Anyone willing to attempt a patch for Rastan Saga to add colors to enemies (an remove music slowdowns)?
I would buy a cartridge in case 
And the sound pausing between screen transitions, I don’t know how any developer with a shred of pride could even accept this. It is trivial to avoid this. They must’ve not cared for their product.
Not sure, my friend. It could indeed have been a shortage of lax. Or maybe a lack of knowledge of the hardware, among the team that was assigned to do the MSX port. At least they ported it in-house, so we didn't get an MSX1 Green Beret with vaguely discernable Schwarzenegger and monster sprites.
Anyway, you know how much I love the Xak series (on MSX), but I sometimes still wonder about the developers play-testing their own creation, witnessing Xak II and Gazzel pausing the music whenever a character says something (even worse when their picture must be displayed), and deciding: "Yeah. That seems okay." 
In this case, it may have been the result of a bit too much care for certain aspects of the game (and/or assuming most people'd play it on machines with more RAM, anyway).