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Whereas SaGa Scarlet Grace can be rough if going in blind. I went in blind, missed a whole slew of loading screen tips that would have helped, and misunderstood how the difficulty scaling worked, inadvertently making my game more difficult to a point (there's a loading screen tip that partially explained how that worked and I had missed it / wasn't aware how many new loading screen tips were waiting for me in the Help as I thought I read all of them after the 30th+ hour super-run-on-abomination-of-a-fragmented-sentence).
It wasn't until the 60th hour (still first playthrough) that I started to look at other players on their first playthroughs on Twitch and only if they were playing as Urpina or coming to this message board. I found that eventually, as long as I was using my main team and not experimenting / leveling up / recovering from unexpectedly low LP, I could almost guarantee victory on any Easy-Normal-Hard battle, with very high win rate on Brutal and story battles. Edit: That is to say, SaGa turned around and I found hope, then rode that to the finishing line with Urpina with a strong desire to keep pushing. 7th Saga drained me.
But yeah, the first 60 hours were a learning curve.
The other saga games are easy compared to this one. I had no problem with any of the others. I could literally take any group of random characters with random weapon types, level them up, and they beat anything I threw them at. Try that in this game, and it'll end in utter, abysmal failure.
Nothing seemed particularly OP in this game, either. There wasn't any particular weapon, or spell category that stood out as even being "something more" than the others. Your options seemed pathetically balanced. There was nothing like "Dream Super Combo/DSC" in Saga Frontier 1, for example, or nothing even as good as unarmed in Romancing Saga 3. Or nothing even as good as Shadow Servant. OP skills have kinda been a staple of this franchise, and there are none in this game. I'm not even asking for Blue/Rogue/Time Lord in Saga Frontier 1 with Time and Shadow magic with DSC. My problem is there is nothing in this that's even 1/10th that good.
I'd say it probably depends on the difficulty setting and which weapon type. Conditionals can really hurt on hard mode and if you don't have a balanced group you won't have many ways to deal with them. Also, sticking with one weapon per unit reduces your ability of getting additional roles.
But yeah, I don't think everything is viable, but I don't think everything should be viable. Your choices aren't meaningful if everything is viable and nothing is good or bad. If there are good and bad things but you can still beat the game with the bad things without too much trouble, then that means the game is too easy (see: most JRPGS).
Yeah, the game seems a lot more balanced, in a good way, than previous SaGa games. Everything has strengths and weaknesses, axe deal more damage but also has a miss chance. Spells are very strong but takes time to cast. What I personally miss is the sci-fi elements, I miss my dual-wielding gunslingers, my robots and the unique world to explore like in SaGa Frontier. I'm not that big of a fan of the vanilla fantasy world where everyone is human, hell, even Romancing SaGa 3 had atleast a vampire you could recruit.
DSC was so broken in SaGa Frontier and trivialized the game, it was obviously supposed to be a secret, not a skill everyone is using like today. Oh look, a blind playthrough of SaGa Frontier, QUICK lets tell him about DSC, Junkyard & gold ingot glitch so he can have infinite money, best buyable equipment and a broken move, that will make the playthrough so fun to watch! /s
I am a fan of Shadow Servant but if I'm going to be honest it was not *that* great, it cost a lot of JP/MP and was easily dispelled. I think most people went with light magic for its healing and strong AoE. Light Sword was also the best sword in the game and allowed characters to deflect even if they didn't knew the skill. But Shadow Servent was fun and I do miss it. Shadow Servant doesn't work with DSC by the way.
Completely irrelevant as well, but the devs said DSC stands for Dangerous Suplex Combo. Source: https://essenceofsaga.wordpress.com/home/book-index/100mysteries/
And his name is Rouge (Red in French), not Rogue. Ok, I'll be quiet now.
It'd be cool to see more SaGa games with that aesthetic but - since the series is based on Tolkien - most are naturally going to be high fantasy.
All of them are I'm fairly confident. You'll find lots of references to eyes. There's magic rings, orcs, goblins, living trees, wizards, undead. Sauron was often associated with fire in the books, and in this game the firebringer is detailed as a deceiver which Sauron was also known as.
In Romancing SaGa there's a character named "Grey" who looks after a human known as "Claudia" which sounds a bit like "Strider" when translated to Japanese. She's a ranger who was brought up in the wilderness and close to nature. When she returns to civilization she finds that she needs Grey's protection because (spoiler) she's actually royalty.
Robots in the SaGa series are frequently stout and short, much like Dwarves in Tolkien's writings. The Dwarves believed they had a maker, much like robots need to be built to exist.
Final Fantasy does this too, only instead of using Tolkien as inspiration for their games they use Star Wars. The characters in Final Fantasy XII have a one-to-one counter part with the characters in the original Star Wars Trilogy. In most final fantasy games however you have a blond protagonist with a magic sword, an identity crises that involve family (Luke, I am your father,) Biggs, Wedge and Jessie, a rebel army and a clone army so on and so forth.
Not even DSC was as OP as Blue/Rogue/Time Lord with time magic. That Red/Alkaiser guy I think learned the strongest sword attack, which was a special attack in his Alkaiser form. RE-AL-Phoenix, or something like that. The only thing he had going against him was that he couldn't learn time magic, if he could then he would have easily been the most OP character.
Tower nuke with Arcane magic could do 60k+ with high MP, and it could chain with other attacks. Also, Tower spell was mimic'd by shadow servant. I remember vertical attacks chained with vertical attacks, like Robot's Plural Slash with a sword (was pretty strong), and the best sword tech. All 3 of those could chain. You could see some really big numbers like 100k for one turn cycle.
Saga Frontier 1, 2, Romancing Saga 3, all those were fun games, but this game is a little too much. Most JRPG games are pretty casual games to be honest, and this game is the exception, not the rule. This game is harder than pretty much any of the old school JRPGs.
True, I did that against the Earth Dragon when I was playing Blue. You do lose all your JP though.
I agree. But that's why I like it, I'm tired of all those easy JRPGs. I would have probably liked Octopath if it was just harder and forced me to actually think in combat, but I could just nuke everything in the game except for some optional things. In Scarlet Grace I have to actually think what I'm doing, I can't grind a couple of levels and trivialize everything.
There is a time and place for hard games, I just don't want every single game I play to be an extreme challenge. At the end of the day, I play games to pass time, not to have my patience tested to its limits. It's not something I possess in great abundance. My definition of hard these days, is anything that requires 2 or more attempts to beat. If I barely scrape out a win on my first attempt, that's challenging enough for me. I don't like games that require serious trial and error to beat.
People can say what they want about bosses in Dark Souls games, or even fights in Monster Hunter games, but I consider those to be fair challenges, because someone could realistically beat them their 1st attempt if they got a good grasp on the mechanics. Or, you can play cautiously, and scrape out a win on your first attempt, and then gradually get better and better on consecutive attempts, as you figure out the fights. Challenges I think are particularly unfair are the ones that require to you fail and engage in a trial and error process as a pre-requisite for winning. This game, I see the challenge as more of a trial and error process, which is why I don't like it. The player can make way too many mistakes investing in the wrong weapons, or by not learning specific skills on specific weapons for specific fights, and these are not easy errors to correct, they require you to start a whole new game to correct if you're a good ways into the game, because grinding more weapon levels and skills just buffs the enemies more. And I just absolutely refuse to even approach that kinda game.
The problem with a game like this is I can lose, and legit have no clue what I should have, or could have done to win with what I had. And the answer is usually there is no winning formula with the tools I had available, because I invested in the wrong tools, and didn't invest in the right ones. And this game severely punishes you for not choosing the proper tools, it just expects you to know what's good right off the bat, and demands you use it as a basic prerequisite for winning. To me, this is extremely unfair.
TL;DR, I really do not like forced trial and error games. Those kinda games amount to a test of patience, not skill. And I really don't like having my patience constantly tested in a game, or in life for that matter. It's actually grinds my gears even more if I know that something is intentionally designed to test my patience.
So play something else my dude. Most games you'll find won't push back like SaGa does.