And... DONE!

My initial strategy of just powering up and changing out some weapons helped immensely, along with a surprise of the RNG just seriously going my way. Saurin kind of kept wasting turns on buffing or ineffectual skills instead of spamming his powerful group attacks, and the extra damage allowed me to finish him off without too much trouble. Got to see Albert's ending and the final sequence was pretty cool. Kind of liked the psych out ending.

Overall Romancing SaGa was pretty interesting. I liked the variety of characters and the quest lines gave a nice lore to the world that kept me invested. Hawke, Claudia, Gray, and Sif were my favorite characters. I think of the main cast, Jamil and Aisha were the only ones I didn't bother with cause by the time I found them, my main party was pretty much set for me.

My favorite quests involved the Knights/Theodore, as well as the Geckling and Assassin's Guild quests. My least favorite was probably the one that involved acquiring the four summons.

I only have three gripes with the game overall:

1) No surprise since I believe everyone hated it, but the way Weapon Skills were handled in this game was tiresome. I probably could forgive having to learn each weapon individually if your character didn't lose all their XP with them if you so much as unequip one. Doesn't make sense. Like somehow Albert drops his rapier and magically forgets all of his skills. Speaking of which, rapiers suck in this game.

2) The Jewel mechanic makes no sense to me in this game beyond being another anti-grinding tool to punish players who fight too much. I never mentioned this mechanic in SF2 because it made sense in that game. Cash can't transfer between characters but the Jewel equivalent currency could, and so you needed to convert cash to jewels as the story went along. Here it just gets in the way as you'll quickly hit the max cash limit halfway through a dungeon, making most treasure chests moot and making any money you get in battles worthless until you leave the dungeon and start converting your Gold to Jewels. It just felt like a tiresome mechanic.

3) This last one is probably the least bothersome of the three, but I felt a need to mention it. I kind of wish the narrative had just a tiny bit more structure to it. Albert's story arc really has no meaningful closure, and then the game sort of just becomes "do quests until we tell you to fight the final boss" which is like 80% of the game. I appreciate the open-ended quest aspect of the game, especially coming off a Super Famicom title, but it sort of felt like I was just wandering around instead of working towards a goal. I get the feeling RS2 will fit better for me as the open questing serves to reinforce the ultimate goal established in the beginning whereas Saruin's resurrection in RS1 doesn't really feel like a big deal until nearly the end of the game when his dungeon unlocks.

With all that said, I enjoyed the game and happy to have played it. Looking forward to Romancing SaGa 2 which I picked up for the PS4. I also have Unlimited SaGa to play but I may save that one for later cause I want to play it around the same time I play Dawn of Mana just to get a double taste of the two PS2 games that nearly ended both franchises and see if that reputation is truly warranted.

Course I'll be taking a break from SaGa for a moment as I really want to start my FFV LP, and I need to finish Legend of Mana as well. I'll keep checking back with this thread, and who knows, I may end up jumping into RS2 anyway pretty soon. Not like I haven't beaten LoM before.