SaGa Franchise

[Wolf Kanno]

They just dropped a trailer for the collection.



Looks fairly faithful. I feel the only thing this collection missed the mark on was finally porting over the remakes. I mean even the Wonderswan remake of SaGa 1 should have been pretty easy. Still, I tend to prefer playing games in their original form and SE is notorious for skipping over originals for remakes so I feel this is pretty nice.

[Del Murder]

Wow, looks like a direct port of the Game Boy games, which is a bit outside the norm for them. Man I loved that trilogy. I do wish they also included the remakes.

[Wolf Kanno]

I know I haven't updated this in ages. I more or less abandoned Legend III because I got stuck and wasn't invested enough to look up the answer. I have been playing the mobile game during this whole time and have enjoyed it immensely. But unfortunately, it suffers from several of the issues I have with a lot of SE's mobile titles. Mainyl the game overloads you with events distracting you from the main narrative, and secondly the game has become a bit too bloated in terms of memory storage thanks to the constant huge updates. I've had to delete most of my apps just to keep the damn thing on my phone. It's a great game, but too big for its own good.

Narratively, it's one of the more interesting games in the franchise and I love the fact they learned their lessons from Dissidia and went all in with really playing with party dynamics and playing up each characters story. There is a wicked cool moment where Sophia (a Crusader class character from RS2) gets to give Kzinssie a reason you suck speech after revealing she knows the power to dodge his Soul Steal move thanks to her time with the Emperor from her own world. There is also a cool event where Undine opens a magic school for all the kid characters and one guy decided that Gustave XIII of all people should be their body guard to some mixed trauma.

Basically, the game allows the new story characters to summon heroes from other worlds, but they are from different points in time from said world, explaining why you can have multiples of the same character in the world. This leads to some really dark moments, especially in some of the tower sequences, where you're dealing with characters who meet untimely ends interacting with heroes from their own game knowing their fate. Likewise, the game has an ongoing subplot about the eight heroes from RS3 discovering that one of them is missing in this new world, to the point the memory of them has also been sealed away. There is also some political intrigue going on as well, made amusing by the descendant of Monika and Mikhail asking them for leadership advice. Overall, the story is actually one of the highlights of the game.

The gameplay is also great. but eventually slows to a crawl when it becomes an equipment grind. Thankfully, equipment is not part of the draw system like it was in Record Keeper so obtaining it isn't usually too difficult, just grinding materials can be tiresome and gaining S rank stuff is hard since it's locked behind higher difficulty levels. It's been a fun game, it's just hard getting past the mobile genres gatcha elements. I still feel like I spend too much time doing side stuff instead of playing the main quest which is annoying. Still, once I reach another update that it too big for my phone, I'm likely going to drop the game.

[Wolf Kanno]

Just to let you know. Square-Enix is putting Romancing SaGa 3 on sale for it's 25th anniversary this year. You can get it on steam for less than $13 USD, so if you have been interested in this old classic, you should check it out. Likewise, they are doing some cool events in Re; Universe as well.

[Wolf Kanno]

Apparently the remasters have been a good business decision by SE because they just announced a remaster of SaGa Frontier for next summer! Even better, they are not just going to spruce up the graghics either. They are adding back in all of the missing content including the eight character Fuse and several of the cut sequences in Asellus' storyline. Looks like it's getting a better translation as well. So this is pretty neat and I hope it's success means we may see the same thing happen to SaGa Frontier 2!

[Lone Wolf Leonhart]

This is really exciting.

I have fond memories of playing on ps1 back in the day, and I remember reading about people finding a missing 8th playable character in the data, so it's awesome to see he'll be officially put in the game.

Asellus has been my favorite for a while, so I'm glad to see more attention brought to her story.

So stoked. Imagine if one of your favorite books growing up was released now and you found out they included entire missing chapters.

[krissy]

honestly pretty cool
should I play the original first or wait for this-

[Lone Wolf Leonhart]

honestly pretty cool
should I play the original first or wait for this-

It's just the original game + more things, so unless you want to play the original to see what's different the second go around, there's really no need to search it out.

[Wolf Kanno]

I would wait for the remaster.

For me though, I did pick up the original, so I may jump into that for my New Year's gaming.

[Fynn]

Definitely looking forward to this, even if my track record with SaGa isn’t the greatest lol. I’ve yet to finish Romancing SaGa 2 despite loving it immensely, and I’d still like to get 3 (though even with that last sale I was too broke to get it). So I’ll hopefully pick this up once it comes out. At the very least the SaGa remakes have been coming out on systems I own so I imagine this’ll be the case here too.

Also, I can’t help but notice a certain gap here. I think SaGa I-III are available through their original gameboy versions on some system, probably the Switch, right? Well now we’re missing Romancing SaGa 1. I know it had a remake first but that was back on the PS2, which is ancient at this point. So it’d be nice if at least we could get that version ported to newer systems.

[Wolf Kanno]

SaGa 3 is done. Finally used a guide on gamefaqs that I think may have been written by a former member of this forum, and finished the game. I wasn't actually too far from the end anyway. Explored the Underworld, found the device that was blocking the Talon from reaching the mountain base of the big bad. Dion sacrificed himself to destroy it and we were reunited with the man who brought us to the past.

Finished some sidequests to gain the last two Mystic Swords as well as the Aegis Shield and the final upgrades for the Talon 2. Reached the mountain where the Talon 2 blew part of it up to reveal the enemy stronghold. Fought who we thought was the main villain who turned out to be a servant who reveals all of the water flooding the world is actually their master Xygar who really hits the Lovecraftian vibes hard. Discover it's devouring Sol, the man who stopped it before in hopes of preventing itself from being sealed again. Sol uses his power to contain the creature and asks us to murder him. Unfortunately, Xygar takes over and is given a true form which my party largely curbstomped into the ground since he only had one move that was an atual threat to my overleveled and well equipped party. The coolest part was having the Talon 2 come to help us in the final battle, especially when it's revealed the ship is controlled by the brain of the main hero's father. Xygar is destroyed and Sol uses the last of his power to destroy the Purelands once and for all. We lose the Talon 2 but out mentor figure saves a piece of him and returns us to their base where we learn the resident stuffy scientist can grow people back from small tissue remains. In fact, it's almost implied Dion, who is resurrected along with the hero's dad, has had to be restored a few times before. The party decided to return to the present where they grew up, instead of sticking around in their true timeline but have to kill time until a new time machine can be made for them.

Overall, I feel SaGa 3 is my least favorite entry and the true black sheep of the franchise. Though I feel playing the DS remake would likely resolve all of my issues with the game. The big thing to take away here is that SaGa 3 is the first game developed by the team that would go on to make Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and it really shows. The cartoony monster designs, the frequent overpowered helper characters, the more traditional FF elements, the sheer easiness of the entire game. After getting my ass handed to me in the first two GB entries, SaGa 3 is almost insultingly easy. It's almost intriguing how the game resorting to a more conventional gameplay structure actually hurts it since the game is just a bit too easy and bland for it. Boss battles can be a bit challenging but random encounters are a chore. The worst part of it is the slow as molasses text scroll for battles which is in the first two entries as well. But whereas those games had you fighting maybe three or four really tough enemies at a time, the average in this game is closer to six. Said enemies are also rarely a threat but have more hp than they deserve. That slow text with five to eight tanky enemies made random encounters a nightmare and by the final dungeon I was running from every battle just to get through it faster. Battles are just painfully slow in this game and because you don't have the serious resource management or difficulty of the earlier installments involved, they're boring as well.

The class system is just not as worthwhile as it was in the previous entries and I think having the power to backtrack from your choices hurts it even further since it makes the classes nothing more than a diversion than something practical. Not helped by the fact that the starting Human/Esper classes fall heavily into 'boring but practical' territory. I stuck to having a bast and cyborg character in my party just for the novelty sake, but I would have had an even easier time with the final boss if I kept the party in their default states in order to capitalize on their bonuses to using weapons and magic.

Dungeon design is the one lone area where I'll commend the game for. SaGa tends to have endurance style dungeons, but these ones had some interesting puzzle elements to them that made it interesting. The time travel concept was also neat, if criminally underutilized.

The plot was interesting but largely nonsensical in a lot of places. The usual issues of translating back in the day, combined with the even smaller storage base, means this game had to cut out a lot from it's narrative. The plot is interesting, but definitely falls into old early 90s RPG logic at times.

Overall, I find it interesting how much I think back to a friend of mine from high school who was playing this game while I was playing SaGa 2. He really upselled this game to me and I certainly went in with higher expectations than I should have. Kind of sad I find the most conventional entry to be the weakest, but it was developed by a different team than the ones that did the first two games. It would be interesting to play the DS remake which had it's gameplay revamped to be the same as the first two entries, but also had more space to actually give it's narrative justice.

So I guess whenever I decide to pick this marathon up next, I'll be tackling the most famous entry, SaGa Frontier.

[Del Murder]

I recall a member who wrote a lot of FAQs. What was the name?

[Wolf Kanno]

Spatvark. I'm sure I've seen that name on some old threads before.

[Del Murder]

Wow, that name takes me back to my very early EoFF days. Pretty cool that some of that old stuff still lives on.

[WarZidane]

Well, since this is a SaGa thread, I guess I can make a post about Romancing SaGa Re Universe here

Started playing it just a few days ago, and it's been an interesting experience. At first I had absolutely no clue how things worked with the styles, stat-ups, what i should be looking for in terms of good characters etc, very different from the usual gacha game.

Anyway, fast-forward a few days and I've gotten a better grasp on things. I was a bit late to the multiple events currently going on (Anniversary which has now ended, Christmas, New Year and the Forneus conquest thing) but still able to profit from them quite a bit.

I've got an army of characters in my roster but for the sake of not getting completely overwhelmed I simply put 5 of them together and went on my merry way, which honestly worked fairly well. The team I'm running for now is a Desert Lance formation, which has one character in the front with some upped stats as tank, and 4 in the back with lowered agility:
SS Julian [I Am Pumped!] in the front, acting as my tank and slash damage dealer (sword)
SS Undine [The Joys of Teaching], a caster with ice spells
SS Princess White Rose [Here, This is for You], a healer
SS Ginny [I'm Ginny Knights], a physical blunt damage dealer (hammer)
SS Faerie [Spear of Punishment], a physical piercing damage dealer (spear)

Unlocked awakening skills but only awakened one skill so far since I haven't done many hard mode stages, and using a mix of christmas weapons, random A rank weapons and one SS rank staff which i have no idea where i got it.
All of them at style level 35 at this point, though i think i might want to start leveling some other styles for those characters as well (except princess white rose, i only have the one style for her )
Story-wise i've beaten 5 chapters(?) now, but before starting 6-1-1 i'm now just going through the conquest map since that's a limited time event. Also of course doing the dailies whenever i can, as well as the christmas event and now the new year's event. Lots of stuff to do, at least I have about 4500 stamina potions that expire in February so I don't have to worry about my stamina