SaGa Franchise

[Wolf Kanno]

Update time!

Oof, what an evening of wasted time. So I finally finished the Cygnus pirate issue, the boss of the area wasn't too hard but I was a bit annoyed to discover everyone I recruited left afterwards. I was able to recruit the robot doctor back but I've lost my Mystics and my other two humans.

My next stop was a slums type place where Red spend his time chasing after a monk who is selling some kind of drug related the Black X. The annoying part was accidentally discovering a side dungeon in the middle of the main sewer dungeon and wasting a bit too much time there. I was not doing too bad until my monster got killed because every power form I get for him also gives him ridiculously low LP. So I had to reset and lost a lot of progress. That mission is a bust for Red as well. In the next town, which is Japanese theme, we meet a robot trying to find enlightenment and just as he was about to spill the beans on Black X, Red gets called back to the Cygnus. The last area was a jungle world where a tournament is being held for masked fighters. Red slips away from the party to enter the tournament as Alkaiser and I managed to spark like four really good techs. The final boss of the tournament said some cryptic things that has me a bit worried, but we'll see where that leads. Afterwards, Red spots Dr. Klein, the former colleague for Red's dad and the man that got their family involved with Black X. We chase him through the castle and I manage to get a new sword for Red, but this leads nowhere as well and Red gets called back to the Cygnus once again. Deciding enough is enough, Red quits the crew to strike out on his own and from here the game has opened up. The first town I was left at is some backwoods sake making country town that is filled with some high end monsters that allow Red to spark an endgame sword tech I recognized from Re: Universe. I explored a few other places and recruited another Robot to the team, but I'm actually looking for a specific character named Gen who is the game's best swordsman. I also want another shot at a Mystic, but I'm not sure if Red gets to recruit any full time ones.

My team so far:

Red - Has been doing a fairly good job sparking techs between both swords and melee. He's got a good assortment but I'm trying to get him to spark a defensive sword move he sparked in one of my botched attempts at the pirate quest. Otherwise, I'm also hoping to spark more of his Alkaiser moveset but I may have screwed myself in this area. My monster character prevents red from using the transformation and that guy is also tanky as hell so if he does get knocked out, it usually means I'm in trouble. The other issue is that with all the stat gains I've given to Red, his Alkaiser form is scary overpowered so it's hard for him to spark his signature moves when his basic attack is OHKO things. Otherwise I'm pretty content with Red.

Cotton - My monster has been pretty snazzy. Found a guide I'm using to navigate how he works and I must say SF1 might have my favorite mechanics for monsters. Basically the monsters form is not based on what it absorbs but what skills it has, so the challenge is to find the right combination of skills to get the form you want. The other trick is that Monsters get a permanent boost to HP for every new skill they acquire so even when you do make your main monster, there is still reason to absorb enemy monsters after battle. Cotton has gone back and forth between undead and bug type creatures. My endgame is to get him to become a Dullahan but this might be a bit more challenging than expected trying to get certain skills. For now, he's a Ahkegi which is some weird zombie centipede creature with good speed and strength. My favorite skill I gained for him was a party boosting stat skill that raises speed and power exponentially.

Robot - Can't remember his name but he's a doctor. Robots are a bit weird in this game as they are a cross between their SaGa 2 incarnations and monsters from this game. Like the old games, their stats are purely determined by their equipment and different gear raises different stats so it doesn't take much to make them beefy if you have a bunch of armor and weapons lying around. They seem geared around using guns as their main weapons but can't actually learn gun skills. Instead, robots learn unique robot skills by downloading data from defeated robots, the issue here is that while monsters seem to have a much higher skill set they can learn whereas robots feel a bit more limited. My robot for instance has learned two useful defensive skills against machine gun and missile fire, two status spells that are situational at best, and one support skill that raises the damage guns do. I get why a lot of guides love robots because they are mostly predictable in building them and they're pure stat creatures. Still, I kind of find him boring. The fact my fourth member is another robot doesn't exactly fill me with joy.

So I'm probably going to keep my main team limited to one monster and one robot. Robots are boring but practical and monsters are fun but way too time consuming to dedicate to multiple party members. I'm hoping to recruit one mystic and then will likely round out my team with another human. I'm thinking either Gen or maybe try out magic with Rouge if I can find him.

I think the biggest issue I have with the game so far, besides the pre-rendered backgrounds making it too hard to find your way around half the time, is that skills are limited to a character. Red may have sparked a crap ton of skills, but it does me little good because only Red can use them, if I get another human, I'll need to have them spark all those techs again if I want them to use it. It's mainly annoying because the SNES entries had better mechanics in place. Granted, sparking moves in this entry seems to be way easier than other entries so perhaps this complaint will be a moot point once I assemble a real team and get to spend more time leveling people up. I am also sad to learn that Red, much like Blue, is only available in his own story. Though it also looks like very few of the main characters really cross path with each other except maybe Lute, Emilia, and Fuse.

[Wolf Kanno]

Had a fairly productive evening. Spent way too long in the Sei Tomb, but manged to acquire the three artifacts to go further in though I opted not too. The Murkamo is a nice upgrade from the Ceramic sword, but oddly enough the better weapon I acquired was a cursed sword given to Red when he got possessed by a Living Sword enemy. Has about +10 more attack than the other sword and raises all my stats by 10 as well. Sure you can't remove it without using the Final Strike move but considering there are sword techs that require two swords and I have four weapon slots to begin with... yeah not a bad deal. May try to acquire a few more for the rest of the team after I read up on it a bit more.

I did finally acquire a few more party members, namely Rouge and Lute who both start off pathetically weak compared to the rest of my team. I kind of want to grind a bit with them, but the other part of me thinks I should wait until I acquire a few more people like Gen and Emilia. I also have the opportunity to start dabbling in magic but not sure where I really want to start. The first available to me is Light and Shadow magic. Light looks way more useful out the gate, but I get the feeling Shadow will prove to be more useful once you acquire the higher spells. It looks like magic is a bit more complicated in this entry than the others, barring Unlimited SaGa of course which is still the most convoluted entry in the series. Can't wait for the remaster of that game, since it's likely going to bring a few people around to this thread. :p

I also got to do the Junk shop trick, but I really need a faster way to get some cash. Which is one of the more annoying parts of the game. Money doesn't come easy unless you exploit a few glitches in the game. Unlike other RPGs I know of, you can't actually sell your full inventory. There are only three shops in the game that will buy stuff off of you and good luck getting any real cash for it either. I would need to grind the Junk shop glitch for 99 of both sword items I can sell from there to reach the money quota needed to start the gold glitch and make real money. The other two annoying things in the game is that their is no run command which is useful in other entries in case you encounter an enemy but don't spawn the monster you want to exploit sparking potential or rare drops. Likewise, the game has also decided to drop a Defend command which was really annoying when I had Mystics on my team because neither of them could fight fast enough to absorb monsters before the rest of my team killed everything. So it's a lot harder to control the flow of battle in this entry.

I'm largely in the open part of the game. I have a lead in Koorong and two other towns, but for now, I think I'm going to just see who I can recruit and level up a bit. I did manage to turn my monster into a Dullahan and I must say, I'm not disappointed with its stats. My only real beef with him is that I need some better skills for it. I can't decide if I want to keep Gale Slash or Light ball as my group hitting spell but I know I don't really need both, and I frankly bet there are better abilities than either if I play around a enough. I know I want to replace Stun Gaze with either the Stone or Charm version, but I'll need to be careful since Stun Gaze is one of the skills that allows him to have this form so I need one of the other of the Gaze skills to replace it in order to keep him how he is. I kind of want to get Scissors back because that skill was surprisingly powerful for a 0 cost physical attack. So I'll need to look up a guide and see what I want to build him up as. My monster is easily my most well rounded character in terms of abilities.

Another plan is to make a team of just Red and my robots so I can finally spark the rest of the Alkaiser skills since robots seem to be exempt from the whole secret identity clause Red signed. I'm specifically trying to get one skill because it's used in an event in the game that guarantees the best Alkaiser move with spark. I also just like how flashy the abilities look despite having way better normal skills already available. Still, I want to see everything he can do.

I'll write up a proper character breakdown after I've spent more time with Lute and Rouge. I also still plan on recruiting a few more people since I don't have to stick to a six party limit like RS3. The game is picking up.

77565

[Wolf Kanno]

Oof, today was a rough patch. I made the mistake of returning to Lute's hometown of Yorktown and checking out the swamp. I was trying to get stone gaze off of the Basilisks in the area and instead moved the battle rank high enough to turn everything in the area into a Kraken because apparently this is one of two zones where the battle rank for the area is two levels higher than whatever your current rank is due to a quest here. So I had a hell of time trying to get out of here because the Kraken is likely an endgame level monster with boss stats. Like the critter has about 13,000hp, uses a powerful tidal wave that can OHKO everyone except Red because he's equipped with a shield I stole from Sei's Tomb that makes him immune to the attack. The critter can also attack up to six times in a round if it doesn't use the big attack. I had to make a team with Red and two Robots to get through the area because my team is too fragile to survive. I really wanted one of my mons to absorb the Kraken for that tidal wave attack but neither of them could survive the attack and their strong forms are countered by giving them low LP. It took me about an hour to safely get out of their and I had to waste a valuable item just so my team could survive.

Afterwards, I started the Aecane Quest so I could recruit Gen and with Lute in my team I recruited his friend Thunder the monster. I returned to Koroong and teamed up with Anna to infiltrate Shuzer's base and finally allowed Red the chance to avenge his family, but the evil Black X organization is still alive and well and Red won't stand for anyone to suffer what he had to so Black X must be stopped because of truth and justice. Other than that, I'm mostly just exploring the areas and seeing who I can recruit and realizing the only real quests are the ones connected to obtaining the higher tier magic. I am also abusing the Junk Shop glitch so I can finally get some money. I've burned through all my healing item and my biggest issue with most of my new recruits has been an issue of outfitting from better stuff than their starting gear.

Team build is as follows:

Red - Probably spent a bit too much time leveling him early in the game but Red is pretty awesome as a main lead. He's been switching back and forth between the stronger regular swords and katanas to earn more skills. I sill haven't done the serious training for his Alkaiser form, but it's nice to know I can build a team with just him and the robots. He is also one melee tech away from learning the DSC move. So overall he's a powerhouse. Iam not going to bother teaching him magic since I believe it affects his ability to keep his crown that lowers his WP cost. My main goal besides the Alkaiser list of moves is to learn Rising Sun and Sprinkler. While he starts with swords, Red is surprisingly good at sparking melee moves.

Cotton - Has finally become a Dullahan and after a few more misadventures where I lost if again while trying to get him better skills, he's back where I need him to be. He's the most well rounded member of my team with a strong party buff move, a healing spell and several offensive moves that his high stats take advantage of. Pretty content where he is and may likely bench him for the moment since I don;t want to risk losing his current form.

Doctor Robot - He's been a bit awkward. His innate weapons and skills are pretty useful but I've been having a hard time finding good skills for him. I think I may have finally got him some decent gear to round out his stats but I still have some serious qualms with guns in this game. Good for crown control, not as useful for killing things quickly except for the laser cannon he has permanently equipped. He's been benched at the moments since robots are not as common enemies and the ones I do encounter already have had their skills downloaded by him.

Engineer Robot - They are a bit more well rounded due to learning a mech skill for melee attack. His big issue is that his healing ability is only useful for other robots but he's been a happy accident with better overall stats than Doctor. He's also benched for the moment until I can get some money and fully upgrade his gear. Robots feel like one of those races that are boring but practical.

Rouge - You know outside of being a squishy mage, he's been surprisingly good so far. He sparks sword techs fairly well but sadly I can't let him use them since he loses out on his Crown to lower magic cost if he has any equipped. Realm magic is pretty good and he sparked Vermillion Sand fairly early which is surprisingly powerful. He's been gaining stats at a decent pace and I am coming close to deciding which spells I'm going for so he can gain their Gifts and learn their higher tier spells. I was debating about going with his skill set from Re;Universe but have decided against it. Light is just too useful. I really appreciate the fact this game let's you preview magic before you buy so you can finally see what spells do. I'm thinking Arcane, Light, and maybe trying to recruit the Time Lord so I can get Space isntead.

Lute - Lute could be better, he's useful for recruiting people surprisingly enough but he starts off with lower stats than normal so it;s been a struggle to keep him alive thanks to being a tad grind happy in the early game. He's good at sparking moves though, so his skill set is looking impressive, he just needs better stats to make them worthwhile. I'll probably spend a bit more time on him soon to get him back in the fold. I may experiment with guns with him as well. I did give him Arcane Magic so I could have a good defensive buff and a means to cure status magic.

Gen - Lives up to his reputation as a sword master. Guy not only sparks moves left and right, but he's been sparking high end skills fairly quickly. Here's hoping he'll earn Sprinkler soon. I'm keeping him sword focus and have him sticking to samurai swords. I may check to see if I can get him his own cursed sword to get a boost to his stats. He's been getting stats faster than the other humans and is starting to come close to catching up to Red which is nice. He just needs better gear.

Thunder - I do feel monsters are more fun to develop than robots. Thunder lost his cool forms and is stuck as some lowly boar monster, but his skills et is shaping up nicely. I just need to figure out what I want his end game to look like. I'll need to level him up a bit more by eating more monsters, so he's doing more of the fighting than Cotton at the moment. I kind of hope I can get him back into his Ogre Lord form because that thing was a beast.

Annie - She's doing okay. She needs better gear but she's not quite as talented as the other humans in terms of sparking moves which has been a bit disappointing. Course that's likely my fault since the enemy encounters are strong and her starting gear does little to help her survival rate. Again, I'm hoping that better gear will see her shine, but she's likely going to get benched unless I use her as another magic guinea pig, Still, the biggest issues with humans is that the smaller weapon selections means they overlap too often, and while humans are scary overpowered, it makes team building boring.

Overall, I'm thinking my final team is going to be Red, Cotton, Gen, Doctor, and Rouge. Gives me a nice spread of everything the game has to offer except for Mystic but they don;t seem to like mingling with the other races.

[Wolf Kanno]

Huge update

I've mainly worked on doing all of the Magic subquests (unless you're Blue, then it's just your quest). I made the terrible mistake of giving Red Light Magic, which barred him from doing the Shadow quest and denied me my first possible Mystic recruit Silence. In fact getting a permanent Mystic on Red's team can be a real pain in the ass unless you're using a guide and even then I'm still miffed that of the three possible recruits, I only managed to snag one.

In fact, I have maxed out my possible recruits which is fourteen characters in the original. In the remaster, you can recruit everybody that's possible to recruit in your chosen MC's scenario. After getting Anna to join, I was able to speak with her boss and gained the opportunity to either recruit him, or Riza. I opted for Riza since I wanted more females on my team. Trying to get the Shield Card netted me Fuse finally, and goign after the Gold card earned me Emilia. So I have four of the possible eight main characters on my team. I could not get the Time Lord or Space Magic quests to start. One of the guides I was checking was done incorrectly and the requirement is that I needed to complete two of the trials for the Gift from two different schools on my main character. So I had to go get the final Arcane card by doing the drinking challenge that sent me back to Kraken swamp. Thankfully I had gained some better stats and techs by this point so it was less of a hassle. I still had to save scum my way through but that's because the challenge has you wandering the swamp while intoxicated and you start with a different status effect every battle that's associated with being drunk. Charm usually meant a TPK if it landed on enough people so save scum I did.

With Arcane out of the way, I was finally able to get Annie to drag me to Despair which was a pain to navigate. Afterwards I got swallowed by Tanzer and had recruit Fei-on and a Slime. With one slot left on my team, I opted to finish the Time magic quest and get the Time Lord, my lone Mystic, to join my team. I still need to find the other two runes. One I know is in a ave beneath Koroong but I can't get the quest to activate properly and the boss room just has me fight low level worms and then get booted out. The other rune is in a cave in Shrike that won;t let me in. I'm hoping that not recruiting Annie's boss isn't going to screw me out of that one, especially since Rune was the magic I was hoping to have Rouge master. Currently, I'm in a world created by the guardian of Space magic trying to earn the right to learn it. Not sure if I'm going to be able to kill the guardian for the gift either since I get the feeling that's a Blue exclusive event. The only other thing I need to do is finsih Sei's tomb and get the Kusanagi for Gen, though the Cometblade is pretty sweet as well.

Once these quests are done, I'll go back to finishing Red's scenario. As for my team:

Red - He's a beast to be honest. The dude managed to spark one of the best sword techs in the game and he's also gained DSC as well. I am a bit miffed that I managed to spark one of his last non-event techs for Alkaiser but then was promptly killed afterwards. Other than that, I think he's fairly close to having sparked most of the sword and melee moves. I'll have to double check.

Doctor - Not doing too bad once I moved around some of his gear, got him some Power armor, and managed to download some support skills that regenerate his HP and WP every round. I just wish I could figure out how to raise some of his mental stats so he can have better WP pool for the Laser cannon skill.

Gen - Is a beast on par with Red at the moment, in fact the only thing that's been bugging me is that he refuses to spark LifeSprinkler the best sword tech in the game. The Cometsword has been a great weapon since finding good katanas in this game is a hassle. Not helping things is that the skill that gives the best spark potential for Life Sprinkler is combo friendly. Otherwise the guys stats are great and he's a second Red on my team minus the melee potential.

Cotton - I've been having a hard time trying to fix up his skill list without losing out on his awesome Dullahan form. I'm probably going to give up since the stats on the form are too good to waste hours trying to get back. I did manage to learn Stone Gaze with him, and wouldn't you know that the Kraken enemies are susceptible to it...

Rouge - Finally got him and upgrade for his starting armor that doesn't lower the magic focused stats. He's been doing great for the most part and has quickly caught up to the rest of the team, he's still a little flimsy for my taste but his magic packs a punch so all is forgiven. I just hope I can get him the Gift for Space magic.

Engineer - Not doing too bad, I just wish his support skills weren't geared towards a robot team. He would be more useful.

Thunder - Managed to turn him into a Thunder Dragon and I'm digging the results so far. He could use some more health but his skill selection is pretty great for offense. He's not as well rounded as Cotton, but he's a decent brawler. I love the fact the Thunder Dragon looks like the Mana Beast from Secret of Mana. In fact there was another Mana reference somewhere else in the game as well. I am thinking of making him a dragon so I might work towards that next.

Lute - Lute is suffering through the issue of having no direction, which is ironic because that's a core part of his character. He's pretty good at sparking stuff, but his stats are just not anywhere to make any use of his skill set. The main issue is SaGa's habit of punishing players who try to make a Red Mage build. It takes too long to make a character an expert in one path, so trying to do multiple means they fall behind really quickly and that's been Lute's issue. Currently I'm making him a second mage, simply to spark the higher spells for Shadow and Arcane Magic. He's been fairly good with arcane but refuses to spark Shadow which has easily been the weakest magic set of what I've used.

Annie - While Lute's issues has more to do with my wishy washy nature on what to do with him, Annie is just been awful. Girl refuses to spark sword techs and strangely does better with guns. Her stats are also just not where I want them to be, and while she's getting closer to Lute's HP gains, she still hits like a wet noodle and refuses to spark sword techs, which are suppose to be her specialty. She's kind of been benched at the moment.

Riza -You know, despite being more fragile than I would care for and not quite at Red's strength, Riza had been a machine. She's sparked a good chunk of her melee skills and has even managed to earn the DSC skill meaning she's the real powerhouse of the second stringers. I just need to spend more time leveling her stats and maybe invest in some Power armor for her as well. Overall, she's been a pleasant surprise.

Fuse - I haven't spent as much time with Fuse as I would like but at least he's starting to spark stuff. He also gains stats better than some of the other characters. I want to make him a gun specialist, but I have a feeling his strength lies in swords. I need to paly with him more and upgrade him to second string.

Emilia - She's just as bad as Annie in terms of sparking anything and I'm starting to learn that guns are just not that great of a weapon set outside of Robots being armed with cannons and plasma weapons. I did give her some Mystic magic to hopefully raise her INT score since I've heard it helps with sparking gun techs but so far, I'm not impressed.

My last three characters are Fei-On a monk, Slime the... slime, and I managed to recruit Time Lord the Mystic. Of the three, Time Lord looks to be the most impressive since he starts with far higher stats than the other two and Time magic looks to be a wee bit on the broken side of things.

I will say the game has some things I love and things I dislike. I appreciate the fact the game has a more intuitive equipment screen that lets you see immediately what equipment does for a character. I am remembering that I still dislike pre-renderd PS1 backgrounds, as it makes navigating dungeons a real pain in the ass. Guns are terrible weapons since gun skills only work with weaker guns. I'm disappointed that despite the game giving you a much larger roster of playable characters, they chose to cut down on weapon variety making said roster feel a little too samey after awhile. I do appreciate bringing back Monsters and Robots from the GB entries though. We'll see how I feel about Mystics. The game has been fun though, and I'm looking forward to getting back into Red's actual story soon.

[Wolf Kanno]

Minor update:

Got Space Magic. I almost lost out on it by accidentally asking the Monster who teaches it to join me but thankfully I had a save before it. Sadly, I learned you can't acquire the gift for either Space or Time magic unless you're playing Blue's scenario. You can access the higher spells by recruiting Time Lord or Kyrin and using them, but no one else can get them except in Blue's story. Thankfully Space magic's higher spells are mostly useless. Vortex is probably the best spell since it nullifies status buffs, but seeing how it affects everyone on the field including your own party, doesn't seem like I'm missing much. The base magic spells Kyrin teaches on the other hand are far more practical and useful.

Finishing that quest had me teleported back to the Koorong sewers with Liza/Riza finally activating the quest for the Hidden Rune, so I got that finished and played around with the new characters.

Fei-On has largely earned my ire since the guy joins the team fairly weak compared to some of the other characters. I mean Slime is pathetic too, but at least as a monster it doesn't take much to upgrade him. Fei-On dies a wee too often for my taste and he doesn't spark as many moves as you would think. He's got nothing on Riza. So he's tied with Annie as my least favorite team members at the moment.

Slime's main issue is that he starts with too many slime abilities so he has a bad habit of evolving into this giant slime monster that has just the worst stats imaginable. I think with the exception of his HP, the original slime form is actually stronger than this one. So he needs some work. I also got greedy and lost Cotton's Dullahan form so I'll need to earn it back. Thankfully, I managed to learn Charm Gaze which is suppose to stabilize that form better once I get it, but we'll see.

Time Lord has been interesting. Time Magic is fairly broken if a bit situational. The annoying thing about Mystics is that they can't really learn weapon techs like Humans can, the nice thing about them is that they sort of work like monsters and absorb enemies into their armor to gain stats and seeing how I'm at max enemy level, jumping his stats up to end game didn't take much effort. They also get to use one of the monster skills as their techs so they are an interesting mix.

Fuse and Emilia must have read what I said about them the other day because they were doing a better job sparking gun techs. Guns are still not great weapons imo but I do like the variety they add to combat. In Fuse's case, I think the real issue was learning he won't spark gun techs if you use his default gun since it doesn't count as a normal weapon. In fact the skills attached to that weapon are unique to it as well it seems. Also Gen was reading it as well and finally sparked Life Sprinkler so I have a nice boss killing team almost ready.

I only have one more rune to find to finish the Rune Magic quest, afterwards I can finally move back to Red's plot with what is essentially an end game party despite being about halfway through his actual story.

[Wolf Kanno]

Update Time!

Finished getting Rune Magic and fairly happy with the results. The final challenge was just a fairly straight forward dungeon but the boss was this cool undead dragon. Afterwards, since I was already in the area, I finished Sei's Tomb. Fight was a cakewalk, but I found the engagement amusing. I am sad I lost the three artifacts. Kusanagi is one of the best swords I've seen so far in the game, but I honestly think the mirror/shield needed to open the pathway was more useful. The magatama accessory was decent and the Murokami katana lost their luster awhile back, but that shield was great since it no-selled water attacks and lowered damage from heat based attacks in addition to being able to block physical and magic attacks.

With the last two quests out of the way, I went ahead with Red's story. I stopped a drug factory in Kyo. I faced off with Metal Black X who is sort of a rival to Alkaiser, though oddly I didn't have to switch to his henshin form for this dungeon. What super cool though was him dropping a decent piece of armor and the fact my robot managed to learn a tech from him because he's a robot. Even better, the skill is actually really good. Afterwards, I returned to Manhattan to take on the CEO lady who sic the space pirates on my ship. This dungeon turned out to be obnoxious. Like two thirds of it was climbing stairs a la Shinra building, except this one was filled with enemies and mini-boss fights. The boss fight with her was super easy, I was trying desperately to spark the final non-event Alkaiser move but Red decided to spark defense techs against the boss's useless techs instead. So after I thumped her, I went back to Yorkland to face off in Kraken swamp to finally earn it.

I'm not going to do a full breakdown of my whole team this time, but I do have some notes on a few of them:

Red - Has almost mastered all of the techs barring Guns. He's missing maybe two defensive techs from swords which are incredibly difficult to spark to begin with. I'm sure he's missing a few melee attacks as well but he's managed to spark all his Alkaiser moves. He's a beast of a character at this point.Gen isn't too far behind himself and he even managed to spark one of those two defensive techs I mentioned.

Cotton is back to being a Dullahan and I'm making sure not to teach him any new skills so he stays that way. The best thing about this monster form is that it actually has a built in shield so he can no-sell techs like the rest of my team. Thunder has stalled a bit, his Thunder dragon form is good, but I want to make him a Black Dragon but he's having a hard time getting the skills or staying alive. I have no idea what to do with Slime, so he's been all over the place and has no real direction but I wish I could finally get him into a stronger mosnter form, he keeps sticking to mid-tier ones so I may need to check his skill list to see what's causing the problem. Maybe I'll make him a Kraken or Snowfolk.

Fuse has managed to spark all the Gun techs and Emilia only needs like one more to join him. Guns have some issues but at least some of the final skills have been fairly good making my opinion of the weapon class improve. The two biggest issues is that there are only like ten or eleven skills tops and only half of them are of any use. Not that swords and melee don't have a similar ratio of Great to mediocre skills as well, but both of those weapon types have like thirty skills a piece so it just feels like guns are weaker in comparison. The ammo mechanic is also a scrappy mechanic in this game and it's annoying that while there are three times as many guns as there are other weapons, only a third of them can be used with gun skills. I feel like Gun skills would be pretty awesome if you could use them in conjunction with Missiles and Laser cannons and their superior base damage.

Annie, Fei-On, and Lute are all still annoying me. They don't like to spark anything and they get targeted and killed more often than I would care to admit. Fei-On is especially annoying because he's managed to spark all but one of the techs needed for the DSC attack and the one he's missing isn't even terribly difficult to spark.

Having spent more time with Time Lord, I now see why Mystics get a bad rep in this game. They are an odd build of a race. Like he has pretty great stats due to the monsters I've absorbed but his skills don't pack as much of a punch as his human compatriots. He only has four skill slots for magic and I'm mostly using it for Time Magic which is more support than anything. Mystic magic is also not quite as impressive as I had hoped. I may need to consult a guide to see if I can step up his game. The biggest issue I'm having so far is that he is incredibly slow to gain WP/JP so even though his HP is commendable, he has little WP and MP to make use of some of his most broken spells/skills.

I only have one more Black X leader to take down and then I'll likely head in to face off with the big bad themselves. The mini-guide I'm using mentioned I only have three more places to go so I'm fairly close to ending this story arc. I'm debating about whether I should keep going with SaGa Frontier 1 and choose another character since the game is relatively short or if I should move on and start SaGa Scarlet Graces? If I do a second run, I'm thinking either Blue or Asellus as my next choice since one will give me the full magic experience and I like the idea of playing as a villain protagonist while Asellus has the most interesting story and it will give me a chance to really delve into the Mystics as a race. On the other hand, Scarlet Graces is shiny and new, and unlike the rest of the franchise, it doesn't have as much as a following so this will be more of a true blind playthrough for me.

[Wolf Kanno]

Minor update!

I've mostly been trying to build my monsters up and ended up seriously leveling everybody up. Used a guide to get Time Lord some choice skills and I now have him just trying to build up his low WP/JP stats. Sadly, I finished the Rune quest before recruiting him, so he never received the gift and I can't do the broken Overdrive/Stasis combo that makes him top tier material. In truth if I had done more research, I would have made different choices for my magic.

Cotton is still fine as a Dullahan. I did drop Scissors for an Ice spell and I do have a certain tech I would love to give him, but skill farming for monsters is a pain when said skill is rare and the monster that possesses it is also rare. I'm pretty happy with him as is.

I managed to turn Slime into a Kraken and managed to give the little critter a pretty good skill list by accident. Fun how the ''no plan'' monster turned out so well.

Thunder finally became a Black Dragon, one of the top tier monsters in the game. The only issue I have is that I did not teach him enough skills so his HP is the lowest of my three monsters despite having the best stats. His skill set is also not quite where I want it to be but it's hardly bad. He just has few boss options and most of his skill set is for ending trash mobs.

Guns have grown on me. Red is trying to spark the Gifted versions of the magics I taught him, and I somehow missed Mind magic and went to Kyo to obtain it's gift. Annie refuses to spark mid-tier skills, but to give me a middle finger, she has managed to spark a good chunk of the final sword skills. Fei-On finally earned the last skill needed for DSC and most of my party now have HP in the 700s.

I'm currently exploring the ruins of Shingrow looking for the last member of Black X I encountered in the earlier chapters.

[Wolf Kanno]

Small update. Still stuck in Shengrow. The first ruins I went to turned out to be optional, though I did find and beat up the optional boss from there. The rest of the scenario is kind of pulling a Wagnas on me where you explore a long ass dungeon to face off with the big bad, only for them to run away and then you have to explore another long ass dungeon and fight them again. I've been a bit too tired lately to play much sadly.

With that said, I'm really debating on whether I'm going to start Scarlet Graces next or doing a new game of SaGa Frontier 2. I've been thinking about that game lately and of the ones I really loved, it's the only entry I haven't done a second playthrough of. I also still might want to tackle Blue or Asellus' story in SF1.

[Wolf Kanno]

Red Chapter complete!

Finally finished Red's chapter after I discovered I was going the wrong way in Shengrow. The Black Ray dungeon was tricky but memorable and the Black X bases was fairly straightforward. Happy to have Alkaiser for the last dungeon and I even managed to spark his ultimate move in the Metal Black fight.

Wasn't expecting the boss rush but seriously whooped all their asses with my overpowered party. Like seriously, the final boss was probably the easiest in the series with the possible exception of SaGa 3's final boss. While I still have a lot of chapters to go through. I can now safely say I've beaten every SaGa game up until the most recent entry.

Favorite party members: Red, Gen, Time Lord, Cotton, Fuse, Riza, and Rouge
Favorite Race: Monsters
Favorite Techs: DSC, Life Sprinkler, Kasumi, Deflect, Bound Shot and Nova Rising
Favorite Magic: Light, Arcane, and Time
Hardest Boss: Duel with Shuzer
Favorite World: Shrike, Time Lord's World, Devin, and Koorong
Least favorite party members: Annie and Fei-On
Least Favorite race: Probably mystics
Favorite side mission: The Rune and Arcane quests, Sei's Tomb
Best member of Black X: Shuzer and Metal Black.
Best Battle Theme: Battle Theme #5 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FODQT0128FA)
Wish I could have recruited: Silence, Asellus, and Blue

Overall, this was a funky game. I loved the fact it played heavy lip service to the style and setting of the Game Boy entries with the variety of races with different leveling mechanics and the schizo tech setting. I was a bit sad that weapon variety is very limited compared to the previous entries but the techs were flashy and the combo mechanic gave a lot of life to several techs you might have passed over for something stronger. I also didn't mind how magic was done in this entry and the Gift concept was interesting even if some of the advanced magic wasn't always terribly useful without the right magic/tech combo. The other issue I can say about the mechanics is the fact the game takes a little too much from the GB entries and has some balancing issues. Humans are definitely the best race to have a party of, and hand to hand is easily the best weapon option in the game. The other races are fun to tinker around with, but I can see how a munchkin/speed runner player would just go full human and stick to abusing DSC to wipe the floor with everything.

I really appreciated the ability to recruit three parties of five which you can choose at the start of battle. Gave combat more longevity and it made using recruiting characters more fun. Kind of wish the RS3 remaster had added a feature like that in. I also like the fact the plots are more individual in this one. Unlimited SaGa followed suit as well but I kind of like how SF1 lets every main character shine completely through the plot whereas RS1 and 3 sort of start off the plot about your character before just transforming into you wandering aimlessly doing all the events until you reach the criteria to fight the final boss that all the characters will fight. The personalized touch was nice. I also commend the team for making all of the characters interesting. Unlike the other entries where you choose among a large group of protagonists, I find all of the characters pretty interesting with the possible exception of Lute. The replay value feels pretty strong in this entry for me.

With that said, the writing is still very stilted in execution. Had I played this back in the day, I would have blamed the so-so localization and the half finished nature of the game; but having played enough of the series by this point, I know that's just how Kawazu and his team write. Music is pretty snazzy with some standout tracks in the battle theme department.

Overall, a pretty solid entry, and I can see why so many people love this entry. I don't think it edges out SF2 as my favorite of the PlayStation entries but it's a solid second choice. I think once I tackle Scarlet Graces I'll do a ranking. If I was to jump in again and start a new character, I'm thinking Asellus will be my next choice. I want to give the mystics a second chance to impress me.

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[Wolf Kanno]

Update time!

I did start another go of SF1 with Asellus and I was about to finally leave the Mystic home world nut I managed to break my urge to replay entries I've already done and jumped into SaGa Scarlet Graces.

It has been a weird experience with a lot of adjustments. The game has retooled a lot of the gameplay and feels a bit like a giant mishmash of concepts from the whole franchise. The interface is most reminiscent of Unlimited SaGa though without the dice mechanics. The game world is point and click and has a clever pop up book aesthetic that is fairly charming. The world map is the only part of the game you can explore. Towns are just as they were in US and simply a menu to choose whether you want to chat with people, check out a smith, or meet a healer. Dungeons don't exist anymore, instead they are a set of encounters that are bookmarked by story scenes.

The game is a bit more story heavy than other entries but still retains SaGa's whole spiel of ''wander around and do side objectives'' so while Urpina is on a journey to find her father and save her homeland, it hasn't stopped me from investigating a peninsula's 100 rumors, or battling pirates off the coastline.

Combat has also been majorly retooled. Three of the mainstays are still here such as sparking techs, Roles, and formations; but combat is a very different beast. It now uses something similar to CTB where you can see the turn order of your party and enemies. Using different moves alters said turn order dramatically and there is a heavy emphasis on manipulating said turn order like in Xenosaga. The biggest reason is to activate Unite Attacks. if an enemy smashed between two of your party is killed when the order queue has them sync together,. they will perform a Unite Attack on one of the remaining enemies. The catch is that enemies can do this too, so losing an ally can sometimes cause a chain reaction that causes you to lose the whole battle. Also new is the Interrupt mechanic. All of those worthless counter moves in the series past finally have a use as you can set them up to target specific enemies and they will activate regardless of the enemy targeting the character using the move. Interrupts usually have some special effect to it such as Matador having a delay effect that knocks the enemy to the end of the turn queue, or Seismic Smash hitting all non-aerial enemies with a low chance to paralyze them.

Despite all of these tools, battles are challenging and I've died quite a few times. Unlike FFX's version of this, enemies are tanky as hell so getting those unite attacks off is more challenging than it seems. Throw in SaGa's tradition of awkward healing abilities and it's easy to get your ass kicked. Battles also have special criteria that lets you earn more rewards in combat.

It's been an interesting ride so far.

[Wolf Kanno]

Been playing a lot of SaGa Scarlet Graces, I'll do a proper write up when I can collect my thoughts. It's a quirky game for sure.

[Wolf Kanno]

Okay, now that I actually got some sleep, let's do this properly.

Update Time!

SSG is interesting. It's got a bit more story focus, at least in Urpina's quest, I've heard Leonard's quest just tosses you into the sandbox. It still has it's regional map design, but there is honestly more to do in it. Every region on the map has some little story element going on in it which keeps you busy and adds some character to the game. Of anything, the world design in this game is some of the best in the series. VA work is minimal but serviceable. I think of my current party, only one character has a pretty awful voice and his design is ugly as well. I may strip him of his katana and bench him for the rest of the game.

So plot wise, there are thirteen gods, the god of fire went rogue and tried to destroy everything, the other twelve gods tasked a human mortal to deal with him instead and said mortal built a mighty empire to smack this fire god down every 150 years that he appears. The seventh time he showed up, the empire managed to actually kill the guy for good. Then the empire has an existential crisis, because what do you do when your entire society is built around god busting and said task is accomplished? Well obviously have a massive power struggle that ends with the emperor and his entire family getting assassinated and then plunge into various civil wars for the next seventy years. It's fairly obvious.

So for Urpina's quest, she's the daughter of Maximus Julianus (why yes, we're now in SaGa Roman Empire), one of the four Noble Lords whose house served the late emperor. He has a dream of restoring said empire and just needs the other nation state's that splintered away to get back in line. So the tale begins with him leaving to go knock heads together with his main army leaving his two children to safeguard his kingdom while he's away. Antonius stays in the capital to govern but progressively enough let's his sister take on his former duties of wandering around the kingdom to check up on all the local towns and deal with any trouble brewing. You see, despite the fact Urpina looks like a Greco-Roman idea of a nymph, she's actually a badass sword master like the rest of her family. Though she wasn't allowed to go on a dangerous journey to learn the family's secret art of dual-wielding.

Anyway, he scout duties are going okay until she sees a mysterious robed figure leave the borders through castle Parna, which is ruled by the SaGa equivalent of the Bolton family from GoT. Then the land gets hit with an earthquake and a giant ''Earth Serpent'' rises from the ground and spreads terror. I put that in quotation because it really looks like a giant demonic centipede made from fire and ash. Once Urpina's group quells the best, they discover a mysterious army in black has invaded the kingdom in the confusion and laid siege on the capital. Powerless to help, Urpina and her guardian Mondo opt to sneak out of the occupied lands and try to find her father and his army so they can return together to retake their home.

I am still in the first chapter of her plot, but it's been going rather well. I found her father, who is in his own trouble that requires some rescuing. Learned the art of dual-wielding, discovered that most of the surrounding countries to her own both despise House Julianus and don't give two fucks about restoring the empire. Discovered the black army is in league with the Earth Serpent as they tend to show up after it appears. She came home finally to discover the invading army has left, but took Antonius as a hostage. So now we're chasing the army that took him. All of this seems to involve an old artifact called the Emperor's Saw which is associated with House Julianus. The saw is needed to fell the Earth Serpent once and for all, but other forces want it destroyed as well. So yeah, it's been an interesting ride so far.

Combat, as I mentioned before is like the CTB system but with a heavier emphasis on turn manipulation. The part I didn't mention is the BP counter.all actions in battle require a resource called BP. When battles start, the BP counter begins with four points available of a maximum of ten. Every round that passes adds another point. All skills require a different amount of BP, so weak skills cost like one point, mid-tier can cost four, and high end stuff won't be available until later rounds. In fact you're party can have so many high end skills it's almost impossible to use all of them in a single round. Almost. You see skills level up when you use them and while some get damage increases, some levels also lower the cost of the skill. Course your ability to level a skill is tied back by your proficiency in the weapon or magic class the skill you're trying to use is from. Also, when character do unite attacks by destroying an enemy on the field and closing a gap between characters on the turn board, all participants of the unite attack get a BP reduction cost bonus the following round. So the game is incredibly strategic in execution. Different formations can also affect BP growth as well. Finally, the twelve other gods will sometimes grant a benison to the party that can be anything from raising your whole parties stats, to light healing. It depends on which of the Twelve Celestials feels you're doing them a favor. Usually if you're in the land where one of them has a temple, that's the one who will likely show up the most. Roles give light personal bonuses the character they are equipped to. Weapon mastery will increase how many roles you can equip at a time. Roles are very important since some of them give greater resistance to status effects, while other boost your damage potential.

The game also has a massive cast with something like 80 playable characters. Granted, half of those characters are palette swaps of each other and you're only allowed to recruit one of the two, but it's been interesting filling out my entourage. Urpina starts with seven characters, but I've recruited about six more since then. I'm likely not going to give a break down of my full team because of that, instead I'll likely focus on the main ones I use. Also, the game has dispatch missions that let you send out reserves for a period of a few battles that helps raise their stats and earn you more items.

Speaking of, this game doesn't really have shops or money, instead you use the materials and elemental crystals you acquire in missions or battles to use at a smith shop to upgrade your gear. Surprisingly, it's not a linear progression either. You can sometimes upgrade a weapon to two or three different weapons within it's class with various stats and specialties. So like Urpina's starting armor can be upgraded into either a Knight's Armor that offers higher defenses at the cost of speed or I can turn it into Chain Mail that doesn't sacrifice her speed but offers less protection. Boots, Gloves, and Hats are especially difficult to upgrade as they generally give smaller defensive boosts but usually offer some neat stat upgrades instead. Did I mention the team finally gives you a comprehensive equipment breakdown in this game?

Using the same smith shop also gives you bonuses as they'll give you discounts a lot. You also need to be proactive in upgrading equipment for both the sake of survival but also to raise the blacksmith rank, which is universally shared by all blacksmith shops and needs to be higher rank in order to gain access to better gear.

Also, as though Glimmer/sparking wasn't complicated enough, weapons now have specialties to them and certain techs can only be sparked by having your character use the correct specialty type of weapon. So for instance, Urpina learned Demilune (a tech from RS3 associated with curved swords) once I gave her a sword with the curved specialty. So you'll need to mix and match weapons and keep a few to go down different specialty paths so you can get all the techs.

Magic... is potent but also a pain in the ass. It sadly merges the most obnoxious elements from SF1 and US's magic mechanics. First off, magic has casting times so even activating it in the first round means the mage will likely not be able to cast the spell until the following round. I'm hoping that raising a spell's level will eventually lower the casting time. When a battle ends, whatever magical element of the battle field is present will generate magical flux at the end which your mage can absorb into their staffs to power up one of their spells. Being the same element means the flux will give you more XP but you can still charge up different elements at a cost. There is also a possibility the flux will allow your mage to spark a new tech though it's often a very small chance. What spells you learn is based on the staff your mage has equipped, in fact your character has to be equipped with a staff weapon to even use magic and unlike the rest of the series, you're only allowed to have one weapon equipped at a time. Standard staffs will simply spark low end spells and usually just two or three. To get the better stuff, you need to equip your mage with elemental staffs to access the higher spells. To compensate for all of these weaknesses magic is pretty potent and your only means of healing since healing items don't exist in this game. On the brightside, the game finally created a group healing spell. Some magic spells like Call of Thunder can also multi-hit a target, making them incredibly powerful tools to kill enemies quickly and open up potential Unite attacks.

Overall, the combat is incredibly fun and robust. It still has the SaGa issue of being a bit cumbersome in it's design, but if you work with it, you'll enjoy the experience. So overall, I've been having a blast with the game, and it's pretty addicting. Ironically, I'm not feeling the ''handheld'' port issue I usually feel with these types of ports. Likely because Unlimited SaGa already got me use to this type of interface, and likely because SaGa has always felt like a series that had a meager budget compared to Final fantasy. The music has been good, if a bit unremarkable. I think the battle theme and the opening opera piece are the only themes I can really recall. I blame it on the game trying to do more of a high fantasy vibe to the music and Kenji Ito's music style excels when the music leans on rock and metal genres.

[Wolf Kanno]

Update Time!

Not a lot happened this evening. I caught up with the cult that kidnapped Urpina's brother and they managed to get him possessed by some demon. I was given the choice to kill him to stop the destruction of the Emperor's Saw (which hilariously looks like an actual chainsaw, perhaps we're making a sly reference to SaGa 1?) and I opted not to do so. Urpina has been a fairly optimistic and determined person so she doesn't strike me as the type who would kill her brother over something like the potential end of the world.

He got possessed, broke the saw, and then ran away with the cult. Now I'm in the SaGa Byzantine Empire. Like it's literally an Eastern Empire that claims to be the rightful heir of the original broken empire. The Empress of this place, who is a pretty cool old lady, sent us on our way to make a new Emperor's Saw by going to the edge of the world. In the meantime, I stopped a volcano from erupting, saved Nessie, recruited Kahn who is a prominent character in Taria's scenario and a pretty snazzy spear user. I've switched around my team at the moment and actually have my whole team made up of story characters for once.

Urpina - Is a beast. She just continues to get more stupidly powerful. In addition to her dual-wielding skills she just sparked a skill called Multi0-Strike which is basically this game's version of Omnislash. I've also managed to upgrade both her swords to great levels so she's getting closer to being able to kill an enemy outright in the first round which is a big deal in this game. I think once she learns all the single sword techs, I'm going to look up a guide to find out what skills she needs to learn to get some more beneficial roles. I've decided I have a new type of favorite female archetype. I really enjoy the innocent girl with the bloodlust streak. Her personality is not far from Haru's from Persona 5. She really sweet and innocent, but won't hesitate for a second to resort to violence to get her way. Like she's scaring the pirate and more grizzled members of her entourage with her choices.

Mondo - He's been an okay support character. I feel Suikoden has spoiled me in terms of expectations of entourages, cause while Mondo is solid, he's not exactly a stand out member. He starts with spears, but I'm switching him over to bows because I've heard he's pretty good with them compared to my starting archer. Not helped that Kahn kind of replaces his usefulness with spears. I feel the bow will work better because while he's manage to earn a bunch of HP, he feels strangely frail compared to Urpina and a few other characters in my team.

Ogniana - Is my other major damage dealers. Axes rock as usual and the only issue I've been having is accidentally getting her stuck in the Technical Axe hole, and she stopped sparking techs because she learned all the ones available to that class. So now I have her on standard class and she's learning skills again. She is a bit of a glass cannon, but she gains HP fairly well so it balances everything out. Her personality is pretty amusing being fairly worldly compared to Urpina. I wish the two interacted more because it was usually funny when they did.

Elsyed - Has not disappointed actually. She's Urpina's future sister-in-law who is arranged to marry her brother Antonius and the one person Urpina admires outside of her family. She's got this cool, Bride of Frankenstein aesthetic and is a fairly powerful mage who starts with Call of Thunder of all things as a starting spell. She's mastered quite a few Natura spells, and has a single Terra spell, but I'm currently making her learn fire magic before switching her over to Aers and Terra. I feel like I need to upgrade a staff to the Aqui element as well since I know it has a better healing spell attached to it. She is also surprisingly tanky for a mage helped by the fact this game lets mages use shields.

Kahn - Is the newest recruit but has not disappointed. He's a little low on techs, but has far better stats than poor Mondo did for frontline fighting. I was even able to upgrade his gear fairly quickly to some good levels that has made him already work well in the team. I really just need him to learn like three techs Mondo has to have my full replacement. His personality is also fun and his intro was pretty funny.

While this is my main team at the moment, I must say that the devs have down a good job of giving personality quirks to the whole playable cast. While the story characters maintain the series tradition of being oddballs, even the generics are given some amusing quirks like my Temple mage who is always hungry, my armored knights who are a little too excited to help Urpina, my fencer who complains every stats upgrade that her new muscles are ruining her girlish figure, or the weird sword woman I picked up who is obsessed with fairies. Hell my generic archer looks like a blonde Solid Snake minus the eye patch. So mad props to both the developers an the localization team for that.

I also just discovered that their is a menu option when looking at your character that lets you see if you've learned all the weapons techs off of their current weapon. So kudos for having the most user-friendly interface in the franchise.

77570

[Wolf Kanno]

Update time!

I finished Urpina's first of three chapters. Not sure if I missed something somewhere in the plot but it turns out the cult who kidnapped her brother Antonius was trying to bring back an Infernal that served the Firebringer and were using their cult magic to summon the Earth Serpent to aid them. Antonius was being used as the Infernals temporary host and managed to smash the Emperor's Saw (which looks like a chainsaw). After getting some direction from SaGa Byzantine Empire, we explored the outer lands and acquired all the materials needed to reforge the weapon, but we needed to reach a specific castle to use the Julanis Ancestral forge to do so. The problem was that it was taken over by a young ruler on his own conquest to conquer all the former imperial territories to make a new empire under his rule. Not helping matters is that his number two is Urpina's aunt who still has a bone to pick with her sister for abandoning their family house to marry Maximus and join house Julanis. Urpina winds up in a bit of a territorial squabble as she tries to stay neutral between the western SaGa Byzantine empire front trying to defend their territory from this ambitious upstart. Thankfully the upstart was fairly understanding and let her use the forge. Course when the two sides clashed, that's when the cultist decided to try and bring back their Infernal master. So Urpina and her crew had to smack around the cultist, her possessed brother, and finally the Infernal itself which may have taken a few too many liberties from SMT's Beelzebub design for comfort. With that all done, we were finally able to recover the injured Antonius. We also managed to stay neutral in the huge war and even got a new party member for our trouble. Urpina then encountered the Earth Serpent again who was still under the thrall of the cults power and we actually saved it from it, which was not exactly how I was thinking this scenario was going to end. Urpina and her vassal Mondo then break the fourth wall to thank us and the Chapter comes to an end.

With Chapter 2 starting, we're now going off to save Urpina's father Maximus from the stuffy Republic that has him under their care. With the Emperor's Saw repaired, we have a negotiating tool so now we're heading back that way, but the game is finally letting loose the narrative grip and I finally have more freedom to move around. I visited a section of the map I couldn't before that led me to a jungle section where a witch coven is hanging out in a cave and won't give me the time of day. I also have a young guy trying to fly with a makeshift glider. Finally some strange old man at a waterfall who seems to be possessed is asking for legs which is all based around a legend in the area of some Raven monster that devoured one of the Celestial legs when they tried to slay it. I eventually got bored and returned home because I'm trying to do more with the mercantile minigame. Instead I started up another part of a weird side quest from the first chapter involving a doppelganger of Urpina running around but I can't seem to find the next event flag.

I've managed to recruit a few more characters for my trouble but I'm also finalizing my main team. Most of it has remained unchanged from the last post, but I may drop Mondo for someone else. I'm hoping to find a decent greatsword user soon. My two current options are not the best so I'm hoping I can find someone else eventually. I also discovered the sparking works differently in this game and can honestly say this is likely the most user-friendly entry in the series thus far. Basically sparking is not longer done by chance, or at least not completely. The game tallies how much BP you use in battle and eventually just reaches a tier where the next skill unlocks. What skill you get depends on what weapon you have equipped and what actions you're doing. Though the more skills you spark, the longer it takes to spar another one, so it can be a bit tedious to spark ll techs on a character. On the brightside, this is a boon for defensive/counter/interrupt attacks since they are often the most difficult to spark in other entries. Now you just need to make sure you're equipped with a weapon that teaches the skill and just wait for the opportunity. Eventually you will spark the move. Urpina is currently trying to spark two moves, one is a counter move by one-handed swords while the other is an interrupt with dual wielding.

I'm likely going to explore a bit now and see if I can recruit some more useful characters. I've gained another story mage, so I may check him out since story characters tend to have better stats. Mages are a pain to raise though...

[Del Murder]

I don't know if I'll ever have time to play some of these games, but it is nice to live through them with your posts. :)

[Wolf Kanno]

I'm not sure if I'll ever do a 100% completion for some of these entries myself. Like SSGA only has four protagonists, but I can tell it already has more content than say SF1 or RS3 so that's a time sink. You should at least check out the GB entries and relive your childhood. ;)

[Del Murder]

I would love to play the remakes of the GB games if they ever come out in English. I will probably get into the SF1 remake at some point. It sounds like that one has some good throwbacks to the GB games.

[Wolf Kanno]

It does have some great throwbacks to it. Not that SaGa Scarlet Grace doesn't also have a few shout outs to the franchise. It was made for the series 25th anniversary so it has some subtle callbacks to the series proper.

As for the DS remakes getting brought over here. I don't think it's going to happen. Maybe if the GB collection does well but I'm not holding my breath, Thankfully the fan community has translated it. I actually picked up a DS emulator to play SaGa 2 so that might be my next ''new'' SaGa game I'll do for this thread.

[Wolf Kanno]

Update Time!

Instead of going to find Maximus, I instead ran into Sigfrei, a character from Bailmont's story who is wandering about and causing mischief. I stopped him from trying to summon a primordial spirit in the region Urpina's future sister-in-law is from and even managed to find the guys homeland which involved a wild questline involving a wishing tree that arrows with notes keep getting shot into sending Urpina on a wild fetch quest. This questline had a pretty cool ending to it so I won't spoil it. Another questline I was doing involved a doppelganger of Urpina that kept causing trouble in her home region, but actually... was really helping out. This quest didn't have quite the satisfying ending I wanted, but it was still fun, especially when the doppelganger got Urpina secretly engaged to a local girl named Lady, who eventually joined my entourage.

Currently, I'm back in the region where I fought the Sarvok cultist and it looks like Sigfrei's own cultist are trying to summon another primal spiritual. We'll see how this goes.

I do love the game's world building. There is a minstrel figure you can occasionally run into who sings tales about the region or the Celestials. There is a also an acing troupe that perform plays about the Firebringer and his past. There is some good mythology going on here with the Firebringer getting some interesting characterization. He's portrayed as a Loki style figure being a trickster god who spent half his time screwing over the Spirituals and infernals for the Celestials sake, and the other half of the time being a pain in the ass to the Celestials themselves. Besides that and giving mankind the gift of fire though, the game still hasn't really explained why he was exiled from the pantheon. I mean yes, he's a nuisance to the Celestials as well. but no word on what he specifically did to get exiled yet. Interestingly enough, the Loki parallel is pretty strong here as well because one of the plays implies that the Firebringer may not be the same race as the Celestials.

[Wolf Kanno]

Been awhile, but I have come back to play a few entries while I recoup from Elden Ring.

Romancing SaGa 3 - Trying to finish up Katarina's game. Was playing in the optional dungeon, which is neat because it's exploring more of the casts backstories. The first was Khalid, but the second was Tatyana, whom was infamously unfinished in the original. I really appreciate the fact Kawazu has been using these remasters to clean up and finish his ideas. Makes me excited for SaGa Frontier 2. Anyway, the dungeon length is based on how many of the Sinistrals you've killed. I'm only two down, so I had to leave and go fight Alloces the Earth Sinistral. He's in my favorite dungeon in the game, it's the ruins of the Archfiend's palace so it has this serious big endgame dungeon vibe. I still need to take down the fire Sinistral but I'm hoping to level my team more since killing the last Sinistral starts up the endgame nonsense and I'm going to be stuck with an unwanted guest...

SaGa Scarlet Graces - I honestly, don't remember what I'm suppose to be doing. I think I need to head back to the old capital to rescue Urpina's father, but I remember getting stuck at a rather challenging battle with two of my best party members mending their LP in my reserves. So I believe I left to go level up my new recruits until the all-star team is back to full health for this fight. I may play around with the trade mini-game to see what that entails. I should also expand some of my all-stars weapon proficiency so I can start unlocking better Roles for them. I may need to find a guide for that. This game still has some awesome world building with one farming town I've been developing trade goods at telling Urpina about their special festival for the Goddess of Agriculture that sounds a lot like the Wicker Man pagan rituals.

[Wolf Kanno]

Minor Update:

SSG - Mainly spent my time leveling up my side team while doing side missions. I returned to the far north where I reforged the Godslaying Saw and started a mining venture where I got to make mines in the area, but it seems to come at the cost of destroying all of the natural magical landmarks in the area. I didn't quite finish this one, but I'll come back to it. Instead I'm doing two smaller quests in the region where the cult kept trying to summon an Infernal. One quest involves gathering offerings for a Beast Spiritual, though I'm having issues finding the second material. The other quest involves the party saving a young lady from a flock of carrion birds. We meet her at this old castle that is rumored to be home to a witch, but the girl has been super nice to the team. The only creepy part was spending the night had Urpina wake up to find the castle in ruins and in the midst of a graveyard. This one NPC I think I can recruit is also in the area looking for this witch and is harassing a fisherman who keeps telling Urpina the girl is in fact the witch and not to listen to her. So of course I'm ignoring that and helping her now break some jars. I'm hoping this will net me this particular player character, because I've read she's pretty good. I did manage to recruit the mayor from a small town near Urpina's kingdom and he's another Club user and dressed like a fruity Renaissance nobleman, with the page boy haircut and everything.

I also feel like I'm running out of gear to earn tech skills from. I'm making tier XIII stuff at this point and I'm pretty sure I maxed out the Blacksmith ranking. I'm now at the annoying part where I need to keep an eye out for all the rare materials needed to level up the stuff.

I feel my only real complaint so far with skill acquisition in this game is that once again, magic is more of a chore than it needs to be. It's pretty potent, but I am annoyed with the casting times for a lot of spells. Especially the group targeting spells.

[Wolf Kanno]

Update:

Romancing SaGa 3 - Wasted half my evening, and then sort of made up for it? I did a bunch of things and ended up switching around my team a bit, which proved to be a bad idea. I'm a little too late in the game to be trying to build an endgame team, especially since my one goal is to tackle the final boss in his true form because I guess I'm just a masochist like that. Anyway, I went after the Fire Sinistral and got destroyed for my efforts because he has that obnoxious perma self-immolation shield that does insane damage if I try to attack him with short range melee. Not helped that I forgot to restore my health before heading in, so I was low on TP/MP so I lost pretty good. The problem was that I hadn't saved in hours (which is why I hate save anywhere systems, because I will forget to save) so all of my endeavors for the evening were lost. But I took this in stride because I was seriously having second thoughts about a lot of the decisions I was making. Sadly, I learned far too late that I've locked myself out of Katarina's Golden Ending, because I apparently needed to have Mikhail in my final team, but he's only available for recruitment for a short time when Bunei attacks Loanne. Otherwise, you can't access his castle for some dumb reason. Despite all this, I cleared up a few side missions I forgot about and I'm starting to play around with building up my magic. I discovered I never finished this one optional dungeon, and I'm grateful for it because the boss of the place has the potential to be an Asura, which is one of the best enemies in the game to spark techs with. So I'm hoping I can fill out more of my weapon tech list since I'm missing a skill or three with each weapon type.

My two biggest gripes at the moment are these: 1) I really hate the fact the game forces an 11th hour ranger into your team at the end to get to the final dungeon. It makes party planning a bit tougher when you know you're going to have to keep one slot open for them. Even more annoying that a very good character can only be recruited by this 11th hour joiner and so unless you plan it carefully, you may not have easy access to means of leveling this character either. 2) Tomahawk is the bane of my existence in these games. This isn't something against RS3 in particular, it's against this skill in general because it's almost always required to spark axe weapon skills or high end axe techs in general. It's a crappy low level skill as well, so my main damage dealer always seems to be nerfing themselves because I have to stick to this one skill to spark the five to nine techs attached to it. Ugh...

If I could add a third complaint it's that tech mastering is a chore.

So here's the team setup at the moment:

Katarina - She's mainly trying to spark the final Greatsword tech I need and mastering Scattered Petals. Afterwards, I have to sacrifice her TP Crown so I can level up her Lunar Magic and make use of the Shadow Copy spell that is going to make her a serious powerhouse. Once she has enough MP, I'm going to try to get her TP Crown back and get her HP into the 800s. I could also try to master Disarm, but that skill is a pain in the ass.

Black - Is still trying to master one final Axe skill which is thankfully not attached to Tomahawk. Otherwise I need to level up his Lunar and Soryu magic a bit. More his Lunar really so he can also take advantage of the Shadow Copy spell since he's my other main damage dealer. Wind magic is honestly not that great in this game, so maybe I should drop it for access to another Revivar spell? I also want to get him a TP crown as well and get his HP up.

Charl - He has quite a few Spear techs to learn and master if we're being honest here, but spears are very good in this game so he's not that far behind in damage output. His Fire magic is really good, and I'll need to get him him Revivar once the Fire Sinistral is dead. I gave him Solar Magic as well, but I'm not too impressed with it at the moment. I may stick to beefing up his spear potential more while raising his HP.

Nora - My main debuffer. I have an awkward relationship with mace weapons and skills in this series. They're useful for their utility, but I wish they had more damage potential. I honestly don't think they come into their own until SSG. She has two more skills to spark and four to master. I need to level up her Earth magic as well since it's surprisingly the best magic of the four, though Hypergravity has the least utility of the ultimate spells. Part of me was thinking of dropping her so I could beef up the Workshop, but I've kind of grown attached to her and it's going to take too damn long to raise up another character.

Muse - Probably my most neglected characters, I don't do solid mages very well and she's not leveling up magic as fast as I would like. I have found her some great equipment though. She also has really high DEX and SPD, so she's actually competent with a bow and rapier so I have those equipped in case I need some extra attack power. I need to get her more Lunar Magic and give her more Water magic. She's basically going to be my dedicated buffer/healer but I need to get her some better armor and way more HP/MP to get that dream off the ground. She's going to take the longest to get where I need her to be. Partly because magic is less useful in this entry with many of the game breakers being relegated to Commander mode or heavily nerfed in this entry.

Leonid - He's quirky, with a lot of weird rules that makes him different from other characters. He has no LP and can't be perma killed, but he can't be healed or revived either. He starts with 666hp and as far as I can tell, he can't raise it either. He comes with the best armor in the game though and he has auto-regen. He is great for sparking epee skills and such, but has terrible stats for using it. He also has his own unique magic but the spells are interesting if highly impractical. A fun character to play around with, but he's going to be my sacrificial lamb when The Boy arrives. I've only kept him around because he managed to spark a good sword tech I didn't have and I needed him to master it for me quick. I am a little sad he's too quirky for his own good because I like my vampires.

[Wolf Kanno]

SSG - Okay, found where I left off and remember why I stopped playing. Lol. So I've cornered my Chapter 2 Big Bad Sigfrei back to the old imperial capital and it looks like it's the final showdown thing with him. The issue is that he's a cheating ass. He's a squishy mage, technically, except in addition to getting immunity from being knocked out of casting, he is also just flat out immune to taking damage unless he's casting or my team activates a unite attack. His magic is also devastating when it activates as unprotected, half my squad can be wiped out by one of his group spells. So I'll need to figure out what to do here. He also has this interrupt/counter move, but I can't figure out what type of attack activates it. So, I'm a bit annoyed because my main team is sort of built on doing high damage in one round, but cheater boy here has limited that since he can kind of just choose not to take damage, and it's dangerous to let my team go on the offensive during his one vulnerable time since his spell has a quick cast time and can do around 600hp per character in a game where 999hp is the max. I'll need to figure something out...

[Wolf Kanno]

SSG - Sigfrei is down for the count. I think my issue was surprisingly being too cautious and also just having bad luck. He tried to cast Call of Thunder which takes two turns to cast and I still had most of my heavy hitters alive, so we just all went ape shit on his ass for two rounds and managed to finish him off. With him defeated, Chapter 2 is finished and I'm now on what I believe is the final chapter of the game. Urpina's family doesn't want her to leave to figure out what's going on in the world, not without taking one of them with her. So I got to choose between her Father, Brother, and Stepmother. Technically the stepmother is unique to her chapter, but I went for her brother instead because he's basically a second Urpina with access to Dual-Wield as well, so I'm currently leveling him up. I may start looking up how to unlock roles so I can outfit my team better, but at the moment, I haven't started any major quests in this chapter yet.

[Wolf Kanno]

Looks like Minstrel Song is the next Remaster (https://www.siliconera.com/romancing-saga-minstrel-song-remastered-announced/).

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I was really hoping for more of a remaster of the original 16-bit version like RS2/3 but I guess it makes sense to just skip it for Minstrel Song since it largely fixed most of the issues I had with the original.

I was hoping for SaGa Frontier 2 to be honest.

[Wolf Kanno]

With Minstrel Song coming out, I figured I should get back to this and try to finish SaGa Scarlet Graces. I also fell off the wagon and re-downloaded Romancing SaGa Re: Universe for mobile.

SSG - I'm in the third chapter. I wanted to activate the Shard quest but instead activated the Phoenix one instead. It's been pretty cool actually. The party encounters a phoenix that they slay, and it leaves behind a feather. The phoenix only dies after it's laid an egg and they're powerful, so Urpina is trying to track the egg down by using the phoenix feather's memories to trace the Phoenix's journey back to it's origin. It's been nicely finishing up some loose plot threads like the Woromir Prince trying to become the new emperor and the tower to the Celestials. So it's been pretty neat. I also like how the background plot we're given about the Firebringer really shows his influence from Norse mythology. The Firebringer is more or less SaGa Loki. Being a Celestial who just likes to cause mischief and pitting the Infernals and the Celestials against each other. yet, like Loki, there has been a several stories showing him as a good guy as well, like discovering the false emperor's mishandling of the Celestials gifts which gets them to strike him down with holy wrath. I also find it amusing that Urpina is pretty much the Lawful stupid of the four main characters. Her faith in the Celestials is charming to say the least.

Re: Universe - Sadly, my old phone died before I could transfer my data, so I have to start all over again. But I'm not far from catching up in the story where I left off, and I've gotten some great pulls from the gacha nonsense. I almost have my old team re-assembled. I'm only missing Ellen. I also wish I could get a Gustave XIII that isn't his Regal form. I also need to get Rocbouquet's other forms so I can expand her abilities, her Tower form is okay, but lacks the versatility of her other forms ability lists. I have been getting lots of incarnations of Khalid and Albert though, like two SS Class types that are both fairly overpowered. May have to move Gerad out of the team. Funny enough, they're doing an SSG event currently and celebrating the series two year anniversary.

[Wolf Kanno]

New SaGa game was announced this year. SaGa Emerald Beyond

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The game has four main characters again, and seems to be lifting a lot of mechanics from SaGa Scarlet Graces. Though it also looks like it's bringing back some elements from the GB entries and SF1 in the form of different races. Will be interesting to see if they work mechanically different like they did in those entries. I noticed Sensei's slime race from the GB games in some of the official art, and a Sephira monster (they're angelic female warriors fought in the 16-bit entries) fighting in a battle. The game also seems to be leaning hard into the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure aesthetic, cause hot damn if this game doesn't look like it could be part of that universe through the character designs. I'm excited, but really need to finish SSG first. ^^;

[Wolf Kanno]

Just chiming back in to let people know that Square-Enix recently released a demo for SaGa Emerald Beyond for PS4, PS5, and Switch like a few days ago. It let's you try out three of the characters and gives you a good feel for the first few hours. I just downloaded it tonight, so I'll have to post about it later.

[Wolf Kanno]

Took a break from MMX6 to check out the SaGa Emerald Beyond demo and was pleasantly surprised. Visually and mechanically, it plays like SaGa Scarlet Graces, so people not vibing with the storybook pop up visuals and Visual Novel cutscenes are going to be disappointed, but the game has certainly fixed a lot of issues from SSG. For one thing, there is more of a tutorial for how mechanics work, which is nice, even though the voice over sounds very insulting when explaining stuff. Unite Attacks have been changed for the better. In SSG, the only way to activate one was to kill an enemy whose turn took place between two party members turn, which was easier said than done because enemies are downright tanky in SSG. SEB on the other hand takes the mechanic back to the Frontier series where Unite Attacks are simply activated by having party members use attacks that overlap with each other on the turn order. Even better, unlike the Frontier entries, this game gives you a visual cue to show if this will happen. Of course, like SSG before it, enemies can do this as well, so it's not always the best strategy to get Unite Combo happy. There is a new mechanic that lets your characters activate a second unite combo as well after performing one which was interesting. The other two QoL changes is the game is far better about explaining where you need to go and what to do on quests using a special visual cue called the Emerald Path, maybe not quite hand holding, but far better than most of the series is known for. Secondly, weapon and armor upgrades can now just be done from the menu screen and so you don't have to traipse around the map finding the right blacksmith.

The game also seems to be bringing back unique leveling mechanics as the tutorial mentions only Humans can Glimmer/Waza. The demo only allowed you to play as Mido and his puppets, but speaking of, his puppets learn skills by mimicking them off of other characters, this includes enemies as well. My samurai puppet Musashi mimicked a two handed sword tech from a mini-boss while my fencing puppet kept mimicking skills off of Mido. Not sure how magic is going to work in this game though. I did have two characters who could use magic, but the process of learning or leveling it up never came up in the game. But it might be fair to say they are not keeping SSG's version, which is likely for the best because it was just as unintuitive as Unlimited SaGa's magic mechanics.

The demo lets you play as Mido the Puppet Master who seems to come from a version of our world. His family used to be guardians of the Japanese government through the ages, but their powers have largely disappeared until Mido was born and showed he had the power to see the Emerald's Glow that guides his life. Though he resists it at every turn. His uncle sends him to the Gate of the Heavens which allows him to traverse to other worlds and his goal is to take the four puppets he has and imbue them with powerful spirits from other worlds so his family may regain their magical powers. The worlds he traverse are ones the other characters you can choose as your main character come from. In the demo, I got to see the magical cat girl Ameya's home world, and I got to reach Yomi where the Dismal King's homeworld resides. The game is being very heavy handed with references to the Game Boy originals with even Mr. S's monster species returning as enemies and Mr.S himself appearing as an NPC in the Emerald Road world to offer tutoring. The voice acting wasn't bad either though Mido's voice feels way older than he looks, but it fits his attitude really well and gives him a Trashy Parker from Into the Spiderverse vibe which I digged. Overall, I'm more excited for the full game which comes out next week.

[Wolf Kanno]

Well this was a surprise...

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Surprised this game of all things got a 3D remake, but not complaining since it's one of my personal favorite entries in the series. The demo for it is out and I have finished it. I'll give a breakdown a little later when I have a bit more free time.

[Wolf Kanno]

Looks like the SaGa mobile game has reached the end of its life and the global version is closing on the first of December. Going to be sad seeing this game go, not only because it was relatively solid, but also because it got me through a tough time in my life.

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[Wolf Kanno]

SaGa Frontier 2 has finally been remastered.

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This was one of the entries that started this thread. May have to pick it up so we can go full circle.