LRG Archives: Saturday Morning RPG
LRG Archives: Saturday Morning RPG
A look back at PlayStation Vita release #002.
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Genre: RPG
Developer: Mighty Rabbit Studios
Initial Release Date: April 5, 2012 [iOS]
Limited Run Release Date: Jan. 26, 2016 [PS4/Vita] May 28, 2018 [NSW]
Limited Run’s second release couldn’t have been more different from its first. Where Breach & Clear presented tactical gameplay through the lens of stoic, real-world military engagements and armaments, its follow-up—Mighty Rabbit Studios’ Saturday Morning RPG—draws heavily on game concepts established in popular Japanese role-playing games, and its tone could best be described as “frivolous.”
If Breach & Clear was ripped from headlines to place players in the midst of life-or-death strife, Saturday Morning RPG lets them saunter lazily through a haze of nostalgia for days of sleeping in late and vegging out in front of the TV. Maybe a slice of cold pizza factors in at some point. This is the video game equivalent of a carefree weekend morning spent reminiscing over childhood memories of time frittered away watching cartoons that were indistinguishable from the commercial breaks.
It’s the result of growing up on a media diet of Transformers, He-Man, and G.I. Joe, with just enough details tweaked to avoid being legally actionable. It’s ’80s Latchkey Kids: The Video Game. Saturday Morning RPG has its sights laser-focused on a very specific demographic of late Generation Xers and early Millennials, a game written for American kids born between 1975 and 1985. The aim here was clearly to speak knowingly to anyone whose Saturday morning routine as a kid involved getting up at sunrise to gulp down a heaping bowl of sugary cereal while freebasing a programming block of cheaply animated cartoons based on popular toys and movies. Practically every character (and every line of dialogue) you encounter in Saturday Morning RPG is either a thinly veiled parody of an ’80s media property (written in the spirit of MAD Magazine—another childhood favorite among the Saturday Morning RPG target audience) or a pastiche of ’80s TV and film clichés.
It is not, in other words, a game for everyone. No; by design, this game was made for a very specific audience—or, at least, that’s the case for its story. When it comes to its mechanics, however, Saturday Morning RPG draws upon a different source of inspiration altogether.
The plot here may play out as an extended romp through our collective media memories of the ’80s, but Saturday Morning RPG bears no resemblance whatsoever to role-playing games of that same era. There are no random encounters here; no monotonous mazes; no menu-driven grinding. Instead, the action has its basis in something far more contemporary, adopting a breezy, intuitive style reminiscent of Nintendo’s Paper Mario games. Even when it challenges players with a nastily difficult battle, it never feels punishing; on the contrary, Saturday Morning RPG is nothing if not forgiving, with generous checkpoints, helpful waypointing, and a retry option that makes total failure wholly optional.
In short, Saturday Morning RPG is an energetic mash-up of disparate influences and concepts, unrelated components that add up to a lighthearted take on the role-playing genre. And, in keeping with its nature as a game, its mechanics shine as the centerpiece of the experience. Despite the heavy emphasis on ’80s media satire, you’ll find the real heart and soul of the game in its combat system. While it suffers from a few frustrating quirks, the battle mechanics in Saturday Morning RPG reward both strategic thinking and nimble reflexes—a rare combination. As in Nintendo’s Mario RPGs, good timing and a strong sense of pattern recognition go a long way toward enhancing your performance in battle. At the same time, the numerous power-ups and skill boosts you acquire through exploration allow you to shift the tide of battle through passive stat tweaks and purpose-built combat capabilities.
Saturday Morning RPG’s battle system appears incredibly simplistic at first glance. Players control a party of one—protagonist Marty Hill—and he can only wield five special skills besides his basic fist attack at any given time. Appearances can be deceiving, though; there’s a lot more happening beneath the surface of the battle system here than you might think. The constraints on Marty’s capabilities are precisely what makes combat so interesting, not to mention so easily tailored to different play styles. Do you prefer to play it safe with basic physical attacks? Risk everything on abilities with low accuracy or unpredictable side effects? Take a defensive stance with buffs and healing powers? It’s all possible, depending on which five skills you choose to take into battle.
Your combat choices range from basic physical attacks to enemy debuffs to healing skills, and each has a number of other traits. Every battle skill has its own rating for power, speed, and accuracy, which gives it nuance in different combat scenarios. A skill with high speed and accuracy but low power doesn’t have much value against a foe with high hit points or the ability to heal damage—but if that ability can cause a status effect like Burn or Shock, its high speed allows Marty to fire it off preemptively against foes with debilitating powers like Paralyze to ensure that their health is steadily sapped even if he’s taken out of action for a few turns. On the other hand, a devastatingly powerful attack with low speed and accuracy can take out even some bosses in a single hit—if it lands, that is. Knowing which powers to equip to best deal with the monsters in a given area is, as the saying goes, half the battle.
The other half of the battle? Actually putting Marty’s skill set to use. Saturday Morning RPG leans heavily on battle gimmicks to liven up its action and avoid the tedium that often affects combat-heavy RPGs. For starters, the game sidesteps the crushing grind caused by endless random combat altogether by giving players a finite number of encounters to deal with. Each of the five chapters here contains a fixed set of enemies—in fact, the number of mobs you clean up out of the maximum factors into your final rating for that chapter. You can spot each encounter before entering battle mode, and many fights are altogether optional. Not only do you never have to face surprise attacks by unseen foes, once you’ve defeated a set of enemies they’re gone forever—even if you “zone out” to a different area and return later. This makes for brisk, low-stress exploration and navigation of the game world once you’ve cleared away your opponents.
Of course, this also means each chapter contains finite opportunities to earn experience points after battle, which limits Marty’s potential growth. Still, the experience cap isn’t a hard number; there are ways to boost EXP gain, including your performance in battle.
All of these elements—EXP boosts, battle abilities, skill parameters—are brought together by Saturday Morning RPG’s timed combat mechanics. Many RPGs (including The Legend of Dragoon, Paper Mario, and Shadow Hearts) have attempted to liven up their menu-based battle systems by integrating timed boosts and bonuses, each with differing degrees of success. Saturday Morning RPG goes all-in on the timed mechanics; they’re not entirely mandatory, but mastering them offers you the surest route to success. A huge number of Marty’s combat capabilities incorporate interactive effects which can boost and enhance their efficacy. Players who prefer not to deal with such shenanigans can make use of combat skills that deliver fixed damage with no need for additional interaction, but it’s the timed mechanics that offer the greatest potential for inflicting damage on foes.
These come in a few different varieties. For example, the Sword of Unknowns—modeled after ThunderCats’ Sword of Omens, since everything here is a reference—deals trifling damage by default. However, you can juice up its power by mashing the attack button to fill a meter as Marty unleashes its attack, tripling or even quadrupling its power. Other skills, like the LaserDisc and the baseball bat, can be boosted by using a precision-based technique. These attacks are accompanied by a sliding icon over a segmented meter; your attack power is amplified depending on which section of the meter the icon is touching when you press the attack button. These range from a total “Bogus” flop, which usually results in a completely whiffed attack, to a “Righteous” success that massively increases its damage output. Each skill in this style has its own meter layout and the requisite timing to match, which causes the flow of action to change depending on how you choose to attack. Some actions use more subtle forms of timing. Consider the Mega Cart, which gives Marty the ability to fire a Mega Man-style arm cannon. It allows you to tap rapidly to fire or hold down the attack button and charge up your shot—though if you hold down the charge button too long, you’ll completely whiff the attack and waste a turn, which means you need to memorize the optimal timing.
Even if you master timed attacks, battles will still end up feeling protracted and sluggish if you use those abilities on their own. To deliver maximum damage and zip through battles, you need to charge up your actions by selecting one of the battery icons. The battery charge feature makes use of Marty’s “MP” meter. Unlike in most RPGs, MP doesn’t allow you to cast magic spells; instead, it allows you to buff both your basic and special attacks. You can amplify an attack up to a maximum of 9.9x. Hitting max amp forces Marty to forego attacking for a few turns, but it’s often the only way to win against an enemy with the ability to heal itself or that counters your attacks with dangerous retaliatory actions.
As with your special abilities, you have three different options for activating battery boosts. You can simply choose the basic charge, which gives you a modest multiplier, but you can also fill a meter by mashing the attack button or by using the sliding icon mechanic to boost your charge. With finesse and speed, the interactive sliders can boost your attack power by as much as four times per turn. Stacking several boosts is the key to reaching 9.9x, though the downside to this is that it burns those turns and leaves you open to enemy attacks. Also, if you miss a boosted attack, you’ve squandered turns and MP for nothing. The boss at the end of the final chapter even has the ability to reset your boosts before you can make a move with them!
But, again, these drawbacks all play into the trade-offs that give Saturday Morning RPG its surprising strategic depth. Plus, weathering a few rounds of enemy attacks isn’t necessarily bad; Marty’s defenses can be enhanced through effective timing, just like his attacks. Every single enemy ability in the game can be partially blocked by hitting the action button at the right time. Just as with Marty’s attacks, his defensive timing is rated on a scale of Bogus to Righteous. The more effective his defense, the more damage he negates. Not only that, but an effective block boosts your attack multiplier slightly, which means the upside to taking chip damage from a party of fast enemies is that you can further amplify your own retaliation once you finally act. A Righteous block can even deflect most projectiles, including snowballs and rocket fists, sending those attacks right back at the attacker to deliver significant damage with no harm to Marty. Certain enemies, like the Sphere Bots in Chapter 3 and exploding presents in the Christmas Special chapter, will also inflict damage to their allies when or if you defeat them.
If all of this sounds like the game stacks the odds in the player’s favor, well, that’s only partially true. The downside to combat in Saturday Morning RPG is that there are more of them than there are of you, and enemies tend to get far more moves than Marty. While there are a few actions you can take that allow you to keep pace with the bad guys, these tend to be weak and ineffectual. The strongest skills usually have a low speed rating, which means that an enemy party will sometimes get five, six, or even eight attacks in the time it takes you to boost an attack and actually execute it. This can be frustrating even if you have a handle on the varied defensive timings needed to block all the different enemy attacks, and it slows combat considerably. Marty has the opportunity to boost his rating in one skill category every time he levels up, but in the early going, putting your focus on speed seems practically mandatory. It’s also possible to build a skill set so effective that once you master boost timing, you can essentially take out just about any boss in a single hit.
This is especially true once you start building a decent collection of stickers, which can provide various battle modifiers to allow you to influence the stats of combatants. Saturday Morning RPG makes use of a diegetic interface in the style of a classic ’80s Trapper Keeper notebook, and modifying your folder with different covers and stickers confers helpful bonuses to Marty during battle—or harmful debuffs for his foe. Stickers allow you to boost Marty’s stats, weaken his enemies, and apply negative status effects to opponents before the beginning of battle. You can also sap Marty’s powers or strengthen bad guys to increase the challenge level, if that’s your thing. The boosts take the form of scratch ’n sniff stickers, which you activate by “rubbing” them at the start of battle. The scratching mechanic varies by platform—on Vita, you rub the screen; on PlayStation 4, you scratch the controller touch pad; on Switch, you just manipulate the left analog stick. You can equip up to five different stickers before battle, and the more you manage to scratch, the more boosts you receive. The really powerful stickers take much longer to scratch, so if you load up your Trapper Keeper with nothing but high-difficulty stickers, you’ll probably only have time to activate one or two before combat begins.
The notebook metaphor fits right in with the game’s overall theme of arrested-development ’80s nostalgia. Yes, Saturday Morning RPG is a buffet of trainspotting delight for media junkies and aging latchkey kids, leaning on thinly veiled references and catchphrases, but it stands apart from contemporary games by going all-in. Where most games are content to make a handful of winking allusions to pop culture history, Saturday Morning RPG contains very little content that doesn’t somehow tie back to the TV shows of its namesake. It weaves that imagery into every facet of the game, all the way down to quest items and attack skills. This game is a relentless onslaught of throwbacks and nostalgia, meant for players to wrap around themselves like a warm blanket. It’s the G.I. Joe/Transformers/Care Bears/He-Man/Captain Power crossover we never got, and even if the names and colors of characters have been changed just enough to avoid infringing on anyone’s copyright, the point comes across clearly.
Most importantly, the bulk of the game revolves around a legitimately excellent and highly adaptable combat system. Not all the jokes land—such as with the proxy for G.I. Joe’s mute ninja Snake Eyes appearing here blind and deaf—but as with MAD Magazine, Saturday Morning RPG takes a page from Michael Scott taking a page from Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Saturday Morning RPG works best when played through in sequence. You can play the game’s five chapters in any order, but quite a few jokes here carry through the story consecutively. The goofy Star Wars trash compactor homage in the final chapter, in which you can either kill or rescue an NPC named Ben, makes a lot more sense if you’ve completed all of his side quests in the other chapters, which involve resolving his tendency to clog up the plumbing. There are also a few optional side quests that carry across chapters and pay off if you’ve fulfilled the prerequisites.
Fittingly for a game that would help to launch a company geared toward collectors, each chapter in Saturday Morning RPG rates your performance based on a clearly defined checklist. Everything in the game is instanced, from side quests to enemy encounters, and earning the absolute best rating for a chapter requires you to find and complete everything. Of course, the set enemy encounter ratio means that some of the PlayStation Trophies, such as reaching experience level 50, can only be earned through multiple play throughs. The game includes a few extras, like the combat-focused Arena Mode, to let you work toward that—Marty retains his experience level as you jump between chapters and modes, so every bit helps.
About all Saturday Morning RPG doesn’t include is a proper ending. The fifth chapter ends on cliffhanger reveal as you battle the secret hidden boss and learn the truth about the motivations of the Cobra Commander-like Commander Hood, but there’s no way to initiate a final battle and resolve the storyline. Maybe that’s a tale for a different time. For now, there’s the five-chapter adventure available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Switch. The PS4 and Vita games shipped as Limited Run Games releases #002 and #003, respectively, kicking off the company (and the new year) with their launch in January of 2016.
Finally, a Switch port arrived two years later, in June 2018. That edition neatly encapsulated how far Limited Run had come as a publisher in that time. Where the PlayStation family releases had been straightforward boxed affairs, the Switch game came in a massive collector’s window-box crammed with all kinds of goodies: A Steelbook case, carded G.I. Joe-style action figures of Marty and Commander Hood, a tape cassette of the Saturday Morning RPG main theme (created by none other than Transformers: The Movie composer Vince DiCola), scratch ’n sniff stickers, and more. It’s a fittingly grand version of a game that plays a critical part in the history of Limited Run Games.
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