Unlimited Saga

Unlimited Saga (アンリミテッド: サガ, Anrimiteddo: Saga) is a Squaresoft RPG for the Playstation 2. It is the ninth game in the SaGa series. Originally released in Japan in December 2002, the game was later made available for North American players in June 2003 and in Europe the following October.

Plot
The game features seven protagonists to choose from:

Laura - An ex-pirate, aiding Henri, the prince of the fallen kingdom of Escata. Ruby - A novice fortuneteller going on a quest with her sister Sapphire. Mythe - The assisant of a famous inventor, who falls in love with a silver haired girl he sees on a painting.

Ventus - A carrier who wishes to find out who murdered his brother.

Kurt - A former knight who wishes to discover the myster of his cursed gauntlet.

Judy - The youngest member of a family of wizards. She must save her family.

Armic - A member of the Chapa tribe, sent on a quest to gather ingriedients for a ceremony to summon rain.

While all characters have their own storyline, they do encounter each other during their adventures. One of the main elements which connects all stories is the legend of Iskandar and The Seven Wonders. The characters tend to stumble across each other at the Festival of Regina Leone in Vaftom, however, some join another main characters' party at other points in the different scenarios.

Characters
Aside from the main cast, the game features many recruitable characters of which some are random encounters who just decide to join and others are intergrated into the character's plot. However, no matter the case... not even if the character is a main character or not... all characters are present in 2 scenarios, hence when playing the game with a different character, you will unavoidably see both new and old faces. Each main character scenario has 9 playable characters of which you'll have to later pick 7 ones to take on each mission. However there is an exception: one single character is present in one scenario only (that being Ruby's scenario) and that is Iskandar.

Also worthy of note that some of the characters are splits amongs scenarios in specific ways. Each main character has another main character to recruit, with the exception of Laura and Armic, where Laura has both Judy and Armic, while Armic has none. Also In Judy's Scenario, the player is able to recruit her entire family, but in all other scenarios the family is split: Judy is in Laura's scenario, her father is in Ventus'es scenario, her mother in Armic's, her brother in Ruby's, her sister in Mythe's and her grandpa in Kurt's.

You can find the entire list of characters with their attributes here:

List of characters in Unlimited Saga

Game System
Unlimited Saga was highly experimental and featured a lot of concepts and idea which seemed new even to fans of the SaGa series, moreso to people who never had connection with other titles.
 * LP- The Life Point system returns once again, however in this case it's even more important than in other SaGa games.
 * Growth Panel- A character developement system where the character would gain 1 new panel after each quest.
 * Reel System- During battle the level and strength of a command you'd use would be determined by a slot machine.
 * Board game- outside of battle, the character is a silver figure that moves on the map, field by field, turn by turn.