90s Korean childhood games the West barely saw – Part 1: Farland Saga

I’m starting a small series about 90s games that were pretty big in Korea but almost unknown in the West. For the first post, I wanted to talk about a tactical JRPG that basically lived on every PC magazine CD when I was a kid: Farland Saga (released as Farland Tactics here).

Farland Saga is a mid-90s strategy RPG by TGL that started on PC and was later ported to Sega Saturn and PlayStation in Japan. In Korea we got the localized PC version under the Farland Tactics title, so for a certain age group it was just “that tactics game everyone had installed.”

Visually it sits somewhere between Fire Emblem and Tactics Ogre: isometric grid, turn-based battles, a young hero and his friends caught in a war between humans and demons, stitched together with very 90s anime-style scenes. If you look at screenshots now it just screams mid-90s Japanese PC game in the best way.

If you replay it today, the tactics really aren’t that deep. Battles are straightforward and the balance is rough. Nobody here loved it because it was some perfectly tuned strategy masterpiece. What made it stick was the story, the characters and the BGM. I first played Farland Saga 2 from a magazine bonus CD, liked it so much that I went backwards and tracked down 1 on another disc. For a lot of Korean PC kids my age, a few seconds of a Farland battle theme is enough to drop you straight back in front of a beige Windows 95 machine after school.

In 2025, City Connection released Farland Saga I & II Saturn Tribute on modern platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Switch and PC via Steam, using the Saturn versions and adding things like rewind and quick save. It sounded like the perfect way to revisit the series… until it turned out that the games, including all menus and in-game text, are available only in Japanese. No English, not even Korean, so for most Western players it’s still effectively invisible unless you read Japanese.

I don’t think Farland Saga is some lost “best tactics game ever,” but it’s a good example of how different regions grew up with completely different “default” titles. For a chunk of Korean PC kids in the late 90s, this was just the fantasy tactics game that showed up on your magazine CD and quietly became part of your childhood. Outside East Asia, a lot of people have never even heard the name.

TL;DR: Farland Saga (Farland Tactics in Korea) is a mid-90s tactical JRPG that spread here through PC magazine CDs. The gameplay is simple, but the story, characters, and BGM are hugely nostalgic. It never got an English release, and even the 2025 Farland Saga I & II Saturn Tribute is Japanese-only, so most Western players still haven’t seen it.