SaGa Franchise

[Wolf Kanno]

Unlimited Saga is complete with Laura at least. I dabbled in another character story, but wasn't sure I was ready to dive back in like I was for PS2 and 3. Overall, I feel the game suffers from a bad rep , but is surprisingly better than people make it out to be. It's core design is certainly out there and requires approaching the game in a very different light, but it works out for the most part. It is surprisingly more story heavy than other entries I've played so far.

So when I last left off, we discovered the one dude had been able to conquer Escata because the retainer had betrayed the royal family. Sadly, we handed over all the elemental gears and the blade and he ran off to a place called the Nanke Lines I believe? It's based on the Nanzca Lines in South America and the theme of the dungeon is to uncover every room that creates one of the pictures made from it. Most of it was easy until the Giant room, because that one involved invisible walls, and while the first one is hinted to you, the others weren't making matters worse, this area was crawling with high level undead. In a rare act of mercy, the dungeon actually had a save point and restored all of the party's health, including LP. So that was neat.

The final battle starts with a rematch with the retainer dude, who is pulling off his best Golbez impression by having a wicked cool skeleton dragon wrap around him and fight with him. His signature attack is Shadow Breath even, and it's a pain in the ass. Not because it does a lot of damage, mostly because it inflicts an annoying status effect called Blackout, which is kind of like Paralyze except in this game, it's terrible. Basically, if a party member gets killed or nailed with a debilitating status effect that prevents them from taking action, the game still counts them as on the field, so they use up a turn and the only way to stop this is to remove them from the field by having another character waste their action to do so. Weight is also a factor, which is where Anzan becomes a double edged sword, because he weighs so much no character can rescue him if he were to be killed or hit with blackout.

The retainer isn't so bad though, I made sure to equip most of my team with a helmet that resists blackout. With him taken out, he goes on about how the royal family squandered the power they had and uses it to summon Chaos, a primordial force used by the gods to create the world. You need to read the Ultimania to get this info though... Anyway, this boss is a bit weird. He has four phases and as I mentioned in an earlier post, he acquires the signature attack of each character's main villain. So in my case, Shadow Breath. His design is interesting, sort of like a weird flower, skeleton, Gilgamesh, Safer Sephiroth looking abomination. You face him on the blue moon of the planet, until his final form, where you take him on in the second red moon. Man Square loves that imagery. This is at least the third game to use this visual. His first two phases are jokes, where he mainly uses the various weapons on its back to smack you around. In fact, with the exception of two attacks, overall its attacks look more impressive than they really are. The two attacks that are a big threat come during the last two phases. The first is Overkill which is a group hitting attack with a good chance to do LP damage. Raven's Edge on the other hand is the real threat. Ironically, it's the least impressive attack since it's basically a basic overhead sword attack but it does massive LP damage. Course the real reason why the final phase is actually a challenge is because it's turns practically triple, so watching it take a character with 19 LP get hit with a four hit combo of Raven't Edge and walk away with 5 LP left afterwards is really scary. Thankfully for me, I brought three Axe specialists and Henri managed to spark a really impressive spear art during the first encounter with the Retainer. It was incredibly close though by the end, and Henri was actually killed while the rest of my team had maybe 3 LP a piece. So it still stands that SaGa has nastier final bosses than most RPGs I've played, though of the SaGa games I've played, Chaos might be the easiest. Laura gets a slightly bittersweet ending, though fairly uplifting. I'm glad I started with her.

Best characters: Laura, Henri, Michelle, Judy, and Musol Yanii
Least Favorite: Platyphyllum, who is not a bad character per se, I just could never find a good niche on my team for them.
Best Voice Acting: Michelle and Platyphyllum
Worst: Francis, Armic, and retainer
Best Weapon Arts: Axe, Swords, Daggers, and Light Martial Arts
Worst Weapon Arts: Throw, Staffs, and Spears
Best Magic: Water, Earth, and Fire
Worst magic: Wood and Metal
Best Panels: Haggle, Defuse, Locksmith, Sharpeye, and Iron Body
Favorite Boss: The Tree Monster or Phoenix
Least Favorite: Dragons...
Scrappiest SaGa game?: Oh yeah...
Still worth playing?: Oh yeah!

If I could improve this game I'd do the following:

Drop the Arts consume HP mechanic: It's only a major problem in the early game. By then end, you'll forget it was even there, but it doesn't really serve any function outside of making the early game unnecessarily difficult until your characters start unlocking Life Protection.

Make Tablets re-usable: Magic suffers the most in terms of scrappy elements being attached to it. Most players I've seen tend to ignore it mainly because it's more work than it's worth. Magic isn't bad per se, but the mechanical gymnastic you have to climb through to make due with it. I feel one easy remedy would be to make Tablets reusable so if you luck out with RNG and manage to get a good one, you can at least teach it to a few characters instead of sticking to just one of them.

A better UI: I'm still baffled by the fact that a normal menu screen is only availble during missions. Like there are ways to view your inventory on the map, but you can't do things like organize it from there. Likewise, it's annoying the game often thrusts you into the map mode first without giving you a clear idea of what panels a character starts with or even what their stat spread looks like. It just feels weird that certain information is only accessible at certain points in the game. It doesn't hurt the game, but it shows why standard menu screens are often taken for granted.

Allow the player to rearrange panels at the level up screen: Oh holy hell this could resolve so many issues. Not that managing stats is hard the way the game works, but due to the nature of the game, you sort of need to go in knowing the optimal panel build for a character, and then pray that the game actually let's the RNG have your way. Some of this frustration could be easily resolved if the game could allow you to rearrange your panels because you'll need to start working on double bonuses in the early game for better stat boosts, but it often leaves you with a setup that makes going for the lofty goal of a triple bonus difficult to pull off without gimping a character for a mission or two, and praying the RNG will be merciful with panel options. Again, this is not a major problem except for players like myself who tend to play optimally. You can easily get by with double bonuses and a mish-mash of panel abilities, and in fact, the game is pretty much built that way, but my OCD would be so much happier...

Better pacing: I feel the biggest criticism I have against the game is that the board game mechanics, while fun and interesting, slow the game's pacing down to a crawl. The side quest hell at the end, really sapped a lot of my enthusiasm to finish the game among other RL issues getting in the way. It's not even that the missions are not fun, they just take forever, especially if there are puzzles and lots of locked chests. That's the largest issue with the heavier emphasis on Table Top gaming and dice rolls that the Wheel represents. It's fun in that you won't find other games that play like this outside of a real table top experience, but the game also shows why most video game RPGs tend relegate all this stuff to the background because they slow the whole gaming process down. I started avoiding chests after awhile just because they consumed too many turns and real time to usually be worth the effort. Especially since the game decided that 98% of all chests should be locked and booby trapped.

WK's Tips for Unlimited SaGa. Be careful it's pretty long...
Now for some tips for anyone who wants to play this game that I wish I had known.

Magic 101
There are three ways to use magic in this game, but only one "correct way".

1. You equip a character with an enchanted item that comes with a spell attached.
2. The character has a Familiar Panel that lets them cast the element and level of magic.
3. The character learns spells from a tome they have equipped on them.

As you can see, option 3 is how the game would prefer how you learn magic. The issue with option 3, is that you need to use the two first options to even learn magic. Basically, learning magic works like this. You need to acquire a Magic Tome through a treasure chest or a rare enemy drop. At the Panel screen at the end of a mission, you need to opt out of using one of the four random panels the game gives you for the level up and choose to equip a magic tome instead. When you go on another mission, you need to go to the character's status screen and choose to learn from the tablet. This last step is important because the game has a bad habit of switching this option off, especially if you have more than one tablet equipped. When your character is in battle, you need to have access to magic through either an enchanted item, or a familiar, and then use that spell in battle. Preferably, you want to land on the element reel of the spell you cast to gain more XP. When the battle is over, the character who has followed all of these steps will get an extra screen where the tablet appears with three spells it teaches and you can choose to put the XP into one of them. Once a spell is learned, the tablet will grab three other spells from the list it has, though you will have to learn every spell on the tablet to master it. Once you've filled the spells XP bar, the spell is permanently learned.

The other factor for magic is that it works with the same rules as SaGa Frontier 2 with a few extra steps. In order to cast a spell with the magic your character has actually learned, they will need either a weapon or armlet that has the elemental arts ability of the spells they know as one of it's attached abilities. This can be accomplished by either acquiring one of the enchanted weapons I mentioned since they'll always have these spell arts attached to them, or you can attach them to said gear through blacksmithing. Casting magic consumes the items durability, so be careful.

Also, two other things to note: Enchanted weapons will have a specific spell attached to them which you can see on the info screen of the item. Enchanted weapons tend to have low durability because the game doesn't intend for you to use them a lot outside of learning magic. To punctuate that feeling, trying to increase the durability of an enchanted item through blacksmithing will cause the weapon to be disenchanted. It will still retain the Magic Arts ability, but the spell will be lost forever. A pain in the ass in the early game when magic is limited, not a big deal by end game when all you need is the Magic Art skill hassle free.

Familiars are panels you gain that do a number of cool things. They give you access to one of the map discovery skills which helps you find treasure or puzzle elements on the field, and allow a character to cast magic based on the familiars level and element. Magic is ranked in tiers, so having a Lv. 1 Water Familiar will allow that character to cast Detect Undead, whereas a Level 4. Familiar will allow them to cast Detect Undead, Rainbringer, Water Aura, and Purify. So if you're going to go for one, make usre it's high level, and even if your character isn't set up for magic, a Lv. 4 or 5 Water Familiar is always a boon to your party for the extra healing. With all that said, Familiars are a trap for optimization. They give you lots of benefits, but they offer the worst stat bonuses for magic builds out of the bunch. You actually want the Map Guides if you're going for a triple bonus, or special skill panels like Fortuneteller and Magic Blender. Use Familiars in the early game to learn magic, and then try to steadily phase them out.

As for which magic to use:

Water is top priority because it has Purify, which not only heals but restores the status of a character. It also has Detect Undead which lowers the LP protection of Undead, and two pretty powerful offensive spells.

Earth is my second choice because Detect Animal is super useful and lowers the LP protection of the most common enemy type you'll encounter. Boulder is an okay offensive spell, and Build-Up is a decent buff skill.

Fire is tied with earth. Detect Aura is useful for slimes, it has lots of good offensive magic, and Power Surge is a great Buff.

Metal is okay and mostly situational. It has a few offensive spells that target groups, but low LP damage potential. Most of it's debuff spells are for Mimics, but they are pretty easy to deal with without them. The Armor Buff spell is probably the only real great skill here.

Wood is probably the most situational. Most of it's buff/debuff skills have issues like Missile Guard which would be a great skill (it lowers Pierce damage) but can only be cast on the caster meaning you would have to teach it to everyone to get any use out of it. Thunderbringer is probably the strongest single target spell in the game, but it's rare and not worth building a Wood focus Mage for.

Forbidden is the one I spent the longest time learning, and the least amount of time using. The spells are pretty potent, especially it's detect spell that works on bosses, but Demonite is rare to come across, which is what you need to gain the Forbidden Art ability on your gear. It quickly fell into the "too awesome to use" category for me.

Blacksmith 101
The first rule of Blacksmithing in this game is to save before you do anything. One of the biggest secrets of the game is that certain materials like Steel and Platinum can only be acquired by merging specific materials and even then, you only have a 15% chance of the final product giving you the desired results. This is especially important with the creation of Damascus, because it involves creating specific tiers of two materials.

To replenish the durability of an item like a weapon, you'll need to merge the item with a raw material or another weapon or armlet. Merging specific materials will sometimes give you access to better materials like merging Iron and Wood to create Steel, or Silver and Iron to make Platinum. Another thing the game doesn't tell you is that merging heavier materials or lighter ones onto a weapon will sometimes change the weapons weight class. This is very important because weapons like Staffs, Daggers, and Swords will have skills like Block, Deflect, and Parry as their secondary skill when they are a lighter weight item. Ceratin weapon arts can only be obtained on a weapon based on their weight class.

For example:

A Heavy Sword will have Slash as their secondary skill and likely Cross Slash as their third skill. Whereas a Light weight sword will have Deflect as their secondary skill, and Rear Slash as their third tier skill. This is really important if you want to build weapons with great weapon arts attached to them. Rule of thumb is that weapons with damage negating secondary skills like the ones mentioned above should always be built for lightweight unless you already have a different weapon choice for their second hand item. Weapons like Axes, Bows, and Spears tend to work better the heavier they are. This is all really important when you're building higher grade weapons.

Likewise, if you want to equip a Magic Art to a weapon or armlet, you need to choose one of the stones as the secondary item to be merged with the item. Even then, there is only a 15% chance the Art will attach itself to the item, so again, save before you attempt and reset if it doesn't work out.

Damascus is technically the best material in the game. Technically Dragonsteel and Shiva Metal are better, but both of these materials are rare and unlike Damascus, they can't be produced with the right material. You need to find something made of the material to make anything. Damascus on the other hand can be mass produced with the right ingredients and has comparable stats to the other two materials. The biggest issue with making Damascus is obtaining Mullock. This is a cheap and brittle material that is plentiful in the early game but will start to become scarce by end game when your shop level gets too high. Even then, I find you can usually obtain the material at trading posts. and due to its low value, it's easy to acquire. Just make sure if you find it, it's either a weapon, armlet, or raw material so you can actually use it at the blacksmith. I also highly recommend making Damascus Armlets first for your whole team. Black Armlets and Cross Bones are guaranteed to have Life Protection as an unlockable skill for them.

Shopping 101
Ugh, Like SaGa Frontier 2, Unlimited SaGa uses a shop level system. What this means is that the products available at shops change based on how much you've collectively spent throughout the game.Hence, why materials like Mullock start to disappear after awhile. This is also the point of Maharaja skill, which increases the value of items so you pay more. Likewise, Haggling will slow down the process of raising your level. It's a balancing act, because you want to keep the shop level low to obtain hard to find materials like Mullock and Feather that are super useful for crafting, but on the other hand, a high shop level means you can obtain hard to acquire armor and materials like Diamond, Damascus Armor (which you can't make), and Dragonsteel.

Likewise, one of the easy to overlook skills a character can have is Fashion. This skill allows you to charm a shopkeeper into showing off their rare goods, which is pretty much the only way you're going to see certain materials in the game. Don't drop this skill lightly, once I dropped it, I never saw it again in the playthrough.

Panels 101
Like stat gains in earlier entries, there is a method to obtaining certain panels though not a 100% guaranteed. Rule of thumb is that whatever actions you take between level up screens will factor in what panels will be drawn for the level up process. Use Haggle a lot in towns or been defusing chests in dungeons? Chances are you'll see more of those panels at level up. Same deal goes with weapon panels and even Map and Familiar ones. I used Familiars so often with Judy, she mainly pulled those during level ups, hence why you shouldn't rely on them too much. This is also why you should be careful about dropping specific panels when they appear. I dropped Michelle's Fashion panel before I really understood what it actually did and I never saw it again because of it. Same thing happened to Francis when I dropped his shield panel.

You should also make sure someone on your team has one of the following skills:
Haggle - To conserve money and get better stuff.
Locksmith - For opening chests and doors.
Defuse - For disarming traps
Sharpeye - For seeing what traps are on a chests and the type of lock.
Obstacle Crossing - For getting past blocked terrain.
Swimming - To cross Rivers
Fix-It-All - For repairing weapons and armlets on the field up to 20 durability.
Aura - For increasing the chance of being able to sneak by certain enemies on the map.

All these skills will make dungeon crawling so much easier...

Also, for weapon panels, higher level is better, not just for the stat boosts, but because they also increase the likelihood of sparking new weapon arts.

Speaking of stat boosts...

Melee characters: Axes and Fist panels specifically Punch.
Magic Characters: Magic Blender, Fortunteller, and Map Panels
Skill Characters: Key Panels like Locksmith, Diffuse, and Sharpeye.

These are the panels you want when optimizing a characters build. Also in the case of magic users, do not worry about their Magic stat. It doesn't really work the way it should. Instead focus on raising the element of the magic type you are teaching them. Also, Shield and Gun panels are only necessary if you plan on using them, in fact, if you plan on using a gun or shield without the panel, you're better off not bothering because the gun reel will be so stacked against you it will be worthless while the shield will have an abysmal chance of activating without a panel. So don't use these unless your character has the corresponding panel.

Defense 101
Throw out everything you know about RPGs. Defense stat, HP, and elemental defense don;t really mean much in this game. The only skill that matters is Life Protection. It raises the likelihood of taking LP damage from an attack, and if you have enough of it, your character can be standing at 0HP for several rounds and still taking damage like a tanking champ. That's not to say the other stats don't factor in here as well, but LP protection makes a bigger difference than having Ice Barrier or Strike defense. Unlike other RPGs, once a character's HP reaches zero, they don't fall, instead they have a higher chance of taking LP damage, so you do still want to go into fights with full HP, but it's possible to have a character at 0 HP for several rounds and see them take no LP damage. So yeah, Life Protection is the only defensive skill that matters in terms of armor abilities.

The more important defensive skills are ones attached to weapons like Parry, Deflect, and Block. Any skill that negates damage altogether is better than having a higher defense number. The other important thing to note is that in order to use these skills, the weapon with the skill must be in the second weapon slot or off-hand in order to activate. Don't know why it's set up like this, but that's how it is. Shields can be super useful, especially if you get high lv. panels for them, but don't rely on them over weapon ones since you need a panel to activate a shield one on a regular basis whereas just having a high strength/skill stat will activate the other more often.

With Unlimited Saga out of the way. I may start up SaGa Frontier 1 next. Any suggestion on who I should start with?