SaGa: Emerald Beyond

SaGa: Emerald Beyond is a role-playing video game in which players take on the role of a protagonist, one of six split between five campaigns set across a selection of seventeen worlds. Characters explore the worlds, with which ones visited triggering different events and influencing the path forward. Navigating worlds, players can follow different glowing lines dubbed Emerald Waves, which lead to different quests. Worlds are navigated from a top-down perspective, with events and battles represented by cutout symbols; cutscenes play out as conversations between characters represented by static art.

The choice of worlds with one protagonist will impact the storyline in that world when revisited in another playthrough either as a new character or replaying as the same character. The player can also choose to leave a world without completing its quest, allowing the player to move onto another world. There is no money in-game, with new equipment being gained through exploration, quest completion, or trading materials. A character dubbed Mr.

Emerald Beyond takes place across multiple worlds connected by an interdimensional space called the Beyond, through which each of the six protagonists travel on their quests guided by an energy dubbed the Emerald Waves. The six protagonists are Tsunanori Mido, a magically gifted man tasked with restoring balance between worlds when his own is threatened; Ameya Aisling, a witch-in-training who has her magic taken away and goes to gain it back while aware of an approaching Calamity; Siugnas, a vampire king seeking to reclaim his realm from a usurper; Diva No.5, a songstress robot who loses her voice and original body after singing a forbidden song, becoming roped into an interdimensional task force; and Bonnie Blair and Formina Franklyn, a pair of rookie police officers investigating an assassination attempt on their world's president.

To complete their missions, each protagonist must journey through the Beyond, following the Emerald Waves to different worlds beset by troubles and with varying levels of awareness of worlds beyond their own. Across each campaign to varying degrees, the protagonists encounter agents of Quisstatium, a group of identical human-like beings who seek to merge the worlds into a single unified whole by force; they include Diva No.5's commander Constantine, and the "Man from the Heavens" who attacked the president of Bonnie and Formina's world. Quisstatium is in some degree responsible for the inciting events in protagonist's story, as they have been given the power to influence events via the Emerald Waves. Each route, including Mido and Aisling's true endings, ends with a fight against the Living Anguish, a being Quisstatium summon as part of their plan to merge the worlds.

Planning for Emerald Beyond began in 2016, after the completion of SaGa: Scarlet Grace. Multiple SaGa veterans returned to work on the game, including series creator Akitoshi Kawazu as director and lead writer, and Masanori Ichikawa as producer. Production was assisted by Opus Studio and Cattle Call. After taking a minimalist design approach with Scarlet Grace, Kawazu wanted to build upon that foundation with more explicit story elements and refinements to the gameplay.

These adjustments included greater exploration, and the removal of in-combat healing. After finalizing the game's design, full production began in 2018 after work finished on Scarlet Grace's expanded version Ambitions. Production was slowed both due to other parallel SaGa projects, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During its debut week in Japan, Emerald Beyond sold 15,079 units on Switch, and 2,854 units on PS4. Low sales of Emerald Beyond were attributed by Square Enix as contributing to a fall in revenue for the fiscal period in which it released. The game received mixed reviews according to aggregator Metacritic, with the PlayStation 5 version scoring more positively than the PC and Switch releases.

Reviewers for Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu enjoyed the science fiction tone of the narrative. RPG Site's James Galizio positively noted the amount of options presented to players and how much story in some character routes was left unexplained after a single playthrough. Shaun Musgrave of Touch Arcade enjoyed the writing, but felt there was not enough substance for repeated playthroughs. RPGFan's Izzy Parsons felt that the dialogue and story were disjointed due to how the game was structured.