While Final Fantasy Tactics Advance offered Square fans something familiar today, the demo of Unlimited: SaGa perhaps raised a few more questions than it answered. Like the last SaGa game, this is a beautiful piece of 2D artwork, but it turns so many ideas of RPG game design around that it's hard to form a firm opinion on the game in a limited amount of time.

The game's "Sketch-Motion" animation system delivers detailed 2D battle graphics, supposedly without drawing actual sprites or polygons. It sounds vaguely analogous to the high-speed FMV compression used in games for the old NEC PC-FX, but this doesn't look like an FMV game in the slightest -- it's just a very sharp, very colorful 2D game. Despite the introduction of the random element of the Reel system, meanwhile, the combat system feels very similar to the earlier SaGa games, with simple turn-based encounters on an isometric field. What's genuinely peculiar is the dungeon system, which abandons the usual idea of a field about which the characters walk in favor of a series of "hot spots" to be explored in sequence.