 ... if you get one more... A few weeks ago I looked at some Super Nintendo games that didn't fit into just one genre, and shortly afterward I took a look at another hybrid genre game for NES called Guardian Legend. Here's another game like that, but for Game Boy Advance called Sigma Star Saga, a game that combines a shoot-em-up with an action RPG. You play as a fighter pilot named Ian Wrecker, who's the captain of Squadron Sigma team and you're fighting against an invasion of Alien Krill, who showed up one day and somehow boiled Earth's oceans and melted the ice caps and threw the world's ecosystem into chaos, just because they could, I guess. Maybe these Krill are getting revenge for all the aquatic life that's been destroyed throughout the Darius series. So you start the game out in a horizontal shooter mode, and hey, what do you know? The gameplay does kind of feel like a Darius game. It's A to shoot and B for a speed boost, but unfortunately it's one of those games where pounding the button fires much faster than simply holding it down, so that's kind of a bummer. This first section here is pretty much just a simple introductory stage with an easy boss fight at the end before you dock at your base and all of a sudden the game switches to a top-down perspective and you're walking around talking to people and getting to know your character, and what's kind of funny here is that he's kind of miserable. Everybody you talk to is all, Ra, Ra, yeah, let's beat the enemy, and meanwhile, evidently, your character would rather be in his room listening to Morrissey. You meet with your commanding officer, who has a special mission for you, going undercover as a double agent to gather intel about a super weapon the Krill are building. We toast to the mission and promptly pass out. Geez, what a lightweight. You wake up in a Krill medical facility and a medic informs you that you are left for dead on a drifting starship, so abruptly, the mission begins. You don't win the Krill's trust right away, though. You're treated like a prisoner, and you have to fight a monster in this arena. Geez, what is this game? Sigma Star Saga is a game where the story dictates the structure, so you go from arena fights to horizontal shoot-em-up sections to top-down action RPG stuff you might see in a game like Illusion of Gaia, and it's all tied together by an interesting story that kept me wondering what was gonna happen next. Eventually, you get to talking with the Krill commander who sends you out on a mission, since he'd rather not actually risk one of his own troops. Thankfully, the alien ship is much more fun to use than what you had before, and in addition, this time around, you collect experience points. Yeah, those dots aren't projectiles, you gotta collect these things to level up. What's really goofy here, though, is that you die in one hit, but the game doesn't tell you how many lives you have. It only brings down a fraction of your HP meter up top, so that's kinda weird. I don't know why they'd bother having you respawn like that instead of just taking damage like normal. The story continues from there, sending you down as part of a team to explore this forest planet. That's when the game transitions to a top-down action RPG, where you move and shoot in four different directions. Like I said earlier, the action here compares most to a game like Illusion of Gaia, but the fact that you're firing a projectile kinda gives it a Zombies Ate My Neighbor's vibe as well, especially with how enemies die. You also pick up upgrades for your ship down here, finding what the game refers to as gun data, and this is another area where Sigma Star Saga really stands out. There's three different kinds of gun data you can find. Cannon data is related to your aim, bullet data is regarding your projectile, and impact data is what your projectile does when it hits an enemy. There's at least 20 of each of these that you can find, and you can combine three of them to create custom weapons. Now that's really cool, especially since this game can get really freakin' tough later on, so you'll wanna take advantage of this to gear your weapon system toward whatever's awaiting you next. You also find tools down here that help you explore, like the scanning tool, or the warp tool, that allows you to reach areas you otherwise couldn't. So yeah, exploration is a big part of this game as well. And I should mention that that's not always a good thing for some people, since exploration usually means backtracking, and that's no exception here, so keep that in mind. Another interesting aspect of this game is that while in this mode, your ship is just kinda hanging out above you, and if it senses trouble, it'll summon you back up to fight for a while. So yeah, there's random battles here, so to speak, they're just shoot-em-up encounters. You go up and collect experience and level up just like any other RPG. What's frustrating, however, at least for me, is that the game is always changing the kind of ship you have to pilot. Sure, you have the same weapon system, and you can flip through weapons by pressing R, and use smart bombs by pressing L, but the game dictates what kind of ship you'll be flying and when. The inconsistency of all the different speeds and ranges of motion got kind of annoying for me after a while, but that's just me. Sigma Star Saga was developed by Way Forward Technologies, the same dev team that created the Shantae series, and this game definitely has a similar vibe and a certain kind of polish that those games have. At first, the visuals are kind of goofy-looking since the sprites are freaking ginormous and take up so much of the screen, but it actually helps it stand out a bit from its peers. I've made a few different comparisons so far, but I think overall this game most closely resembles Big Star Trooper for Super Nintendo. That game may not have any shoot-em-up stuff in it, but it has the same kind of shifting between game modes, the top-down action sequences are a little similar, and your character's size and movement relative to the screen real estate also feels familiar. Anyway, yeah, Sigma Star Saga is a really cool novelty. It uses storytelling to combine all sorts of different gameplay elements, and it impressively does not come across as gimmicky. In other words, it's not just a bunch of stuff thrown together for the sake of being thrown together. It all fits, and it makes sense, because the game gives it plenty of context. I will say, some people are gonna be turned off by the opening shoot-em-up level because it's kind of bare bones and your ship is really slow, so it's unfortunate that this game gets off to kind of a rough start. It just doesn't give you much of an indication of how much there is to this game. And yeah, I'll admit the story will make you roll your eyes at times, but I still appreciate that it's going for something a bit different. So yeah, if you liked stuff like Guardian Legend for NES, then you'll love Sigma Star Saga. And I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a good rest of your day.