Just a few months remain until Shouzou Kaga’s free indie game Vestaria Saga I is released to the public. Despite its humble origins, the game has been attracting a good amount of attention due to Kaga’s name.

Hard Worker: 15% chance of acting again.

While it’s nice to be excited, Kaga posted a friendly message on his blog advising fans to keep their expectations in check. Apparently he’s been receiving a lot of encouraging messages, which he’s happy about, but he’s afraid people are forgetting what the game really is.

We’ve been calling Vestaria Saga an “indie game”, but that’s not to say it’s comparable to a commercial indie game. Essentially, it’s simply Mr. Kaga’s “fan game” that he’s been making with the Fire Emblem equivalent of RPG Maker, with the help of a few like-minded volunteers.

So definitely don’t treat this as the fully-fledged follow up to TearRing Saga or Berwick Saga or Kaga’s latest attempt to dethrone the Fire Emblem series (although you can as a joke). Still, like I implied in the comments, any game release from Kaga is an exciting occasion, even if there’s no budget involved!

In addition, Kaga remarked about numerous requests from overseas fans who want to help translate the game. Sadly, it seems Kaga doesn’t have the additional time and effort to co-operate, since he’s busy working on the game (and eventually part 2).

More importantly, it appears SRPG Studio does not have in-built translation support and the license prevents Kaga from modifying the engine. We’ll take this as a subtle hint that we’re meant to translate the game independently; after all, Mr. Kaga didn’t say “no” to the idea!

Below is Mr. Kaga’s message in full; translation kindly provided by Kirokan.

Please keep your expectations in check (laughs)

I’ve received a lot of e-mails from all over, filled with encouragement. Thank you very much. (A lot of them included flattery, haha.)

Though there is a lot of hope for this project, it is far from an industrial-level product.

It’s pretty much just a toy made on a simple game-making tool, and nothing more. Even if you play and like it, it will never be at that level, unfortunately.

I guess you could also say it’s like making cotton candy. If a professional craftsman was to make cotton candy, it’s still not exactly something notable to sell, right?

That’s all this is. Nothing of great importance. Please do not keep high expectations for this project!

Even though preparing the game (documents, assets, etc.) is a cooperative effort from many different people, making the game itself is a one-man effort (because the game-making tool literally prevents us from working together on it). It’s just me, punching in keys on the keyboard one-by-one. It’s why it’s taken so long! (laughs)

I’ve received several offers from abroad, saying things like “I want to help with a translation!” At the moment, with the way the game is currently written, I cannot accept such offers. I haven’t had time to even look over the text yet. Please understand that it would also mean making separate text characters, and that I am not allowed to mod or change [the tool] in any way.

–Shouzou Kaga, from his blog.