Brave Battle Saga - The Legend of The Magic Warrior

Brave Battle Saga (also known as Barver Battle Saga) is a solid RPG. Just my kind of game. Just to start off, this uses the Mednafen emulator, which works fine, though it had a few hitches. For some reason the emulator's "Pause" function doesn't work at all, and there were a couple of times where the audio desynced and the only fix I could find was to restart the emulator. Although the preview images and videos show the image all stretched, it's actually far more reasonable, using the base 320x224 Genesis resolution (game looks chunkier at x1 or x2 scaling). The emulator allows up to 4x scaling with or without smoothing and it adds a neat little border when playing in full screen. The game only uses the ABC face buttons so configuring XYZ is not necessary. Now, onto the game. While the story's not exactly groundbreaking, it's got a couple moments that made me go "huh" in mild intrigue. It's also obvious the spritework and stuff was quite heavily influenced by some other RPGs, but hey, they still look real nice. The music is good, but the sound effects are kind of wonky. A lot of them are really quiet and certain events (getting hit, for example) produce no sounds at all which robs them of impact slightly. I don't know if this is an emulation quirk or if the game really was this way, but it definitely sounds off. There are no random encounters, all encounters are portrayed as sprites in the world that initiate a battle when touched, though oddly most of the sprites have no correlation to what you'll be fighting, so I guess they're random in that aspect. One downside I'd note is that the screen uses this lazy scrolling where the you're always off-center when moving which annoys me a little, but it still leaves enough room to react to any potential enemies ahead. Battles are in the standard turn-based style, which is totally fine by me, although I'll admit the fighting in this game boils down to only using Attack on the regular enemies and only using Spells to spam your strongest magic during boss fights since magic sucks against groups. The game has an option called Real Time Battles that essentially works like the ATB system. That option won't affect the pacing of fights much though, since it only "pauses" during submenu navigation if you have it set to Off. The battle UI is a bit clunky, there's a Repeat command that performs the same move that character did the preceding turn, but it's useless because the battle cursor memorizes the last action...