SaGa Franchise

[Rez09]

Death is located in hell. You have to meet him in the evil story route to unlock the final dungeon, as the bard doesn't want anything to do with you, but the only way to meet him otherwise is to kill the Flame Tyrant, I think it is called, in the volcano instead of giving it the Ice Sword then heading down the staircase behind it. It's actually a pretty neat location and you can see the ghosts of various people who have died during the game down there, including ones you've killed. Pretty sure Galahad ends up down there if you decide to shank him instead of just letting him come with you. < . <;

You didn't let Saruin have the super sweet Obsidian Sword? D: Did you at least bring his clearly and unsubtley evil henchghost with you through the dungeon?

Normally speaking Light Magic is sold in the westernmost temple in Melville, I think it is called -- the empire capital, and should no longer be available for purchase after the empire is invaded by pirates, however the fan translation DID fix some bugs and that may have been one of them, so I'd check there. If she isn't in there when you check you might need to take the secret staircase down in there and clear the boss in the basement or find her in the emperor's room; if neither of those work, then Light Magic is locked for the remainder of the game.

I believe you need the map to enter the temple, I normally put off recruiting Hawke until he buys it for me, ala Galahad and the Ice Sword, and then recruit him, but you also need two talismans to get in, one from the great tree in the forest Claudia is from and the other in the shady temple in Northern Estamir from the priest who refuses to speak to you. Problem is, I don't know if those two talismans are still available, the forest one in particular, since you need to tell the tree you want to save the emperor for it and might not have the option any longer if he isn't sick. If you CAN get into that temple, though, it is a great place to farm up money -- it's where I always do it late game, since it is reusable, has a ton of enemies (like everywhere else), and the exit is easy to reach.

Just a side note, two of the game's 'end game' swords are also incomplete, one being the final sword for the evil route and the other being, as I recall anyway, the Obsidian Sword. Both weapons hit hard but only learn a single tech that costs an obscene amount of WP for the damage it does, so if you learn something like sword rain and nothing else that's what is going on there. The Ice Sword might be back in the shop for purchase, though I forget exactly what triggers that.

[Wolf Kanno]

Thanks for the info. For your question about the henchmen, no. He wouldn't join my team but it may likely be due to already having a full party at the time. I also took that sword cause hell yeah I want a cursed weapon! I would also like to hear about this Cursed Shoe glitch.

Update Time!

I mainly returned to the Frontier and finally dealt with the Vampires and took on the Jewel Beast. I was surprised to learn that the Jewel Beast wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Went down on the third round with no character losses, so feeling good about my chances with the end game bosses. At the moment, I'm debating about either finally doing the quest to get the God Weapons so I can level them up before taking on the final dungeon, or finishing Theodore's quest. I'm not sure if I'm going to bother seeing if I can get the Moonstone at this point.

At the moment, I'm starting to feel the burn out from the game cause dungeons are a bit relentless. I still have a few more items to purchase such as Guardian Rings for the team as well as the Garal/Venyl weapons for people not sporting legendary weapons. Not sure if I'm going to bother with magic for the most part, I'll see how the final dungeon goes. I'm imagining it's going to pull what SF2 did and have a significant difficulty spike by endgame. We'll see.

[Rez09]

To my understanding the cursed shoes make you weak to everything, including healing, but you can't take damage from being healed so some kind of crazy stuff happens in the coding when you heal someone wearing the cursed shoes and they gain resistance to everything. There's also a hilarious glitch to make one of your characters into an immortal snowman. And one to gain priority on every action. And one to walk through fixed map encounters. And one to disembark from vehicles several tiles away from them and pop over walls into places you aren't supposed to be. This game has a lot of bugs.

There's really no reason to finish Theodore's Quest, as far as I know all it does is slightly change the ending, and I'm not even fully sure it does that. If you are strong enough to kill the Jewel Beast, you should be strong enough to finish the game; there isn't much of a difficulty spike beyond that point. The game has an odd fixation with glass cannon enemies for the most part, and the final two (Technically five, but really two) encounters follow that logic, so if you managed to take the Jewel Beast's attacks and kill it that quickly you should be completely fine, though Saruin does have a bit of a dirty trick up his sleeve if you happen to go the glass cannon route as well. And aren't a snowman.

Little bit of a nifty aside, if you do decide to give up that Obsidian Sword he totally DOES use it in the final fight and his stats are increased accordingly. He's also bugged when you do that and the easiest boss in the game. This is not the case in the remake however, and you can actually give him ALL of the destiny stones there, which is an absolutely hiiiiiiiiiiiiilarious for the two seconds it takes him to kill you.

[Wolf Kanno]

Update time:

Sorry this is taking so long. My OCD prevented me from starting a quest and not finishing it, so I did complete Theodore's Quest before finally obtaining the God Weapons, I sort of wish I had grabbed the GW earlier, but was afraid getting them would lock me into only being able to do the final dungeon.

I actually reached the final floor where the boss gauntlet is located, but left because I kind of want my party to gain all of the Weapon Skills for the new weapons I acquired. Unfortunately, only the Eres Bow has been mastered while Albert and Gray refuse to level up their weapons beyond Lv. 5 to my discontent. So I've been kind of farming enemies around Isthmus Castle to gain the weapon skills needed.

[Rez09]

Do they have other high level swords, I assume they are using swords, equipped? There was some kind of bug I remember reading about where the devs intended multiple high level weapons of the same class to increase leveling speed but instead managed to do the opposite, so that might be holding back their weapon leveling.

[Wolf Kanno]

Okay, so I'm currently stuck on the final boss, but after a little analysis, I feel I may have my solution.

The biggest problem with Saruin is that he just has too much damn health. He can actually outlast me, especially since he seems have the ability to half the damage I do on a whim for some reason, not sure if this is a weird Phase mechanic the game just fails to telegraph to you or what, but it does get annoying when an ability that I can only use ten times goes from 3500hp damage to 1700hp for no good reason. Especially when said boss has nearly 3x the health of the boss before it. Though frankly, his attacks are manageable, except for that Charm one. He just has so much health he can take my onslaught and outlast me.

Now, to give him credit, I see that I also have just not set-up my party as well as I could have. I was not expecting him to take scratch damage from the Obsidian Sword which I have on Hawke and he sadly has no real good secondary weapon with great skills to fall back on. I have also largely ignored magic for most of the game outside of Myriam and Albert. In a way, this game is kind of doing the same deal as SF2 did where the player probably doesn't bother using most of the game mechanics or tools, cause up until the end, there has really been no reason to. I've never really needed a dedicated healer until this fight and most battles end by the third round cause as far as I can tell, nothing has had over 30,000hp in this game until the final boss.

So I have decided that my new strategy is going to involve leaving the dungeon, thankfully the dungeon is actually pretty short and easy to move around in without fighting a smurf ton of monsters outside of the gauntlet guarding Isthmus Castle; and head back to town to teach my heroes some magic. Mainly give everyone a healing spell, a buff spell, and maybe that image spell so his powerful physical hits don't shave off 90% of a character's health, and then trudge back in to fight him. I will also either give Hawke the Garal Sword and have him master it for it's final skill in order to have a fourth major damage dealer, or I'll give him Yacomb's Spear from Albert and focus on making Albert do support. I need to rearrange the team and better prepare them for a war of attrition, instead of a blitzkrieg. I mean, I feel my current set-up can win this fight, but it would largely involve the RNG falling into place for me every time, and we all know how often that happens. Instead I'm just going to rebuild the team around a fight of attrition.

[Rez09]

I loooooove the Saruin fight so much. He's a bit cheatsy, though. >: 3 Instead of a Garal Sword you might consider investing in a Garal Flail, as he can be debuffed temporarily by its later skills.

[Fynn]

So this thread has kind of inspired me. The only SaGa game I’ve played is the first one (Wonderswan version) and I really like the look of the Vita remaster of Romancing SaGa 2, and apparently we should be getting 3 soon too! I hope to get the former for my birthday (maybe) but then I will still be left without RS1. The question is - should I go for the fan translated SNES version or Minstrel’s Song?

[Rez09]

Minstrel's Song. The game is a full remake, like FFIV DS, rather just an enhanced port with a new paintjob, and they expanded nearly every aspect of the original title in it, including more characters, more in-depth combat, more quests, storyline bosses that were missing from the original, more equipment, equipment upgrading (as I recall, anyway), and they fixed all of the crazy bugs plaguing to original title. You also get the lolz of voice acting. The original is still pretty nifty and completely playable if you want to check it out instead of buying a new game, but MS is the definitive version of the title.

[Fynn]

That’s great to know, thanks!

EDIT: So Minstrel’s Song is a bit hard to obtain for me now, though it is the version I’d prefer at this point, but I am considering emulating the SNES version. Is there merit to playing them one straight after the other (as in are they different enough) or will they feel too samey?

[Black Magic Shopkeeper]

Hey, just popping in with an update: I got past Forneus. A while back, actually. I don't exactly remember the details 100%, but I do know that Boston, Robin and Ellen played offense with their strongest attacks and healing was shared between Harid and Robin. I think Robin was the last man standing when Forneus was finally beat. I think Suction is what saved the day, but honestly it's all a blur now.

I also went and beat Arakes, closing a second abyss gate earlier than I'd expected to. In fact, while I'd assumed it would take at least three tries, I beat him in one go. Awesome. That was much easier than Forneus. As per @Rez09's suggestion, I equipped Harid with Spider and slapped Power Glove onto Ellen-- so that probably helped a whole ton.

Now I've taken to the Dry River and wound up in Mung Village. Undine got booted out of the party and replaced by Zhu Lin, though I find I'm actually okay with this. While I do miss having a base af mage, Zhu Lin is already proving useful with her marksmanship. I don't even know what the heck I'm doing at this point. Just... going to some cave to fight bad-guys? We'll see.

Meanwhile I've been seriously considering buying Minstrel's Song. I'll likely have enough free time for it so I'm probably gonna just buy a used version on Amazon. That's how I usually get old games these days, anyhow. If @Fynn gets it too, maybe we can start it up at the same time and compare our progress as a fun little experiment. :P See how different each playthrough actually is.
But yes, do feel free to join us in nerding out, Fynn. The SaGa franchise needs more love.

[Rez09]

That’s great to know, thanks!

EDIT: So Minstrel’s Song is a bit hard to obtain for me now, though it is the version I’d prefer at this point, but I am considering emulating the SNES version. Is there merit to playing them one straight after the other (as in are they different enough) or will they feel too samey?

If you do a single playthrough of the original into a single playthrough of the remake it should be fine; you'll be retreading ground, but it is nifty to see the scenes redone in 3D and you'll pick up on a lot of the differences.

Regarding RS3, the normal progression path for the demon lords seems to be Arakes -> Byunei -> Aunas / Forneus, so once you have Forneus down you should get Byunei and Arakes super easy. Aunas is either really easy or hard depending on your party setup, as he absolutely murders direct contact attackers, but he's generally easier than Forneus outside of that, if only because he isn't as prone to constantly resetting the elemental field and Fire isn't a generally offensive magic type.

For the part with Zhu Lin in the party, Bai wants you to head all the way to the southern caves and fight the odd human looking people there -- the random Kuwagamons aren't hostile, which is a nice change of pace. After you complete that you'll eventually end up with another mission that requires you to head north instead and you can bring Bai on that mission with you, and she has a super nasty Tornado on her the helps a lot in the boss fight.

[Wolf Kanno]

Yeah, sorry I haven't updated in a bit. I've been actually productive lately which leaves little time to play games, not to mention all I've really been doing is grinding weapon/magic levels.

I taught everyone Healing and Strength Water for the final boss, and some Mirage magic for Doppelganger, but I doubt I'll be able to really utilize that anyway. I gave Hawke the Garal Sword to give him some better Weapon Skills and gave Guella Ha a Garal Flail since Rez09 mentioned it has some debuffing skills I can use and the Garal Spear skills are terrible. I'm currently heading back into the dungeon, and fighting everything I can to level up the skills, but I may leave once again to buy a few more Magical Shelters (their like tents in FF) cause I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have to fight Saruin's minions again, cause I think that fight resets every time you leave the dungeon.

Hawke has nearly maxed out his health, and most of the team is close to breaking into the 900hp range. Sadly, I don't gain too many stats boosts anymore from battles, but that's kind of expected this late into the game.

My first strategy attempt is simply to use the first round to have everyone cast Strength Water to greatly boost their damage, and then just unload the fourth lv. weapon arts into him, with self healing anytime he hits the team with one of his group attacks, and have Albert (who has the highest Water magic levels) to use his turns to heal anyone who takes a brick ton of damage from Saruin's melee attacks. That should hopefully seal this deal as I'm pretty sure I've come close to beating him in the past with the old set-up if the background changes are anything to go by. I kind of want to get this over with cause I'm itching to start my FFV LP.

As for the topic of Minstrel Song, I can't say for sure since I've only played the original at this point. I know from the Wiki it adds a ton of features from the later installments like Life Points and weapon crafting, as well as utilizing the later installment's versions of weapon arts (which is a boon in the game's favor I might add) as well as actually finishing the game. The characters also got redesigns for better or for worse depending on your taste. Still it's been an enjoyable ride, so I feel the more the merrier in recommending the title.

[Fynn]

So I got my hands on Minstrel Song, actually! Should start it soon. Any tips? Who should I pick, what should I look out for? From what I read, I feel like Grey and Claudia could be a good choice, leaning a bit towards Grey since I heard he starts on a relatively small space so I shouldn’t get overwhwlmed

[Wolf Kanno]

If I could do my playthrough over again, I would use Grey or Hawke as my starting characters. Albert isn't bad, and technically his story gives the game a nice bookend feel so don't worry about starting with him either. Frankly any character works out pretty well, though I feel Barbara starts with the weakest usable party members at first.

Of the none main character options: Guella Ha and Myriam are both pretty good party members that I really enjoyed. I've heard the Prince guy is pretty badass, and Albert's sister is also pretty snazzy. There are a few extra characters in Minstrel Song as well like Silver.