Tenbu Saga

Long-running series of role-playing games. Although the series overall has a more fantasy focus, some installments have had more steampunk or science fiction elements. The stories of the games are somewhat loosely interconneted.

The first Tenbu Saga game was a hit at the time, but most people today will admit it was a bit of a clunker with awkward battle mechanics and cumbersome inventory management. TSII and TSIII, however, were introduced on newer, more powerful gaming platforms and feature a memorable cast of characters, improved battles, and one of the all-time great video game scores.

Tenbu Saga IV: The Last Kimu (released on the new Manaseed-Z console) tried for a radical reinvention of the series, but ended up dividing the base. It's a "love it or hate it" game. Follow-on games are a return to form for the series and have received consistently good reviews and commercial success. Some "true fans" claim that everything after III was total crap.

However, the most disastrous Tenbu Saga game is probably Tenbu Saga Online. The series obviously struggled to put its signature characters and world-building into an online persistent world, turning the richly imagined eRPG setting of the previous games into a "dull, gray, grindfest." Even the music wasn't very good. Perhaps was the killer was the game's "pay to win" model that led many to call it a cheap "cash-in," and the game struggled to survive in a market niche dominated by White and Gold Online and Battle Engine Online.