Small Saga follows the journey of a young mouse, Verm, who experiences a tragedy at the hands of the "Yellow God." Unwilling to accept his place in the world, Verm sets out to gather allies on his quest to become the first God Slayer. While Verm's tail may be cut short, his tale will prove to be long and arduous.
The narrative of Small Saga is a revenge story, with Verm's character in particular drawing quite a few stylistic and behavioral cues from the Berserk series. The tale begins when Verm and his brother set out to Heaven, The Land of Gods, to collect enough seeds to feed their family through the winter. However, their journey ends in tragedy when a god neither had encountered before, The Yellow God, begins a trail of destruction through Heaven. After vowing revenge against the Yellow God, Verm trains himself to wield a legendary God Weapon, a feat of which few rodents are capable.
Verm's journey leads him to various places across the lands of Rodentia, which if one hasn't surmised at this point, is a kingdom of rodents near what I presume to be modern London. As he travels from the lower depths of the isolationist mole burrows, to the highest branches of the fascist grey squirrel autocracy, Verm gathers allies to his cause, each with their own motives and backstory.
I like that Small Saga is very endearing game, which constantly plays upon scale to make a rather grim story consistently amusing. As one may expect from a JRPG style adventure, while killing god is the ultimate goal, the writing takes time to explore discrimination and methods of governance. Small Saga does a good job not overburdening the player with side-quests, allowing the player to focus exclusively on the main story with no grinding necessary.
Small Saga is a turn-based JRPG style adventure. In other words, there is really nothing here that is re-inventing the wheel. For experienced RPG players, one will likely find a fairly optimal strategy early on, which will be mostly unchanged until the credits roll. Were the game to feature a lot of random encounters, this would've gotten stale extremely quickly. However, Small Saga is almost entirely boss focused, with the emphasis really being placed more upon creative design.
For lack of a better way to convey my thoughts, Small Saga is very easy. The game is devoid of random encounters, so leveling up is tied to story progression. Verm eventually assembles a party whose composition roughly translates to a warrior, black mage, dragoon, and bard. However, none of them have enough moves to really introduce much complexity into combat. I found that simply turning Verm into a glass cannon, supported by AOE from the mage and support abilities from the other two classes was sufficient for nearly all encounters. The game does try to mix things up a bit by changing the party composition periodically.
There are two main RPG mechanics to Small Saga. The first is an equipment system featuring four slots for each character: weapon, armor, and two accessories/consumables. As Verm progresses on his journey, equipment is almost always numerically better than the last item discovered, so there's very little strategy involved beyond remembering to update item loadouts periodically. The other RPG mechanic is the skill tree, which is unique to each character and is not possible to fully complete. Thus, there is some slight customization around feats and stat increases; however, these can be reassigned freely throughout the game.
Small Saga is a game I'd recommend to others. I appreciated that it was a pretty tightly written narrative for a JRPG, and enjoyed the pixel art from start to finish. The gameplay is not particularly deep, creeping into being repetitive; however, limiting the fighting to single encounter bosses mitigates that a bit. While its setting may be tiny, the impression it left was not.
