Actually combat does involve a slot machine that you can customize with moves, it also has misses. The game has an interesting Tabletop style "weakness" mechanic where you can give your characters huge stat boosts by equipping them with a weakness to certain attacks or monster types.

From what I've read, the game is some odd amalgamation of Tabletop RPG, Board game, and slot machine. In fact, you have a limited amount of turns to complete a "board" and if you run out of turns by making bad rolls, you have to start it all over. I'll probably have a better understanding of it when I get around to that entry.

In my own SaGa news:

I've beaten Genbuu and I am now ascending the tower. My Mutant still has her same four skills but close to 750hp, I'm sporting a Salamander Monster who is sporting mid-game stats. My humans, who are considered the best race, are the loads at the moment because I simply don't have access to any money or good gear for them. I did get a fun taste of power with the King's Gear you needed to collect, it's a shame you lose it permanently in order to get the Black Sphere to enter the tower.

In SaGa Frontier 2 news, I'm starting to come around to Wil. I think my issue here is that I went from melee focused Gustave to pure mage Wil, and I was trying too hard to play Wil like Gustave. Wil is just not a fighter, his best weapon proficiency is the Staff, which is easily the weakest melee weapon with some of the worst Arts attached to it. Sadly his secondary weapon are swords, but he starts at an abysmal level with them so even using high end Arts gained from Gustave's chapters can't compensate for his general weakness with the weapon. On the other hand, once you actually to bother learning magic Arts, Wil becomes a much better fighter though he pales in comparison to Crutch Character Narcisse who has way better elemental proficiency, starts with Fire magic, and has access to the better Bow weapon letting him be more versatile in combat.

Not helping matters has been the fact Wil's first chapter is pretty hard even when you kind of know what you're doing, and my knack for always forgetting to save often cause I don't like the "save anywhere" feature because I will forget to without a visual reminder. There are two types of combat in dungeons: Duel and Party. Party works like you imagine it would. Duel is a bit unique because it's one on one, and instead of selecting Arts you've learned, you have to select up to four commands associated with your weapons and gear. Every art is made up of a combination of these commands, so you have to put them in the correct order to activate any Arts you own. On the brightside, you can actually teach a character Arts easier by inputting the commands of Arts they don't know yet if you have a guide though it's not a guarantee it will activate. It's still faster and more efficient than the random Spark factor in party battles. Now, the thing about Duels the game doesn't tell you but you'll likely figure it out pretty quickly is that enemies threat levels are different depending on if you're dueling them or fighting the with a party. With very few exceptions, if a monster battle gives you the option to duel them, you probably should because two of my most painful game overs were from fighting them as a group, whereas they are much more manageable at duels.

The main problem with duels besides being incredibly time consuming, is healing. There are no healing items in this game, and in order to use a healing spell in battle like duels you'll need to know the correct combination and hope it activates. The other way to heal involves consuming Life Points. All characters have HP and Life Points. HP works as you imagine but LP is actually more important and significantly smaller. If your character loses all of their HP, they are knocked out for the duration of the battle unless you use a healing spell on them. If LP is depleted, they're dead and can't be used for the rest of the chapter. So long before you actually gain healing magic, you have the option before a round starts to let a character sacrifice a LP point to restore all their HP. Thankfully everyone has enough to not make this a problem but some duels and particular monsters can make you blow through all your LP if you're not careful. To make matters worse, some monsters have the ability to attack your LP directly. It all sounds confusing but it's an interesting set of mechanics.

Anyway, tangent aside, the reason why Wil's chapter is so difficult is because the majority of battles are duels, so combat becomes quite a bit of a slog. I did acquire an overpowered item or two, but by the end of the chapter when they weren't as useful.