There's no Save button in Legend of the Ultimate Dragon, and there aren't going to be save slots. I went back and forth on that for a while, so here's why.
The game saves after every step you take. You never have to think about it, and if the power goes out, you lose a step at most.
That part was never the question. The question was whether to also give you slots. Save here, try something, don't like how it went, load. Most RPGs I grew up on worked that way and I don't hold it against any of them.
But this game has a Hardcore mode where death is permanent, and it has people who react to how you treat them. If you can save before a conversation, be rude to somebody, watch how they take it, and then load and be nice, you didn't really make a choice. You previewed one. Same with Hardcore. A permanent death you can reload past isn't permanent.
So I picked one save that moves forward with you. What you did is what happened.
Once I'd decided that, I had a new problem. If there's only one save and the game is the only thing that manages it, it had better never lose it. A save slot system gives you a backup whether you meant to make one or not. Mine doesn't. So the save itself had to get a lot more careful.
Here's what it does now. When the game saves, it doesn't write over your old save. It writes the new one to a separate file first, and only once that's completely written does it swap it into place. If the game crashes halfway through saving, or the computer shuts off, the old save is still sitting there whole. You lose one step, not the journey.
It also keeps the save it just replaced as a spare. If you ever start the game and your save is damaged, it sets the damaged file aside with the date on it, checks the spare, and puts that back if it's good. Then the title screen tells you what happened. If the spare is bad too, it tells you that, and you start a new game.
That last part took me a minute. There was another way to go. When a save is damaged, you can try to patch it up. Take the parts that still read and fill in the rest with defaults. You'd keep most of your progress.
I said no. A patched save is a save of a game you never played. Your gold might come back, but whether you'd already spoken to someone, or turned them down, might not, and you'd have no idea which parts were real. I'd rather tell you plainly that the save is gone than hand you something that looks like your game and isn't. And the damaged file is never deleted, so if it's ever something I can look at and fix properly, it's still there.
One more rule falls out of all this. When a Hardcore character dies, the spare gets thrown away too. Otherwise a damaged save could put you right back to before you died. That would undo the whole point of the mode.
Then there was a smaller thing that turned out to matter more than I expected. When I played it, I didn't trust it. I'd go to quit and hesitate, because nothing on the screen said my progress was safe. The game was saving the whole time. It just never told me.
So the pause menu says it now, in one line: "Your journey is saved after every step."
LOUD: Pause Menu
And when you quit, it saves one more time and shows "Saved." for a moment before it closes. I thought about renaming the buttons to Save and Quit, but the line already says it, so they kept their names.
That little "Saved." had its own bug. If you pressed Escape during that moment, the quit got stuck halfway and never finished. So now the game ignores buttons for that beat. It's the kind of thing you only find by doing the wrong thing on purpose.
None of this is something you'll notice when it works. That's sort of the point. The best a save system can do is never come up. But the decision underneath it is one I care about. In this game, what you did is what happened, and I'm not going to let a save file quietly change that.
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