Update time!

I did start another go of SF1 with Asellus and I was about to finally leave the Mystic home world nut I managed to break my urge to replay entries I've already done and jumped into SaGa Scarlet Graces.

It has been a weird experience with a lot of adjustments. The game has retooled a lot of the gameplay and feels a bit like a giant mishmash of concepts from the whole franchise. The interface is most reminiscent of Unlimited SaGa though without the dice mechanics. The game world is point and click and has a clever pop up book aesthetic that is fairly charming. The world map is the only part of the game you can explore. Towns are just as they were in US and simply a menu to choose whether you want to chat with people, check out a smith, or meet a healer. Dungeons don't exist anymore, instead they are a set of encounters that are bookmarked by story scenes.

The game is a bit more story heavy than other entries but still retains SaGa's whole spiel of ''wander around and do side objectives'' so while Urpina is on a journey to find her father and save her homeland, it hasn't stopped me from investigating a peninsula's 100 rumors, or battling pirates off the coastline.

Combat has also been majorly retooled. Three of the mainstays are still here such as sparking techs, Roles, and formations; but combat is a very different beast. It now uses something similar to CTB where you can see the turn order of your party and enemies. Using different moves alters said turn order dramatically and there is a heavy emphasis on manipulating said turn order like in Xenosaga. The biggest reason is to activate Unite Attacks. if an enemy smashed between two of your party is killed when the order queue has them sync together,. they will perform a Unite Attack on one of the remaining enemies. The catch is that enemies can do this too, so losing an ally can sometimes cause a chain reaction that causes you to lose the whole battle. Also new is the Interrupt mechanic. All of those worthless counter moves in the series past finally have a use as you can set them up to target specific enemies and they will activate regardless of the enemy targeting the character using the move. Interrupts usually have some special effect to it such as Matador having a delay effect that knocks the enemy to the end of the turn queue, or Seismic Smash hitting all non-aerial enemies with a low chance to paralyze them.

Despite all of these tools, battles are challenging and I've died quite a few times. Unlike FFX's version of this, enemies are tanky as hell so getting those unite attacks off is more challenging than it seems. Throw in SaGa's tradition of awkward healing abilities and it's easy to get your ass kicked. Battles also have special criteria that lets you earn more rewards in combat.

It's been an interesting ride so far.