Here is a bunch of info and such I have found at RPGamer.com:

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Namco, publishers of the space shooter/RPG Sigma Star Saga for the Game Boy Advance, have recently brought the game's official website to life in all its intergalactic glory. There's a plethora of info available for the clicking, spanning nine brand-spankin' new links including game and character info, concept art, screenshots and more.

Sigma Star Saga mixes RPG elements (weapon and spaceship customization) with a "space shooter battle system." Players assume the role of fighter pilot Ian Recker as he embarks on a mission of revenge against the Krill, a ruthless alien race that attacked Earth and defeated his strike squad, the Sigma Team. While on foot, players will utilize a gun to attack foes that can be upgraded during the course of the game. There will also be battles that will occur in Ian's spaceship. These battles will occur with a classic shooter style battle system.

Sigma Star Saga recently went gold and will be released in August. Look forward to RPGamer's review of the title when it ships.

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I got a chance to check out one of Namcos most unique titles ever today. The story follows an ace fighter pilot who flies as part of the Sigma Star squad against the neferious Krill, an alien race which is at war with humanity. Assigned by high command, the hero is kidnapped by the krill so that he may infiltrate them. During this he has a krill parasite attached to him which can gain experience and increase his power both in the ship and on the ground. Here we began traveling about the ground to first explore the game's combat.

At first glance the gameplay seemed very slow paced. The ground combat being limited to only horizontal and vertical, making the motion for combat pretty awkward as often there was a need to target things that were diagonal to yourself, requiring moving to line up.

However, once I started getting "beamed" to our ship and the side scrolling fun began everything changed. When thinking about this title, first picture an ordinary action RPG. Now remove the random encounters and replace them with levels from R-type. Here you can level up your ship by collecting small energy spheres that are dropped by killed enemies. You progress through a battle area by killing a preset amount of enemies for each beamed up encounter. As you complete storyline battles you gain access to other planets.

While it was slightly interesting, the game did not truly hold my attention. Whether it was the fault of the game or the place I was playing it in, I did not enjoy the experience.

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So, unexpectedly, I found myself at the Namco booth today. Shouldn't have been over there, but hey, Klaxor wanted to go and they wanted to talk to us. We got there early though, so we stopped and checked out a few of their RPGs before chatting with the fine folks there. Off to the side in the GBA section, both Klaxor and I spent a bit of time with Sigma Star Saga, the latest GBA RPG from Namco.

To be clear to those who were curious, and why not for I was among those who questioned early on if this was in truth an RPG, there can be no doubt on playing it that it is in fact one. Nothing else quite has that much text in it and that sort of feel. To those who are old enough to remember Guardian Legends, this feels like a spiritual successor to it in gameplay, complete with the nifty spaceship battles and exciting ground combat. Or would if it truly had those.

I'd like to give a better note to such a concept than I can and I know had I experienced it sitting down in a comfortable area, I would've been much more willing to put up with what this game had to offer. As it was, all it had to offer me was boredom. I started off from the start in an introductory space battle system that some, rightfully, would compare to gradius, only it's not as fun. Likely due to being an intro level, I was flying a ship that was slow, fired a shot at a time, and generally just navigated around equally slow enemies moving in pretty uninteresting patterns. It simply didn't seize with it's intro stage at all, not being particularly engaging or flashy. Moving into the plot, we find our hero, the pilot of the ship from early on, traveling around a military base, talking to his friends, and eventually getting assigned a high priority important mission from the commander, all played out in standard RPG style. >From here, the hero is assigned to infiltrate the enemy, an alien race that goes by the name of the Krill.

The hero is then captured by the krill who, thinking him a criminal, offer him the chance at revenge against the humans who have spurned him. Attaching a parasite to him, he's given a chance to prove himself in combat against a slow moving test enemy who is the current champion of combat. Despite this being an intro fight, it revealed a few problems with the system, most critically the inability to move or fire diagonally, making lining up shots a bit of a pain. Generally not a good showing on this end.

Talking with the folks, it's evident that later on, there's some more fun stuff coming down the game with the ship getting gradius option style power ups and highly customizable weapons systems alongside an experience system coming into play and random battle 'space combat' scenes, but from what I saw, the game was a slow placed blend of weak elements from a few genres blended together without the energy to really bring it out as a top game. Possibly something to rent and check out, but look out for a little while of boring stuff before you get any real freedom to cut loose with the system.

Now despite our pretty leery experiences with the game itself, we were lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with two of the folks deep into the project: Philip Cohen the Associate Producer and Tara Samuel the Product Marketing Manager. Asked on how they ended up with a game that really sat along the boundaries of three different Genres, Philip told us they hadn't really intended such.

They just started off with their concept and kept building it up and before they knew it they had folks going "Hey, um, you know this kind of feels like a spiritual successor to Guardian Legend." Asking about the development, it turns out that the game is being entirely built here by Namco Hometek.

The game is supposedly about twenty hours long with plenty of storyline, Philip admitting he was pretty surprised by the amount of dialogue they'd ended up with, as the player follows the adventures of your rogue agent hero as he infiltrates the Krill and gains their confidence fighting against humanity in his mission to find the Krill superweapon.

They indicated the best part of the game was really the customizable weapons data. The ship worked on three types of weapons data that determined what you shot, how you shot it, and some other traits which could be switched in and out part by part to put together customized weapon systems which the player could see right there. Overall, it was a real pleasure sitting down with them.

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The RPG Info Man strikes again

this place is like dead...

Im getting this for xmas