SaGa 3, or Final Fantasy Legend III as it was retitled in North America to capitalize on that series’ momentum, is one of those games from my childhood that left an indelible impression on me. It and Sword of Hope 2 formed a potent one-two punch that kept me entertained during long car rides and moments when I simply didn’t feel like paying attention to the real world, so I immediately recognized Finding Light‘s influences and took notice. It turns out that this is an RPG Maker game, though the grayscale sprite art allows it to dodge the traditional “RPG Maker look” (blurry, colorful art that doesn’t really fit together cohesively) for the most part, and the mechanics are faithful enough to Game Boy jRPGs that the majority of players likely won’t be able to determine which engine is being used. The story is also enjoyable and creates emotion without bombarding you with text, which is crucial to the overall feel of the plot. There’s really only one issue, and that’s the difficulty of the boss fights; from the middle of the game onward, you have to outlevel the areas you fight each boss in by 5-10 levels to stand a realistic chance, and even then, bosses’ ability to inflict status effects and attack 3-5 times per turn can easily kill a character outright and force you to play from behind with pitifully weak healing and resurrection items and magic. It’s difficult to explain just how frustrating some of these fights are, especially one or two that it could be argued are outright cheating, and these undermine what’s otherwise a brilliant slice of Game Boy nostalgia.

The writing is solid, minus a few fourth wall breaks

Finding Light is actually the third game taking place inside this world, with the first two (Knight Bewitched and Mari and the Black Tower, neither of which I’ve played) being more traditional RPG Maker titles that share some of the same characters. As a result, starting with Finding Light means having characters talk about historical events and make references to things that you’re not in a place to understand or appreciate. This is more the case with the moment-to-moment interactions than the overarching plot, however, with the important stuff being explained more than well enough. Honestly, the preexisting relationships between some of the characters weren’t as distracting as I thought they’d be, at times even working in Finding Light‘s favor since games like Final Fantasy Legend III similarly featured characters whose relationships already existed.

You play as Mari (from Mari and the Black Tower, though seemingly playable for the first time here) as she searches for her missing partner, Abbie—and that’s in the LGBT-positive sense. The same-sex component of the relationships that exist or are hinted at in Finding Light isn’t a huge focal point, which is to say that it avoids being preachy, instead coming across as the kind of thing you’d have seen if Nintendo’s content policies in the Game Boy days weren’t so strict about what kind of content could be depicted. The writing in general is pretty solid across the board, with characters all being distinct from each other and capturing that tricky “less is more” element of classic gaming. Like SaGa 3/Final Fantasy Legend III, the story begins with flooding and tasks you with collecting a number of plot devices so that you can reach the evil source and fix everything (resolving your personal struggle in the process, naturally), though some of the locations visited seem to draw additional inspiration from Final Fantasy IV.

The story manages to be sad, touching, and hopeful, and that makes the occasional fourth wall breaks and references to memes and such all the more distracting. This isn’t a deal-breaker, nor is it universally bad (sorceress Malady’s ability to notice the player and sudden grayness of the world is entertaining, if slightly overplayed) but references to outside things like Steam sales throw the humor/seriousness balance off a bit.

Mechanically, Finding Light has some rather large pros and cons

There are some things about this game that are absolutely brilliant, with the biggest standout being how easy it is to run away from fights. Usually, a jRPG escape rate is something like 40-60%, which means trying to run away from fights is a pointless endeavor since you’ll be attacked a bunch whenever you fail. Running away in Finding Light, on the other hand, has something like a 99.5% chance of working. Obviously you’ll be horribly underleveled if you fail to fight anyone between bosses, but this allows you to grind in your preferred spot and then run away from every random encounter you get while traveling straight to the boss. In a lot of older jRPGs, pushing forward was a stressful risk/reward thing, which is great in theory until you remember that we all instinctively grinded to avoid ever being bitten by the “risk” part of that equation. Your freedom to run from most random fights (sometimes that .5% strikes, though I only failed to run away 3 or 4 times in 13-14 hours of gameplay) makes it much easier to backtrack should your level prove inadequate for your current area, and this makes traveling around the world painless in a way that few games of this type are. This makes a huge difference.

Running away isn’t your only freedom, either. Spells (which use MP) and skills (which use TP—restored through attacking and being attacked—and occasionally also MP) are equippable, which means you’re constantly switching out your advanced abilities to suit the situation. At one point I found a great late-game grinding spot that reliably put me up against a bunch of relatively squishy enemies, so I equipped spells that attacked all enemies and circled a nearby town for easy experience. This sufficed to finish fights in 1-2 turns, and I could pop into town and rest whenever someone’s MP became low. Boss fights also require changing your skills around, as you might want as many defense-buffing skills active as early as possible, or to turn everyone into an offensive powerhouse while one healer tries to keep the party on their feet.

There are two things that drive me crazy about the boss fights: status effects, and turn order. You might think that going up against a single boss character with a party of 4 characters would give you the advantage, but bosses have the ability to act 3-5 times per turn (and some even have moves that trigger at HP thresholds, meaning they can act in the middle of one of your multi-hit combos), and that can translate to ~10 hits per turn given their penchant for attacks that either hit everyone or strike multiple times. Your healing items and spells are woefully underpowered, too, with the end result being that some bosses can kill a character outright if you’re unlucky enough to have them focus their attacks on a single person. Once a character is down, your strategy goes out the window; everyone starts wasting turns trying to revive the dead character, which usually results in them being killed again on that same turn and everyone eating the rest of the hits. When bosses aren’t forcing you to play from behind like that, they’re spamming status effects that become a nightmare to deal with. There’s confusion, poison, death (or something like that), and blindness, and all of them are annoying in their own way. Add on top of that your beneficial status effects and the fact that you’re only shown the last 2 statuses inflicted on each character, and it becomes impossible to monitor whether or not your damage-mitigation and/or damage-increasing buffs have suddenly worn off. Basically, reacting to bosses isn’t a good idea. Instead, you’re best served by grinding several levels higher than you think you need to be, and even then, luck plays a role in beating certain foes.

Brewing and Roxie class changing is interesting

Once Malady joins the party, you’re suddenly able to brew new items using components dropped by monsters. Some of these are undeniably helpful permanent stat boosts, with the agility boost being crucial for adjusting your turn order, but for the most part I didn’t find much of a use for this part of the game. It’s an interesting system, but most of the craftable items were weaker versions of things I could simply buy, and I never had enough components to craft a significant number of the permanent bonuses. Using a bunch of agility boosts to take Malady from being the slowest party member to the fastest was useful, but that’s ultimately a subtle effect compared to equipping different spells. I did notice that new recipes opened up over time, but I couldn’t tell if that’s because my crafting skill was increasing or because I found new recipes. On the other side of the coin, there’s fox character Roxie’s optional class changes—just like in Final Fantasy Legend III, Finding Light has a system where you can feed meat to a character in order to change their class. In the Game Boy games, that meant changing various characters from human to mutant/robot and back again, whereas here it’s a much more straightforward system where Roxie is the only one who can eat meat, and it changes her into the type of enemy the meat is from. It’s not likely that you’ll have every enemy’s moves memorized, so there’s still an element of experimentation to this, but changing Roxie’s class can completely change her role inside of a battle.

I’m loving Finding Light’s authentic visuals and music

It’s always hard to differentiate between art content that’s been made from scratch for a game and what’s been purchased for use with RPG Maker, so I’m not even going to speculate about that, but it bears mentioning that the visuals and music suit Finding Light to a T either way. Yes, the absence of color can become fatiguing just as it sometimes did on the Game Boy, but limitations often pave the way for creativity, and a lot of the pixel art here is simply fantastic. The music is also largely limited to the same bleeps and bloops that Game Boys were capable of producing, and some of the cheerier tracks can become intermittently grating because of that, but there are also numerous memorable tracks that would have inspired countless fan remixes if they had been attached to a game in the 90s. Several of Finding Light‘s tracks are truly impressive like that.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 2/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for the purpose of this Finding Light review

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