SaGa Franchise

[Wolf Kanno]

Update Time!

Okay it's official, Unlimited Saga is easily the weirdest and most brutal entry in the franchise. The series bad tendency of not explaining anything really hits its zenith with this entry because even having played through so many entries myself at this point, this game is a radical departure from previous entries.

So dungeons and the world map now work like a table top game, where you move your character's avatar piece on the board. Sometimes you find monsters, sometimes you find treasure. Like D&D, as long as your characters have the skills, they can check the area to find any treasure or evade a monster by checking for initiative. Treasure chests now need to have traps removed and lockpicked to even get to their contents and any time you use a skill, the Reels appear to serve as the dice. It's pretty unique, though I wish that either treasure chests weren't all booby trapped, cause it sucks to screw up and watch your LP get shaved off. I also really wished that the movement controls were not mapped to the analog stick only. The UI for these sections are not the most intuitive.
When you reach towns, you visit Inns and Blacksmith shops to get items, information, recruit new people, or go on adventures. Most of this is done from a menu system. It's a real shame actually because the sprite animations in this game are really fluid and nice but they're only relegated to combat. The rest of the game's visuals are a little disappointing though the actual background drawings are nice and detailed. Musically, this might actually be my favorite OST by Hamazu. It has a nice Suikoden IV vibe to it with some of the instrument choices though he loves his violins a wee bit too much.

Combat is the weirdest part, as it looks familiar but plays very differently from any entry before it. So you still have LP and HP, but unlike every entry before it, your HP basically works like armor. So even if it's reduced to zero, your character will still stand, but now they'll likely take LP damage from any attack afterwards. Enemies work the same way where you really need to strike their LP instead of just shaving off their health. HP regenerates, but not after combat like in the RS series, instead you have to make the character rest by either making them set out of combat or when you're exploring you hit the R3 button to choose to wait for your turn and have the whole team regenerate their health. How much they regenerate depends on their regeneration level and what they are equipped with. Light armor tends to give you a bonus to HP Regen in exchange for lower defense, while heavy armor gives you a penalty for better defense. Equipment itself is complex with armor now having skills attached to them. Some gear just come with good skills, some armor skills can be unlocked in battle, and the blacksmith shop can add some to weapons and accessories as well. Crafting seems to be a big deal as well but I'm only scratching the surface for that at the moment.

Weapons and accessories still break in combat, and the only thing taken from SF2 is the idea that magic is tied to the materials in your gear. So instead of MP, your magic will consume your weapon durability. Though it helps if the item or weapons has a spell art attached to them to do so, otherwise you need special panels to use magic. Weapon Skills also consume the durability, though I'm not sure if higher skills drain the durability faster or not. Though I do seem to burn through gear faster in this entry than in SF2 or the GB entries. Speaking of weapon skills, they have the most radical change in this entry. The game brings back RS1's weapon system with a twist by merging it with later entries sparking mechanics. All weapons can have four skills unlocked on them that vary from different attack types, to parry skills, to magic arts that allow magic use. When your character sparks a tech in battle, what they are really doing is sparking an advanced version of one of these weapons skills and then it is permanently added to the weapon reel and works a bit like a critical hit. I'm not sure if sparked moves can spark higher moves, but I'm going to assume so. When you engage in combat, you get five turns for one round of combat. You can either have your whole team use a move or you can have some use multiple turns and others none. Characters that are not given turns will leave the field of battle which allows them to regen some HP and protect them from getting hurt in the combat round. When you get your turn, you choose what attack you want from a list based on what your equipped with and what magic may be available to the character. you input every character command and then the round starts with turn order based on speed. When a characters turn comes up their battle reel will come on which at first just lets them do their attack but as you spark better moves, they will be added to the reel. You also have the option to Hold the attack, which delays it so that it can be combo with other attacks your party does, so for once you have a little more control over the combo system than you did in the Frontier entries. What makes it dangerous is that you sometimes combo with enemies instead and that can sometimes end a battle with a pyrrich victory.

You only level up when you finish a quest, your character will generate four random panels to add to their board. These range from weapon panels that increase your proficiency and spark rates with a particular weapons, skill panels that give your character the ability to avoid enemies, diffuse traps, pick locks, haggle, or use diplomacy, and finally there are familiars and magic tomes. Familiars grant your character access to particular elemental magic, while tomes allow you to teach your character specific spells but they work a bit funky as they actually gain a form of XP from fights, and occasionally, the game has you choose one of three spells to level up. Tomes are not generated like normal panels, you have to find them on quests, and then at the end, choose to give them to a character in exchange for a panel. The way panels are arranged on the character grid determines their stats, and you gain bonuses if you have panels arranged a certain way. What the game doesn't tell you is that you can't rearrange a panel once it's placed. So if you're not aware of these arrangements and don't pay attention to the stat screen when your choosing where to put your shiny new panel, you can accidentally screw yourself over. The panel grid itself also has a rather unintuitive design where each point on it corresponds to a particular stat that is only shown to you as a symbol and some of them are vague, and others are not as important as you would think. So if you want to raise your strength, you need to pop a weapon panel next to the strength panel and if you have two of them adjacent, you'll get a bonus. Some of your stats are your characters elemental affinity, and that is actually more important than your magic stat in determining magical damage. You'll need to place familiars or magic tomes by them to get bonuses. Skill is a stat that determines damage for daggers and spears, they need skill panels like Lockpicking or Diffuse to raise their stats.Magic is a useless stats, and so is endurance since it doesn't affect defense. Panels also have levels so if you get a higher level one, you should replace the old ones unless you're trying to maximize stats.

Oof.... so yeah, complex.

I have reached Voldstam, which is like the fourth town in the game. Laura is an ex-pirate who accidentally saves a kid's life and learns he's actually the missing prince of a fallen kingdom named Henri. So her story is mostly about trying to get him to a safe place while being pursued by mercenaries and bounty hunters. We recruited one of the other "main" characters in Judy. She's a pint sized sorceress looking for her grandfather. I really wish I could find more characters because having a large team seems important in this game considering how long dungeons can be and how quickly LP can be shaved off if you have a few bad run ins with the Reels or combo attacks.

Laura - Is specializing in Axes and Swords a the moment since they are powerful strength based weapons. She also has Diffuse Lv. 2 and Lockpick Lv. 1 for notable skills. I'm debating if I'll make her pure melee or try to go with the red mage route with her since she starts off with Fire magic. Hybrid classes are apparently not ideal in this game but apparently Laura and a few others are rare exceptions.

Henri - Oof, he's a mix bag. I really need to get his panel board under control to get him some decent stats. He's a skilled based fighter so only daggers and spears for him. He has a Lv. 1 Diplomacy skills that has come in handy but his board is all over the place. His saving grace among the team is that he comes equipped with a special dagger weapon that is unbreakable, so at least I won;t have to resort to melee when his weapons break.

Judy - Has been surprisingly more useful than she looks. She starts with some good fire magic, but I have unfortunately burned through the weapon that had the spell. I gave her a bow and she has sparked some really good techs with it already. She sparks more than poor Henri. I have her with mostly Familiar panels as well as her starting Forbidden Tome Panel and a Metal Magic Tome I acquired in an earlier mission. I probably should have checked first to see if she was even good with Metal before giving it to her so I feel like a dunce in that regard. My biggest boon with her was acquiring a Lockpick Lv. 2 Panel for her. Now if I could only have her gain a Fortunteller or Magic Lock panel I would be set.

It has been a serious uphill battle in terms of the learning curve, but I am having fun.

EDITGA: I forgot to mention the true scrappy mechanic this game introduces. Combat actions, in addition to consuming weapon durability, also consumes HP. So fighting a few battles can quickly drop your HP to 0 before your next battle, leading to either more risky encounters, or forcing you to consume valuable turns in side adventures to constantly restore health. It bring me back to Romancing SaGa 1 which also punished you for fighting too much. It's such a counter-intuitive design and probably my biggest pet peeve so far besides the game's general "I won't explain the rules to you, and don't bother with the manual because it also leaves out a lot of info" nonsense the series is known for.