Update Time!
Finished getting Rune Magic and fairly happy with the results. The final challenge was just a fairly straight forward dungeon but the boss was this cool undead dragon. Afterwards, since I was already in the area, I finished Sei's Tomb. Fight was a cakewalk, but I found the engagement amusing. I am sad I lost the three artifacts. Kusanagi is one of the best swords I've seen so far in the game, but I honestly think the mirror/shield needed to open the pathway was more useful. The magatama accessory was decent and the Murokami katana lost their luster awhile back, but that shield was great since it no-selled water attacks and lowered damage from heat based attacks in addition to being able to block physical and magic attacks.
With the last two quests out of the way, I went ahead with Red's story. I stopped a drug factory in Kyo. I faced off with Metal Black X who is sort of a rival to Alkaiser, though oddly I didn't have to switch to his henshin form for this dungeon. What super cool though was him dropping a decent piece of armor and the fact my robot managed to learn a tech from him because he's a robot. Even better, the skill is actually really good. Afterwards, I returned to Manhattan to take on the CEO lady who sic the space pirates on my ship. This dungeon turned out to be obnoxious. Like two thirds of it was climbing stairs a la Shinra building, except this one was filled with enemies and mini-boss fights. The boss fight with her was super easy, I was trying desperately to spark the final non-event Alkaiser move but Red decided to spark defense techs against the boss's useless techs instead. So after I thumped her, I went back to Yorkland to face off in Kraken swamp to finally earn it.
I'm not going to do a full breakdown of my whole team this time, but I do have some notes on a few of them:
Red - Has almost mastered all of the techs barring Guns. He's missing maybe two defensive techs from swords which are incredibly difficult to spark to begin with. I'm sure he's missing a few melee attacks as well but he's managed to spark all his Alkaiser moves. He's a beast of a character at this point.Gen isn't too far behind himself and he even managed to spark one of those two defensive techs I mentioned.
Cotton is back to being a Dullahan and I'm making sure not to teach him any new skills so he stays that way. The best thing about this monster form is that it actually has a built in shield so he can no-sell techs like the rest of my team. Thunder has stalled a bit, his Thunder dragon form is good, but I want to make him a Black Dragon but he's having a hard time getting the skills or staying alive. I have no idea what to do with Slime, so he's been all over the place and has no real direction but I wish I could finally get him into a stronger mosnter form, he keeps sticking to mid-tier ones so I may need to check his skill list to see what's causing the problem. Maybe I'll make him a Kraken or Snowfolk.
Fuse has managed to spark all the Gun techs and Emilia only needs like one more to join him. Guns have some issues but at least some of the final skills have been fairly good making my opinion of the weapon class improve. The two biggest issues is that there are only like ten or eleven skills tops and only half of them are of any use. Not that swords and melee don't have a similar ratio of Great to mediocre skills as well, but both of those weapon types have like thirty skills a piece so it just feels like guns are weaker in comparison. The ammo mechanic is also a scrappy mechanic in this game and it's annoying that while there are three times as many guns as there are other weapons, only a third of them can be used with gun skills. I feel like Gun skills would be pretty awesome if you could use them in conjunction with Missiles and Laser cannons and their superior base damage.
Annie, Fei-On, and Lute are all still annoying me. They don't like to spark anything and they get targeted and killed more often than I would care to admit. Fei-On is especially annoying because he's managed to spark all but one of the techs needed for the DSC attack and the one he's missing isn't even terribly difficult to spark.
Having spent more time with Time Lord, I now see why Mystics get a bad rep in this game. They are an odd build of a race. Like he has pretty great stats due to the monsters I've absorbed but his skills don't pack as much of a punch as his human compatriots. He only has four skill slots for magic and I'm mostly using it for Time Magic which is more support than anything. Mystic magic is also not quite as impressive as I had hoped. I may need to consult a guide to see if I can step up his game. The biggest issue I'm having so far is that he is incredibly slow to gain WP/JP so even though his HP is commendable, he has little WP and MP to make use of some of his most broken spells/skills.
I only have one more Black X leader to take down and then I'll likely head in to face off with the big bad themselves. The mini-guide I'm using mentioned I only have three more places to go so I'm fairly close to ending this story arc. I'm debating about whether I should keep going with SaGa Frontier 1 and choose another character since the game is relatively short or if I should move on and start SaGa Scarlet Graces? If I do a second run, I'm thinking either Blue or Asellus as my next choice since one will give me the full magic experience and I like the idea of playing as a villain protagonist while Asellus has the most interesting story and it will give me a chance to really delve into the Mystics as a race. On the other hand, Scarlet Graces is shiny and new, and unlike the rest of the franchise, it doesn't have as much as a following so this will be more of a true blind playthrough for me.
Reply With Quote
