Developer WayForward and their partnerLimited Run Gameshave opened pre-orders for Sigma Star Saga DX. Players can now buy the new edition of the classic Game Boy Advance title through theLimited Run Gamesstore with a standard and a collector’s edition available up to April 6, when they will stop sales. Shipping is estimated to happen from November 24 to 30.
A New Edition
Sigma Star Saga is a unique game that mixes shoot’em up battles and top-down role-playing game moments. It originally came out back in 2005 on theGame Boy Advancewith Namco publishing it in America and Atari doing the same for Europe. Bandai Namco still owns the license for the title, but the companies managed to reach an agreement for the new retro release to happen twenty years after the original launch.
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Not only is the development team at WayForward bringing the title back, but the new release will be an enhanced edition that will come in a cartridge that works on Game Boy Advance devices. The improvements include quality-of-life upgrades and fixes based on player feedback, making the experience smoother than ever before.
According to the development team, the original game was often regarded as having random shoot’em up battles show up too frequently, so they toned it down to half as much. This change led them to also rebalance the experience point distribution to avoid making the whole game harder than it originally was and avoid forcing players to grind to properly face the challenges.
It’s now faster to move around the top-down maps and goal markers make maps clearer for newcomers to figure out the direction to go. Autoshooting in the shoot ‘em up portions has been improved so that all weapons are faster now, but players can still do it manually and hit the mark with even more speed than the auto shots.
Hit boxes have also been improved to make the player’s ship smaller and enemy targets easier to detect. The same goes for the platforms in the top-down sequences, which had a more strict player detection calculation and could lead to accidental falls in the original game.
Text for dialogues and item descriptions has seen an overhaul, and some inconsistencies were ironed out to improve the experience. There are also more save points so players don’t lose much progress over failing and many legacy bugs were fixed to avoid circumstances like endless battle sequences.
The game’s Standard Edition costs US$ 49.99 while the Collector’s Edition goes up to US$ 99.99. The more basic version only includes the cartridge in a box that mimics the old GBA packages, but the more expensive one includes various goodies, such as a double-sided poster with a map on the other side, a coin with Psyme and Scarlet faces, a CD soundtrack and a keychain with Recker’s ship. The collector’s edition comes in a deluxe box with foil slipcover and the cartridge has a galactic blue color.
The improvements include quality-of-life upgrades and fixes based on player feedback, making the experience smoother than ever before.
Sigma Star Saga will also be released on modern systems, with the Carbon Engine port being handled by Limited Run Games. This alternate edition of the retro classic, however, will be released in digital and physical formats after the vintage GBA one. More details about the modern console version should be released in the upcoming months.
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