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I just had my first divine interventions that auto-won a random battle. What is even going on in this game? (I mean this in a positive way.)
I looked it up and apparently there are a lot of factors there add/subtract divine favor, including certain combos that you can get based on your whether your party members are in certain combinations of being in the front/middle/back row. I'd been getting them but didn't realize this was also a way to have a minor influence on divine favor.
I also just maxed out event rank and the game just told me about like... three new other systems. How viable was it to use these in New Game+ in the original game, where there were fewer options to carry things over? It feels like it would take a lot of grinding of materials/gold/jewels to take advantage of a lot of what's going on here in a single playthrough.
I had my first benediction about 35 hours in. It was Yucomb's, probably because I helped out Marina twice over, with both the nymph statue quest and the undersea Fatestone retrieval.
I also just maxed out event rank and the game just told me about like... three new other systems. How viable was it to use these in New Game+ in the original game, where there were fewer options to carry things over? It feels like it would take a lot of grinding of materials/gold/jewels to take advantage of a lot of what's going on here in a single playthrough.
in the original new game + you mostly just got more gold from knowing more ways to get gold (the shop affinity level also carries over, but i think that only amounts to about 30% more gold per sell after you max it out (which probably takes 2-4 playthroughs depending), which is not really a primary moneymaking angle), but there's some kind of accumulating jewel bonus the more times you complete quests that causes you to get a lot more jewels in new game+ than before.
that said, the later upgrades remain stupendously expensive and without truly grinding for jewels you probably won't hit level 5 on any class (or more than 1-2 specific traits) unless that bonus starts getting really huge; for that reason i think i'm going to start carrying over class levels first, especially as i've invested most heavily in a character on this run who is not really recruitable until the late game in the first place and i probably won't try to use every time, as i think it most obviously amounts to a fairly reasonable time saving perk that doesn't "have" to be that powerful anyway
the blacksmithing system is somewhat grindy, especially if you just try to hook into it late in a run, although more than that a deterrent is that the results are unexceptional on a lot of normal weapons (most lines end in Garal or Vernie weapons akin though probably not identical to the ones you can buy in stores once you reach higher shop ranks). a lot of tempering materials are common though, to the point where if you don't use them you'll probably start selling them just to not keep dealing with them, so if you get a decent bonus (generally attack up without durability cost or durability cost reduction without a large attack hit) i wouldn't be shy about using them; it's actually pretty fun as it can change up your approach to battles a lot, trying to use less AOE techs and big hits to preserve your durability for longer, etc. edit: to be more clear, tempered weapons will ascend faster if you use up their durability more, but unless you're going out into an area just to grind them and your characters up, you're going to have to balance that versus actually making progress on a quest you want to do
and if you're really unlucky with weapons acquired from random sources, it really does help going into the final stretch; figuring out how to use the system at a basic level was a core part of the ending grind on my albert file because i felt like my weapons were just not that strong, while i've picked up a couple of much better weapons this time around just sitting in random chests i'm sure i'd opened with him.
i looked up some information on favor after i accidentally tripped the same ending quest *again* on this playthrough, and as far as i can tell elore is the only god you can reach the benediction threshold on with quests alone, which is exactly what happened to me this time since you can get there just by getting a lot of fatestones. (previously i had bought a lot of cosmology spells too.) yucomb's associated quests do give a lot of favor though.
at a bit of a final decision point with jamil's story, because i haven't learned anything about how to recruit most of the remaster characters so i'm kind of in a guessing state of whether i should try to do a certain postgame-ish boss fight on this file or put it off till it'll be a little easier with more carryovers and knowledge. if i want to just go for the ending i should be at a point where i can easily set up to finish in a couple hours tomorrow, but if not, i'm probably going to be working on weapons and HP for my characters for a while...plus for as many weapons as i've taught my final party member, she doesn't have many techs learned yet...
Okay I finally fiddled with spell synthesis and am pretty confident that every subsequent run will now be a billion times easier. Yes it can give you some of the series' historically broken spells for ridiculous amounts of BP that are presumably only reliable castable with BP restoration items that I don't think I've seen in this playthrough (or maybe saw listed in a shop but had no cash to buy and forgot about), but also some spell synthesis just take powerful 10+ BP AoE spells and reduce them to like 5BP so you could reliably spam them for most of the game. You would think the tradeoff for this would be making them weaker, since the basic calculation of spell synthesis is more BP for more power, but no—there are also no tradeoff combinations that reduce BP and increase power, for some reason (not complaining or criticizing, I love it).
honestly kind of wish that kind of spell fusion was something more of the classes could access, the "true" fusion spells are so powerful that letting the more basic spellcasters get that kind of moderate bump would help make them feel a bit more interesting and exciting to use. i'm definitely going to have to check them out sometime, but it takes so long to get good damage from plain spells in the first place that i have a hard time imagining how something like wizard is really worthwhile (by comparison)
on the other hand i finally defeated schiele this morning so really all of the rest of the game (except for the last few super strong final boss upgrades, presumably) feels pretty easy by comparison to that. i think i've figured out enough that later playthroughs won't feel so rough unless i try to do that again, at any rate, and while i kept thinking "i don't gain many stats at this point, i don't think the game will let me get much stronger in a reasonable amount of time" that wasn't really the problem anyway. i actually don't think anything i've seen in a saga game has compared to the sheer likelihood that you'll just take almost 300 damage on all party members, 3 turns in a row while your characters randomly lose almost all their turns and do nothing before dying; though near the end of the fight she starts using snowstorm and a spell called "black ice" with an effect somewhere between aegis and self-immolation. funnily enough this is a lot less dangerous because the former only does tons of damage without locking out your turns otherwise, while the latter doesn't deal as much damage and only steals a fairly small number of your turns. rather than both at once.
anyway, tonight i am finishing the game as quickly as possible to see if that actually did anything on future playthroughs, and if not i guess i'll have to do research to make sure that it wasn't because of the dialogue prompts in the scene afterward. the best ones seemed pretty obvious, but i can always believe i've been fooled once more
honestly kind of wish that kind of spell fusion was something more of the classes could access, the "true" fusion spells are so powerful that letting the more basic spellcasters get that kind of moderate bump would help make them feel a bit more interesting and exciting to use. i'm definitely going to have to check them out sometime, but it takes so long to get good damage from plain spells in the first place that i have a hard time imagining how something like wizard is really worthwhile (by comparison)
Yeah it's a very robust system so it feels like a bit of a waste to only be limited to two (I think) classes, and only one fusion spell at a time as an active skill, and only having access to that spell while you're in the class. Feels like they could open it up a bit more and still stay more or less within the bounds of the current level of game balance, but just making other spellcasting classes more viable.
Not understanding fusion for a long time, I did find my character set up as a Wizard worthwhile just because especially there are enough enemies that just say "nope, I'm not taking damage to physical attacks" and there are not a lot of sources for weapon-based elemental damage until you happen to spark the right skills, so I always felt like my spellcaster had something to do. But, in retrospect, she could have been extremely OP for most of the game, though, if I had just fiddled with this system, and I can't see using a non-fusion spellcaster ever again. Maybe you could make a case for Wizard's innate increased damage being worth it while you don't have the cash to buy enough spells for fusion ingredients, but that's about it and probably only relevant for a brief period of playtime.
I had Myriam in my team for most of the game as a mostly dedicated Fire-element mage (did not investigate spell fusion with anyone). Bird of Fire and Revive were enough for most everything I ran into, with the Jewel Beast being the only thing that could not be overcome--I doubt few would on their first, unassisted playthrough. I finished with seven Fatestones on hand, one lost to a quest, one given away, and one undiscovered (though I suspect I know where it is/who has it), so it was about as exhaustive a playthrough as I could make it, too. I never once forged anything, either. I'm sure the hardier challenges encourage or require advanced tactics and preparation, but most of the game is compatible with the kind of bumbling it'll inevitably engender.
Yeah, it's definitely not required for a normal playthrough. I basically also just used Myriam as a fire mage (with occasional wind in case of elemental resistance and to buff Claudia's bow attacks) until I had already hit max event rank. I'm still mopping up various quests here and there to get a better grasp of the larger map and world before any second playthrough, and I finally had enough free jewels and cash for spells and awareness of the system to reclass her into being able to do fusion.
But, now that I know about this, I would definitely always hold off on spending jewels for a spellcaster class until I can take them to a town with a fusion-capable class option.
I managed to make one +1 weapon, but now trying to forge it again with further with the ideal materials turns it into another weapon with a different name and much worse durability instead of putting it on the path to be +2, so I'm kind of confused. It wasn't anything rare so it's not a big deal and can just buy another one to get free inn repairs back, but pretty far into one playthrough I definitely don't get crafting yet and it's been fine. (My guess is that there's probably a handful of weapons that you can actually take beyond +1 and you have to discover them through trial and error, or a guide, and Reinforced Bow is apparently not one of them.)
Like most SaGa games, even without any New Game+ carryover, a replay with decent system knowledge would really let you go wild.
oh, i very much think the "normal" game difficulty is pretty reasonable; there are some highs and lows along the way, depending on what order you do things and how well your choices interact with some of the more difficult parts, and all of the brutal stuff is fundamentally optional, though sometimes very rewarding. obviously, they are needed sometimes in general, and i don't think that "basic" spells aren't good enough to complete the game at all, but i would've enjoyed if there were more incentives to really work with them.
defeating jewel beast in weston near the end of the game is definitely super difficult, i haven't put much effort into thinking of how to mitigate the enormous damage in that fight, and i think it's just immune to magical damage. though i understand there's an easier way for the fight itself to go (you have to do a bunch of things in preparation and are on a time limit). i'll probably try and figure all that out at some point, but it's not all that exciting compared to a lot of the other stuff i'm still exploring and trying to figure out.
jamil file's done! ...unless i need to play the ending again for some reason. i got myriam (the usual scholar, at this point i kind of feel like she's an honorary protagonist) and monica (i trained up her starting marine class a bit but ultimately she was locked into Castle Knight, usually with polearms, because the deflects were too important) at the start of the game and kept them forever, and claudia was in and out but once again became the mvp for all of the hard parts. then on the final boss she got controlled by him on about the second turn of the second part but i just kind of ignored that and won anyway. my last party member was captain silver, whose starting class (which i thought was unique but eventually found out where you can train it)...seems less good than i hoped, ultimately. but she was pretty fine at turtling up and handling some support duties i ended up desperately needing, so even with her struggling to learn even some weirdly basic techs and having the common non-main-character slow BP gain...well, she was probably still my least useful party member, and in some spots even less reliable than neidhart (who was in a similar spot last time but at least has his super-strong armor for free), but somebody has to be.
I managed to make one +1 weapon, but now trying to forge it again with further with the ideal materials turns it into another weapon with a different name and much worse durability instead of putting it on the path to be +2, so I'm kind of confused. It wasn't anything rare so it's not a big deal and can just buy another one to get free inn repairs back, but pretty far into one playthrough I definitely don't get crafting yet and it's been fine. (My guess is that there's probably a handful of weapons that you can actually take beyond +1 and you have to discover them through trial and error, or a guide, and Reinforced Bow is apparently not one of them.)
Like most SaGa games, even without any New Game+ carryover, a replay with decent system knowledge would really let you go wild.
there's a lot of strange stuff with the blacksmithing and resultant weapon names. sometimes the weapon name will change if you change its mode (i think the town sword becomes a defender in defense stance and then a defender +1)? other weapons will rename when you use the item but then have a second upgrade later after you use it for a while. and sometimes the only ways to notice that would be to see whatever the change is (usually damage increase) either from bigger numbers in battle or checking the item outside of battle. a lot of the base level weapons also have multiple possible materials with different properties, and...
well, anyway, it's a wild game, one where after 3 playthroughs and like a hundred hours i still feel like there's not just many things i haven't seen but probably relatively basic concepts i may well have overlooked repeatedly, and with a lot of non-linearity and unusual power increases (plus the way various combat mechanics like sparking and healing work) you can technically do all kinds of things that usually wouldn't make any sense in other games if you're stubborn and creative enough. like this (which i am putting behind a spoiler for having several things you possibly-to-certainly wouldn't have seen in one playthrough):
edit:
unless i need to play the ending again for some reason
ok so it very much occurred to me this was possible but it wasn't until i'd played through sif's intro that i was able to confirm that in fact...winning the battle against schirach apparently only has a direct effect for the remainder of the current playthrough (i assume this worked the same in the ps2 version, but schiele resets to her "final meeting" state where talking to her causes the scene that gives you the diamond)
so! what does happen is
that in the scene afterward you can give her back the diamond, and, at least if you do, she returns to pubs, where you can recruit her. or buy sorcery spells from her. obviously the former is very much that infamous "superboss that gives you the ultimate weapon" kind of situation (though i'm not certain that she's even especially powerful); there's certainly tough bosses you could wait to fight until afterwards, or you could power up saruin to give her a real workout, but basically having her is bragging rights.
but in remaster's new game +, you can carry over spells, so it does seem like if you just want to play through the whole game with dark magic unlocked, that's an option...i'm torn because i wasn't intending to do anything quite that powerful yet (and at the same time i made a couple decisions with spell learning this run while trying to figure out certain parts that i'm not sure i'd intend to repeat), but ignoring the preparation and learning parts of fighting the boss the actual process of trying to beat it was annoying enough i can't say i'm thrilled at the thought of going for it again anytime soon. the obvious compromise would be to give them to a character i don't particularly plan on using very often, but also preferably one i could get any time...like aisha. and the thought of being able to break her early game when i get to playing as her again is pretty amusing too, though i don't know if her intro quests are mandatory or if you can do something silly instead with remaster's new game + and better knowledge of how the maps work
...well now that i've tried *that* i've learned that the game tracks the state in a more complex way than i thought, because when albert joined on sif's file he had all the spells i taught him (a bunch) on my first remaster playthrough, so it doesn't just start rolling them over the first time you say you want to keep them. that's fine, i probably won't keep him for a long time right now anyway but it's kind of good to know
I reached ER 18 last night, and I've come to see the appeal of doing Normal progression. I've been feeling pretty ready to start with a new protagonist for several game hours now, but I'm not gonna grind out event rank just to make that happen sooner. I did some dabbling with blacksmithing and managed to develop a +1 bow and +1 rapier, though I cannot seem to find a new material that's Harmonious with that rapier (so maybe there isn't one, or it's a drop I still haven't found? I have found a lot of different materials though).
I did make Herman a Rosalian Mage at some point and have stuck with that for the rest of this file. I didn't even look into spell fusion until very late though, and it's not like I've had much reason yet to need anything unique I've found from fusion. But still, he does have Overdrive right now, though honestly it seems like Rain of Life might be more generally useful. Before I stopped last night, I picked up both Phantom Warrior and Mark of Awakening (whatever it's called, the final Bewitchery spell) for Barbara and I'm interested to see how/if those spells interact the way I'm hoping. Regardless, I have been enjoying making Barbara a primary Martial Artist, with Scimitars and Illusions on the side. But she has been in a long drought of not glimmering any new M. Arts techs for a long while now.
I feel like if getting the Destiny Stones was required this game would feel very tedious, but because it's not it's really fun to just stumble onto one while you think you're trying to do something else entirely. I like that there's a mix of hints to reach them, where in some cases someone tells you "hey I know where a Destiny Stone is, you should look into that" and in other cases they're just part of some other quest. It creates a feeling of serendipity that for me at least reduces the sensation of a rote mcguffin hunt, making the world feel more alive.
Also, getting the Topaz today, I noticed a pretty basic translation error in a related achievements it pops: "All characters were referred to as 'Warriors of Nisa' in Nisa Cavern" should be "Referred to as 'Warriors of Nisa' by everyone in Nisa Cavern." If you took a year or two of Japanese, you probably can guess exactly the error made here. The original text is ニーサの洞窟で全員に「ニーサの戦士」と呼ばれた, and they misunderstood how the particle に works with a passive verb (i.e. 全員 isn't everyone in your party, but all the NPCs in the cave). I don't care about achievements, but if anyone does that's what that one means and how to get it to activate.
i'm definitely glad the game doesn't force you to figure them out the first time, but i have found it kind of funny that my last couple playthroughs i've started off thinking "i don't know, i might skip that quest next time" but after everything i learned with jamil this run has had me thinking "normal is almost too slow"... and that's even with sif's intro cranking the early ranks quite quickly.
plus, after seeing some of claudia's sequences during demi's playthrough, i've become really interested in seeing most of the scenes with all the characters...there's really weird bits all over the place, so i never know when one of the characters will say something absolutely hilarious.
but like, most specifically, i decided to do ailing emperor again because there's only a few worthwhile things to do around the kind of halfway point on the clock, and most of them aren't as exciting. the alternative is usually just to loot random chests in caves, which i rarely want to do that much, or to go through the trading cycle and following quests, but i didn't want to change up my party or do the battle for that this time, so i put off till the end. (i didn't do any of it last time until i replayed the end for carryovers...)
plus the second elemental quests involve a lot of fighting relative to the rewards, so even though i wanted to do them again with sif for this playthrough i didn't want to just crank the rank with them.
last time i took a weapon as the reward for the moonstone quest, and it was a perfect weapon for jamil, but this time i picked armor, and it gave a super heavy plate that i put on sif right away, and her defense stats went up to like, 86 in each, which made her seem borderline invincible for about the next like 6 hours. she did the "mec trades blows with the boss for the last 6 turns" thing from saga frontier a few times and generally made things kind of a breeze until the ruby quest, which is about the hardest one for a fatestone i think...except for the one i still don't know how to find.
honestly, it's kind of wild snapping back to reality on this playthrough, i blew through so many major quests and powered up so much so fast, and now i'm in a phase where there's a few more things i want to blow through before closing things out (even though i'm definitely already really close to being strong enough) and not really any more bosses i want to fight as hard as ones i've already defeated on this file (although if the process of buying spells unlocks trials of elore i'll probably do it), so it's gonna be a bit of going through the motions for the last few hours. but i have gotten to use a bunch of characters i hadn't touched previously again, so playing around with marina a while (before probably letting her go to get gray back or something), and flammar, and diana...it's been a good run. and as much as yeah, i feel like i've gotten most of the exciting parts out of the way, there are plenty of things i've been wanting to see and haven't yet with my current setup, so i'm hoping that more chances for them will let them come up
sif has been an interesting protagonist, even if she (like albert) comes off a bit more on the serious side of the cast, and i've found a bit more of an inclination to "roleplay" compared to the other characters so far, or at least make decisions based on how i feel about her character and personality (where on other runs my first instinct has often been to subvert what seems like their presented personality...), in terms of her character-building and a few choices. obviously i powergamed kind of hard still, but i decided i wanted to use clubs mostly, and have stuck closely to that, with the game once again arbitrarily rewarding that choice via random drops.
i don't know who i want to play next, probably hawke or claudia, but i'll probably take a bit of a break from the game after this one, and figure out a few new goals before going in again.
I made it to the final boss last night, and it plus the previous boss fight was the first time I actually got stonewalled in this file. I would certainly feel more confident if everyone had like 100 more HP, and better armor would probably help a lot, but it also doesn't feel impossible to beat right now either.
I've ended up with 2 Rosalian Mages now, but actually I still have not used Overdrive for a winning strategy, and instead I've found Anti-magic to be immensely useful, at least for the Triple Minions boss. I did use regular Fold Time in that fight instead though, to be fair. Still have to brainstorm what approach I need for the final boss itself, but I may end up looking up a few mechanical things about some spells because the game isn't entirely clear about what's happening sometimes.
And now I finally beat it! I did end up looking up various things about spells and shielding and attack attributes, but ultimately I don't think any of that information actually helped me win the fight. The real MVP was synthesizing Rain of Life and Anti-magic.
It really would have gone better if I kept questing a bit more instead of heading to the final dungeon as soon as I completed the Trials of Elore; my characters would sometimes just miss attacks on the final boss, and it's not like he was buffing his AGI or debuffing my stats, so it really was just an issue of being underpowered.
the aoe attack that does a bunch of smaller hits *does* debuff your stats (and does other status in his more powerful forms), though he doesn't seem to use it that often. honestly, a lot of the late game enemies are just hard to hit though, the surge chance is a big reason i think martial artist tends to be a really good offensive class
nice job beating the boss, though! on my jamil playthrough i obviously got way ahead of him and trivialized it, but i think even on this playthrough i'm not inclined to struggle through the fight and happy to keep overdoing it while i clear out a few more relatively grindy quests i wanted to do anyway. i'm assuming i'm far enough ahead to do it without fusion magic, anyway...might be a little overly arrogant. i will learn!
sif file done. i wanted to hold back one time and not use the two things i consider most powerful against the ending bosses, so i only used bows on ifrit because you can't poke or smack him, and didn't fuse any spells at any point, which are two of the most powerful things i know of in the game. except for doing too many quests, i guess. i've struggled through the last bosses a couple times on my first playthroughs, so i kinda just want to get it done for all these middle runs. maybe near the end i'll try and see how far i can push it.
my view of how the game should go broke down a bit after i thought "so what's up with the dragon's eye, anyway?" and looked it up, which i don't regret because i would've never been able to come across it on this file otherwise, and the same quest only does something unique for albert, who i also already played. literally, because i'd already done the trials of elore, there wasn't a very pleasant way of changing the party at that point, which is a requirement to start it. plus there was only one party member i actually viewed as a reasonable target now that everyone had almost or more than 500 hp; as much as flammar is a bit of an underwhelming mage next to myriam in some ways (and not just bc i had her on wizard, the class is fine; it's actually pretty good for a mage with high starting BP and bad regen where one of the most useful things they can do is bomb AOEs on non boss enemies for 1-2 turns), i didn't want to swap back because i would probably have to raise the latter's hp. so i chose darque.
anyway, this meant my final party was diana, flammar, marina, and raphael, who i put absolutely no effort into raising up, just slapped my biggest armors and the moonstone on him and sat him in front with a couple defender swords and a huge shield. he sparked a couple moves on the quest and about one more against the last boss...but he did his job. a true knight.
it took me all this time to realize he was also liam o'brien. i thought Peklo was just talking about ewei and his evil laughter at first.
i was hesitant to actually use marina and almost kicked her out really quickly, but i decided to keep her around and after a couple hours i really turned around. she's the only character outside of claudia who i've seen reach 6 bp/turn, her hp and damage output are fine after you use her for a little while (and you can have her for a while before even reaching the final rank) and her unique class is really cool. i have no idea how it works relative to my understanding of the general system, but it obviously changes *something* about the usual favor mechanics because i got yucomb's benediction three times in the last several hours of the game, with the first two happening about five battles apart. and she's perfectly suited to hold the weapon from the dungeon you had to do to get her and support with two of the most easy-to-slot-in spell schools. you might wonder, is getting a random battle zapped for 3000 damage a few times in the final stretch of the game the best class bonus? obviously not. but it's super cool and funny, and i think there are tons that have even less relevant impact.
there's no trainer who can class her back though, so you really can't ever change her out if you want to rain lightning on all the enemies a bunch. i still think she's one of the strongest non-main characters i've used.
diana's good though. pretty comparable to monica last run i think, though i think polearms are also one of the best melee weapon types and short swords are a bit more limited (though still great defensively due to shielding). i trained her in spear stuff too but the only good one i got was the one that summons avi, so i didn't use it that much.
darque i used pretty straight up as a sword guy for most of this file, and finished his quest. he's fine at it, and then gets hilariously good because you get level 5 shortsword for free. the enemies really hated him though, which got slightly worrying on trials of elore especially.
even though i exiled him i got a scene at the ending. in context this is really funny, like he woke up on the stone altar again and went "ok, this time for real though." raphael doesn't appear in the battle scenes and the dominion ending changes slightly if he's in your party.
but neidhart is almost completely immune to mechanics. they didn't come up with a way for the story to go on without him, as i learned to my great confusion my albert playthrough. (because in albert's specific ending he appears with diana, and they're talking about albert like he's dead. i don't remember what aisha's was like, but i realized after jamil that they all feature the close characters from the intro believing the leading player is dead/gone. so i was was kind of in shock during that scene: "but you were right there! that's so messed up!") this feels unfortunate in a game where they even thought of flags like "if the player doesn't talk to a tutorial kid all game, there should be a different ending scene." but it's also pretty funny. this is still a videogame, one where the character you just spent 15-60 hours with asks you to keep playing after the ending, and sif is like "actually, it'd be really rad if you were a girl"
Sif characterization: it's an absurd delight to witness how she handles Saruin's climactic villain diatribe. This is a frequently funny game in its script treatment both on the source material and localization end, and despite the shared nature of most of the game's events between the eight protagonists, there is a stunning amount of individual line-reads and interjections that do a lot to colour their respective handles on the situations they find themselves in, so repeat playthroughs have more diversity to them on the storytelling end in addition to the narratives a player constructs in their head.
yeah!! that's a great moment i didn't even think to mention but took a screenshot of. i'd even said before she came off as a bit serious, but in her dealings with both elore and saruin she's got a certain irreverence, quite literally, that's a little funny by contrast and appealingly confident and earthly.
I also remember being confused AF when I finished an Albert file and Neidhart was just all over the place in cutscenes that didn't make any sense. It was definitely unintentionally funny.
I also remember being confused AF when I finished an Albert file and Neidhart was just all over the place in cutscenes that didn't make any sense. It was definitely unintentionally funny.
This is one of those SaGa fragmentary storytelling things things that is told implicitly (by establishing that this practice exists in the world in other scenarios, then showing Neidhardt in two places at once) rather than directly like monologueing-at-you JRPG would, but this is a kagemusha situation. There's a real Neidhardt, and there's a stand-in.
this is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how he can spend several months gallivanting around with random adventurers, but there is apparently one scene where having him in your party is accounted for (which i haven't seen yet but will probably check out eventually)
you can also apparently recruit him again if he dies. which, again, makes sense from that angle, although it's pretty funny to imagine your character going up and being like "hey, can i get another neidhart? we won't talk about what happened to the last one"
Finished with Claudia. This was great! The final boss was not anywhere close to the most difficult in the game because I did quests until I couldn't find any more, but it still had great atmosphere and a great gimmick, especially in the second half where it seems like there's some cycling major debuff to everything you do that gradually wears off until he does the big Sword Rain multi-hit AoE attack and it reapplies. It creates a nice cycle of tension where just as you start to feel like you're doing damage again and are getting everyone healed up, you take a really big hit and not only can't really do much damage but also can barely heal meaningfully.
I think the way the game cuts back and forth between the final dungeon and cutscenes in the world is probably the most dramatic a SaGa game has ever been? I can't think of anything else like it. (I guess an exception is SaGa Frontier 2, where it's possible to get dramatic because the narrative is more set in stone. But I can't think of anything like it in the free form games, at least.) Presumably those cutscenes at least somewhat reflect quests you've done, because one of the major characters was someone who was previously in jail, so I would guess there's a much less happy outcome for those events? Or does Raphael just get out anyway?
Really enjoyed Claudia as a character, and her final message to you, the player, in the meta-game room at the very end is very funny. (Something like, "I'm finally free from being toyed around with by fate. Thanks for that. So, if you play again, don't talk to me. Just leave me alone." Her main scenario gimmick of starting with unique characters no one else can recruit that you can't dismiss for a while would be limiting for replays where you know what you're doing, but it worked pretty well for a bumbling through it first playthrough. I'd definitely recommend her as a starter protagonist if you want a bit of narrative cushioning but not so much as apparently Albert gets.
I really did enjoy my SFC playthrough of this game as well, but there's no question that this remake and especially this remaster of it is the way to go for this game. The ability to speed up movement and combat really makes this game a breezy delight. The friction is all the weird open-world friction and baroque systems friction that's supposed to be in a SaGa game and makes these games interesting, and basically never just "it feels like these battles are taking too long" or "I'm moving too slow," which is typical for many PS2 JRPGs.
also the battle theme they use for encounters with saruin's minions is awesome
also also, it's great that the game lets you make a save in your status menu after the final boss monologues at you, which i assume is very useful if you go for the infamously difficult version of that encounter
I tried to look up whether this was like heavily accented Spanish I can't parse at all or scatting, and it's the latter, improvised during recording. Also, the page I found transcribing it is absolutely psyched about the song (understandably).
i also think claudia is one of the best first protagonist choices, just based on my current understanding of the game. it obviously doesn't hurt that her LP and BP regen stats are amazing and the game all but telling you to use bows on her make her feel like one of the strongest characters in the whole game, but it also seems like the game does a good job of sending her around to major stuff. not as directly as albert (and sif by extension) who get easily roped into the early stages of the knight storyline and are much more likely to encounter neidhart in the palace early on than the other characters (though they don't have to, and others certainly can)
incidentally, regarding the two companions, supposedly there's an oversight (at least in the ps2 version) where if you activate the scene that gives you the eres medallion, you can go to the tree instead of leaving mazewood, and the medallion scene then warps you back to the forest entrance and skips the scene where they would leave, keeping them in your party. which sounds like a funny novelty to mess with, but as far as i know they can't use weapons and don't have many techs, so their potential use outside of magery is really limited in the long term.
i'm really glad you enjoyed the game! i haven't played either of the 16-bit versions and this game is honestly so good in its synthesis of the original game with new additions that it really is impossible for me to imagine what they're actually like. and there are minor elements that stand in as a love letter to the series as a whole, plus even alongside it's contemporaries it's obviously a really unique and wonderful game. which i'm saying as someone who likes a lot of ps2 rpgs; there's just nothing else that uses these kinds of choices to build a game that it remains fun to play in the same space and see unique things for one playthrough or many. obviously to some extent this has to do with the popularization of "postgame" grinds and the like, which some of the superboss fights feel a bit like, but as a whole the continuing appeal of the game is lot more about the excitement of getting new ideas of things to try or see. which honestly i think carries over into scarlet grace; despite the characters having somewhat more differences in that game, a lot of the same quests happen, and the appeal is just the creators' ingenuity and creativity in creating a world and systems that just keep being fun to interact with.
I am reaching the end of my Gray file. Currently at ER 21 and wrapping up the elemental lord trading quests so I can save the girl. I have obtained a few more Fatestones this time -- Moonstone, Emerald, Diamond -- and I've also been fighting a lot more in the back half of the game, once I didn't have to care too much about my current ER. The highlight for me was probably beating Ifrit this go-around: I loaded my frontline with Flameproof Gloves and the Ignigarde and then used fixed turn order to eat his flame shield and then attacked as normal. But even with this strategy he hits extremely hard, so it wasn't just a cakewalk.
I am torn on carrying over learned techs again when/if I start another character, because I have definitely learned many more powerful techs than I ever saw with my Barbara crew. My rationale for carrying over both techs and skill levels is that if I got duplicate characters, then I would just try to use weapon types on them they hadn't used before. But I am now realizing that's not as clean as I thought since there's still a lot of overlap across many weapon types sharing techs. I also discovered this game has the "weapon crown" mechanic that SaGa Frontier has too, except it seems to be hidden in the UI; while I was in a dungeon, all of a sudden someone's DP costs went down and the only thing that happened was glimmering new techs. So all that to say when you carry over a lot of techs and skill levels, you're potentially getting a very large BP/DP advantage.
Oh yeah so I finished my Gray file a few days ago. I carried forward a lot of stuff from my previous Barbara file, so as a result I had a lot of money, jewels, and class levels for most of the game. I spent a bunch of time fighting at the end-game to get Gray's Katana quest finished, so by the time I faced Saruin, he wasn't even that tough and I beat him first try.
I attempted to fight 2 superbosses, Schirach and Slask (evil form of Strom), but after my first fight with both of them I gave that up; was not in the mood to deal with status ailment hell and 4 actions per turn, respectively.
I liked Barbara a bit more than Gray in terms of characterization. I thought Gray didn't really have a lot of flair to his responses to things like confronting Saruin, or the giants in the hidden village. I am not jumping into a 3rd playthrough immediately, but I was still feeling a SaGa itch so instead I picked up my long-running Romancing SaGa 2 file instead. One thing I did here was actually write down some notes about my 2 playthroughs so when I did come back for #3, I could remember which characters I had already used, Fatestones I've found, and some of the quests I've done multiple times already.
