story progresses that allow you to reach new places, but none of this is particularly complex. Puzzles and combat are both fairly trivial and the abilities are more key than tool, letting you pass specific obstacles rather than recontextualizing gameplay. The only real secrets or collectibles are varyingly-hidden “gun data” that can be used in the shooter segments.
Those shooter segments come in two varieties: random encounters that interrupt the top-down gameplay to teleport you to a ship and task you with taking out a number of weak enemies or a single miniboss, and boss stages at story climaxes that send you through a challenging course and culminate in a unique boss fight. In all cases, you use the weapon you’ve customized through equipping gun data (choosing between the firing patterns, bullet types, and bonus effects you’ve collected so far) but don’t get to pick the ship to use (which affects your hitbox, durability, and maneuvering speed). Enemies drop experience orbs when defeated; collecting enough of these levels you up which increases all ships’ offense and defense stats.
Both kinds of gameplay are fairly simple and seem to suffer from the technical limitations of the original GBA platform. As annoying as it can be to have your exploration interrupted by a shooter, I do think alternating between the modes is important to keep either from getting too stale. By far the best mechanical aspect is the gun data system: there are tons of varied combinations, it’s fun to experiment and create overpowered setups, and finding gun data thus makes top-down exploration rewarding. (Though I do wish you could create two different custom weapons and switch between them—you can only switch between your custom weapon and each ship’s default weapon. That means that many of the interesting highly-situational custom weapons are not feasible in practice, since you never know which ship you’ll be using or what kind of level layout and enemy setup you’ll be facing so you’re obliged to use a custom weapon that’s useful for anything the game might throw at you. It’d be fun to be able to have a generic weapon and a situational one.)
The story, world, and characters are all intriguing, though things feel a bit rushed in the end. There’s a strong atmosphere created by great art, soundtrack, and sound effects, as well as dialog and storytelling that imply a larger and richer universe that I wish could be explored further. I really enjoyed occupying the game’s world.
All in all, Sigma Star Saga is a game with some fantastic and creative ideas that are not really used to their full potential. The mechanics are an interesting and unique-feeling mix held back by the limited controls, screen size, and processing ability of the Game Boy Advance, but substantially bolstered by the intriguing world and story. As glad as I am that this DX version filed off the worst pain points and made the game easier to appreciate (I don’t think I could have made it through the original) it leaves me wanting more—a full remake or a sequel that lives up to what this setting and genre mashup have to offer. And it should definitely keep the gun data system.
I Stopped Playing When: I finished a completionist playthrough with all gun data and both of the endings you can get on an initial playthrough after 12.9 hours. I did a New Game Plus playthrough for the remaining two endings which took 4.5 hours, bringing my total to 17.4 hours.
Three Stars: Good. I liked the game enough to finish it (or just play it a bunch, for games that don't end). I recommend it to most genre fans.