In FFL news, I've reached the second area you can fully explore in the tower where I'm hunting down some dragons and the orb their guarding that I need to proceed up the tower. My Mutant has reached the visual cap on Magic and HP, but I'm aware that the cap is actually higher. I was able to upgrade my humans, and I'm debating about just farming the are to raise their stats. I've sadly hit the max on HP200 Potions so I'll have to go after the more expensive HP400 Potions instead. The better weapons are much appreciated and nothing in the are poses much of a threat.

SaGa Frontier 2 is the tale of two very different games. I did a few more of Gustave's chapters and he's easily the best part of the game. I did one of his very few optional quests which involved him getting mixed up between two pirate factions fighting over the chance to go legit. Was a pretty cool side story and Gustave continues to impress me.

Wil is like dating a porcupine. I want to like him and his side of the game but by god is he going out of his way to piss me off. Wil's plot has gotten a bit more interesting now that we''re actually trying to get to the bottom about his parents mysterious deaths. You have to traverse this awful desert area to reach a small town where his father went on an expedition with some unsavory characters. When you finally reach the town, you have to talk to everyone who only gives you bits and pieces of the full story but it's interesting nonetheless. The next chapter was better cause it thankfully didn't involve dungeon crawling. Instead, you have to choose one of Wil's team (Tyler is technically the only real choice) and then infiltrate a gang run by the last surviving member of the Expedition that Wil's dad was a part of. Wil finally gets some interesting plot build up and the whole chapter involves running around the town and trying to find an old man and his grandson that the gang is after. It's a bit time consuming but more fun that most of Wil's chapters have been. The next chapter involves going after the gang.

Wil's Chapters are unfortunately very frustrating. The dungeon maps are confusing as hell and it's very difficult to discern what's a path and what's just pretty background as well as what doors can be opened and which ones are just wallpaper. Graphically the game is similar to Legend of Mana, which isn't surprising when you learn that Kawazu worked on that title as well. Yet it doesn't lead to the most intuitive level design which is probably why it;'s a rare sight in the medium after the PS1. None of this would be too problematic if enemies didn't respawn when you re-enter an area. The more annoying part are the battles. Wil's team just isn't that good unfortunately. Wil is a fragile mage and even with some buffing here and there, he is still the most fragile member. Cordelia the guardian and front line fighter kits way harder and has access to the Spear weapons, but she's just as fragile as Wil sadly. Aunt Nina is durably, but she's another pure mage like Wil and she only brought one new spell to the team. Narcisse is a bit more flexible but I'm learning quickly (and this applies to FFL as well) that Bows just kind of suck in this franchise. Maybe I got spoiled with Tactics Ogre... Tyler is the only heavy on the team but his best weapons are the Axe and Bow. Axes are powerful but lack the amount and variety of skills like the Spear and Sword have.

The problem here comes back to what I was talking about in my previous post about Duels. Only Tyler is really built for dueling on the team, unfortunately I need to duel to learn new spells for my mages, but unlike Weapon Arts where they either activate or they don't, Spell Arts have this annoying thing where they activate Custom Spell Arts, which is a fancy way of saying a boosted basic elemental spell. To give an example of what I mean here, if you build a combo using Stone magic three times in a row, you may eventually learn Stone Armor which is an equippable Art that raises a charcter's defense, or you'll get a Lv.2 or Lv. 3 Stone Custom Art which lowers the enemies defense, which is something the basic stone spell already does. You can't actually use these Arts in regular battles and since only three of the eight elements actually do damage, they're not great in duels either. Even worst is that I discovered some of the higher tier spells actually use the same spell order as the level one trout, which means I now have to pray to the RNG Gods to let the spell work. This blows through your SP like no business and while they're are ways to regenerate it, it's a slow process.

What's really been irking me are the enemies. As I stated before, several enemies are easier as duels, but sometimes the game makes you face off with creatures that are frankly harder than some of the bosses. The Gryphon enemy in the chapter I'm currently on is a team battle only enemy, most of his attacks are OHKO to my fragile party, the one that doesn't kill them has a high chance of charming them, and he has more health than anything I've encountered in the game including bosses. It's times like this where I learn to hat Wil's team cause it's just way too fragile for its own good. The issue is that this has been common for every dungeon in I've been in for his chapters. He always has one or two enemy types that have ridiculous health and can usually take out a character per hit. HP is rewarded randomly and like most of the franchise it doesn't use a conventional level system. Money is also incredible hard to come by in his chapters and it's rare to find armor in this game, so trying to get around the Squishy Wizard Brigade has been a bit of a chore for me.

What's ultimately happening to me is that while I'm getting the usual RPG High of progression in Gustave's story, the same can't be said for Wil, he's just been an up hill battle from beginning to end. It sucks getting lost in a dungeon, worrying about blowing through your LP and then suddenly getting ambushed by a Boss in Mook's Clothing and watching your whole team get wiped out.