Which one is your favorite, and why?
>>727624481Revenge of the seven and saga frontier 2fpbp/thread
>>727624481Romancing trilogy. I think both Frontier titles were too experimental, and series never got a decent budget since. Remake notwithstanding.
>>727624538saga frontier 2 remastered*
>>727624624>and series never got a decent budget sinceThis is sadly true, but Scarlet and Emerald were still great because they knew what the focus was.
>>727624481Gringo George is my favorite salsa
>>727624481the last remnant
>>727624798YIKES
>>727624481SaGa II (GB or DS) is still what I would call peak SaGa, though RomSaGa Minstrel Song is the one I sunk the most hours into. Would argue either is my favorite title and core to my person.Revenge of the Seven is easily the best actual game though, in terms of production, ambition, and being a video game a normal person would want to pick up and play.>>727624798Emerald's cool, but I would argue it overall less focused than Scarlet. I don't think any characters' plot or world story was particularly intriguing or pays off the huge setup. And some stuff like monsters or kugetsu was particularly well done on a mechanical level, even if I appreciate the return of racial powers.
I like Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song because it has the best music and the best intro song in what is possibly the entire PS2 catalogue.The rest of the SaGa games are just "ok" by comparison as a result.https://youtu.be/vOpAbG6W26o
>>727624481>Playing through the classic SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend games>Monsters suck shit in 1 but can get reasonable transformations to replace their weapon uses>Monsters in 2 are slightly better but eating the wrong kind of meat can downgrade your monster into being an absolute dead weight to the teamWhy did they make an autistic evolution system and not allow the player to track it
>>727625460SEX
>>727625569>we will never, ever have this level of unfiltered S O U L in a videogame intro again
>>727625867gotta sell them strategy guides, senpai
>>727625867>Why did they make an autistic evolution system and not allow the player to track itWELCOME TO KAWAZU'S WILD RIDE, MOTHERFUCKER. HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY, CAUSE THIS SHIT AIN'T CHANGING ANYTIME SOON!Man's basically what if Patches the Hyena was a real person...though because SaGa III wasn't directed by him it is actually coherent and normal to understand the beast/man/mech evo system there so you do get a break before returning to autism land
>>727624481Frontier and Emerald BeyondBecauseI can play as the robot
>>727625460Kill yourselfAnd I mean that sincerely
>>727625569My first SaGa and I thought it was insanely good. A little disappointed that I saw people saying it was the most complex/least beginner friendly. Was hoping for more games like it. Started Romancing 2 (the remaster, not the new remake) and like it a lot too though.
>>727627963Minstrel Song is pretty much the least beginner friendly (though you can argue Unlimited SaGa is worse), it very much just toss you into the deep end right from the word go. It's basically a console JRPG version of D&D and that just leaves some awkward growing pains and expectations. I don't blame anyone from getting filtered by it.Still, I think there is a lot of merit if you can stick with it (and its admittedly lame-ass dungeons). It really does feel like one-on-one D&D adventure with a good friend sort of making up the campaign as you go. "Hey, you know that one town you went to? Well it got crushed by a giant jeweled toad. Wanna go fight it?"
>>727628942The worst thing about it is that quests disappear depending on how many battles you fought.
>>727630110Kawazu hates grinding! Don't just powerlevel, powerlevel smartly!Really though, it's definitely an annoying "feature" of the Romancing trilogy (props to the Remaster for showing your Battle Rank and how high up it is). However, it does promote a better sense of permanence in your actions and gives meaning to Enemy Scaling, a routinely hated RPG mechanic in its own right. If scenarios had some level of protection from Battle Rank shifts, such as not changing when you are in the middle of the scenario/dungeon, or only going up when you take a full rest at an inn, I think this would be far more reasonable. It's incredibly inconvenient, but it is something that once you do know about, you understand why it is such and how you can accommodate your own playthrough around. This isn't Elder Scrolls, you aren't supposed to or need to do everything.Now, if you wanna talk about SaGa Bullshit, you go to the original Frontier 2 and how scenarios just up and disappeared because you did them out of order...in a timeline you don't know about....
>>727624481Minstrel Song. For a franchise where, for budget reasons, Kawazu often has to cut down his ambitions, MS is a perfectly realized vision of what he originally intended.Saga Frontier 1 has the best world setting (science fantasy shit is too rare)Scarlet Grace for the combat.Romancing Saga 2 RotS for series beginners.
>>727628942Yes. People trash the story but I actually think it has lots of nice touches and details even though a lot of the quests and the overarching plots are simple. Things like being unable to travel directly between two locations when they're at war are very cool.
>God pls help we are trying to save the world>No>God, you are already here, please just help>No, I am larping as a hobo>But->I said no, also I am joining your party because you talked to me>God pls >DO CHAIN ATTACKS IN MY NAME WHILE I NARRATE THIS FIGHTWhy is Elore such a massive cunt
>>727624481Saga Frontier its honestly a great game with 8 (thanks to the remaster) stories to go through and a combat system that is more fun than most in this genre. Not every story is fleshed out as well but taken as a whole this game to me is one of the all time best JRPGS.
>>727632051I both love and hate the original SaGa games in that while I find the freedom of the first game amazing, I find it equally frustrating and unfun to basically have to trial and error every zone until I learn which is a no no, for no logical reason.A similar gripe to the second, where you HAVE to play it with previous knowledge and basically a step guide in hand or you WILL softlock yourself, which is genuinely just bullshit.
>>727624481I've never beaten any of thembut I like SaGa Frontier the most because I like its art style, UI design, monster design, music, character design, cool prerendered backgrounds, etc
How can one man be so based?
>>727632250Yeah first game id definitely not perfect. The writing is also quite simple and it would have been nice if the side quests (getting the magic gifts) had more uniqueness to them per character. But I also get it was rushed and so its good we even got it at all.
>>727624481I've played minstrel remaster for 10 hours and have no fucking idea what im doing. Every path, every dungeon leads to a dead end or a giant tentacled beast that one shots my team.
>monster sucked shit in first GB game>final boss is immune to everything tiamat does except one 40 damage skill>say fuck it and saw bitch in half
>>727624481Minstrel Song. It feels like it has more of a "living" world than most, with the way some questlines move along even if the protagonist isn't there to interact with them. I also like the combat, variety of characters, music, etc. I thought the art style was sort of off-putting at first, but it grew on me.RS2 is a fairly close second, though, and I'm pretty fond of SaGa 2.
>>727630621I beat Frontier 2 a long time ago, but I didn't even know that was possible. I wonder what I missed.
>>727631391More like RotS for the Octopath crowd.
>>727632352Define 'beaten'? I definitely remember beating Red and Blue's quests back in the day, but got stuck on the others.
>>727631886>Why is Elore such a massive cuntMuh free willMuh childrenMuh solo shredsOnce again, Muhrdias
the level up system in saga 2 is fucking evil. humans and mutant stats only go up one point at a time and only one attribute at a time. if your hp goes up, then no stat gets an increase. and it's random after each battle. oh and every guide out there will recommend your characters have 2 stats being 70+ by the end of the game
>>727631886>I shan't get involved in the way of mortal freedom >Except when I actively throw this stone at Esmeralda and force her to be involved in this whole shitfest and get her chased by a doomsday cult because I liked that one dance>*Twiddles guitar*
>>727634659Can't say, I never played Octopath.
>>727636073It's not really random, all items have specific stat up patterns that trigger growth flags.The game also has a lot of random encounters so you've got plenty of opportunities to level up, even without abusing mechs the game's pretty easy until the very end where you should have stocked up on so many powerful items that the final boss shouldn't be a problem unless you're running a full mech/monster party
The best part of SaGa games is how short they ate. I don't mean that to be a backhanded compliment; I mean I'm sick of being expected to trudge through 80 hours of hallways and cutscenes.Brevity is a lost art.
>>727636960They are only "short" because they are designed with the idea of being replayed.I.e Minstrel Song expects you to successfully finish the game 8! times, one per main character, before you can access the true last boss.
>>727636960Some of them can be fairly long, not 80 hours long but minstrel song and scarlet grace kinda get to the 50-60 hours mark if you try to do everything.They need to be shorter than average though since they're meant to be replayed multiple times, other games focus on the cinematic adventure so they need to be longer because they're a one and done deal, with these games you can keep replaying them for a long time because there's so many moving pieces for you to play with
>>727624481I find it amusing that, for a franchise as autistic and niche as SaGa, it has pretty most (if not all) games translated. Granted, i know that is a somewhat recent development, but still.Blessed be kawazu and his infinite obsession.
>>727637116That is assuming you manage to find whatsherface in each playthrough and talked to her at the right time, too. You miss her or she doesn't spawn for whatever reason, that entire playthrough is pointless and you gotta finish it anyway.
>>727637116>>727637573The remaster removed the hard cap on Sheryl's flags so you don't need to play through the game multiple times to unlock her quest, if you know what you're doing you can do it all in one go
>>727637761That's nice considering what an absurd pain that shit was.Still. It was the original intent for it to be that way so I still count it as a design part of the game. Brutal nonsense that it was.
>>727624481>Avoid battles (aka playing the game) simulatorWho the fuck comes up with this shit or thinks it's good holy shit
>>727638324filtered
>>727638324>Engage with battles in an intelligent fashion and don't just blindly grindIs that really such a big ask?
>>727637932Sometimes Kawazu goes too hard on some things and corrects them in the remasters, Minstrel Song Remastered in particular fixed a lot of annoying things from the original release like Frielei disappearing forever if you didn't recruit her on the spot or kicked her out, it also fixed a lot of rough parts of the original game like certain expert classes being useless and things like Necromancy can finally be learned by everyone rather than being just some gimmick, it was probably their most thorough remaster.
>>727638324You will get dabbed on by the final bosses if you do this.
>>727636073>guideThere's your problemMy mutant spammed magic all game and was given the stat boosters. She had about 40 mana at the end (before the boost from her boots) and that was plenty.
>>727624481Romancing SaGa 2 is fucking sick, the things they were doing three decades ago is unbelievable
>>727624481frontier has a cool structure and more games should draw from it
>>727636960With most genres and games there is a very clear cut when they stopped thinking in terms of arcade games and started making modern gamesWhereas with SaGa it's like they approached it from the angle of "how could we do an JRPG that might feel at home in an arcade?"
>>727639006Emerald Beyond is a soft successor to Frontier, it doesn't have the "Dark Souls" interconnected world you navigate seamlessly but it shares a lot of common elements like the multiple world settings, the various playable races and a lot of other stuff, it's a fusion of SaGa 2, Frontier and Scarlet Grace with some other original stuff never tried before.
is Romancing saga 2 (not the remake but the first remastee square did along with Romancing saga 3) the best entry point?
>>727639916not anymore; the remake is a better entry point
>>727624538I rarely say this, but...fpbp
>>727639916Yes, don't even bother with the remake. It plays absolutely nothing like an actual SaGa game.
>>727640074but it doesn't have that old d&d vibe the other games have
>>727625569Still blows my mind some random boss has such a fucking fire battle bgm in that gamehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNvWC_lTP38
>>727639585I was so hyped when Emerald Beyond finally show shown because it really did look like a SaGa Frontier successor. Its a shame that it mostly just a Scarlet Grace 2. Great battle system though.
>>727640796I find it hard to go back to Scarlet Grace after playing Emerald Beyond. For me at least, EB solved just about everything I didn't like about Scarlet Grace. I only played Leonard and it his campaign felt too long, maybe that was just my own fault but, I felt pretty done with SG by the time I reached the end.
>>727640698>boss fight in SaGa>spanish guitar and violins>fat japanese lady starts scat singinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRr1dZayriM&list=PL9maLQNq795RKx9sQPkB5g6mTrlZYCcBC
I love Auld Lang Syne. It's a big part of why Diva is the best MChttps://youtu.be/8VsVZkPAXz4?si=ierJFB8F9noorfuG
>>727624481I haven't got around to playing thru these games. I did try playing SaGa Frontier 1 on the PS1 fairly recently but was massively filtered, so I'll give it another shot at some other point. I'm kind of running thru old western CRPGs and the SMT games first.I have played FF2 and the Game Boy FFL games, but nothing really past that. I really liked The Legend of Legacy, even if it didn't really have a story attached to the game.>>727625464>SaGa II (GB or DS) is still what I would call peak SaGaReally? I don't see many people recommending the GB games. They seemed kind of simple to me.>>727625867When I was playing FFL1, I found meat to turn my monster into a high level medusa or something similar and just ran around petrifying most encounters. Sure, I needed to sleep at the inn and run with half move durability, but it was much more useful than anything else I could run across so I just kept it until near the end. During the final run, I did feed it something to get a new monster since they ran out of moves, but otherwise would've just kept it alive.In FFL2, I didn't even bother with the monsters. I just grabbed one robot and went with humans/elves instead.
>>727642067damnI should finish my scarlet grace playthrough and get this
>>727642352>SFXs at the start are Boudica, Blath, Imakoo and Wednesday reading their weapons>Lyrics kick in during phase 2 the moment you enter the battle UI>Song's language changes depending on your in-game language settings
>>727642761Absolutely legendary how based Kawazu is. There will never be another.
>>727642748EB is great, there's some rough spots here and there but it's an incredible game considering how much stuff they crammed in there and how the game works, despite the low budget it's brimming with soul.They even made a music video for Diva as a lore accurate extra.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGyFD4VCiuI&list=PL9maLQNq795RKx9sQPkB5g6mTrlZYCcBC&index=9
>>727643680Is this music video in the game anywhere at all?
>>727644561No, it's an extra they made after the game launched, but the song is in the OST CDs
>>727624481>Romancing SaGa 2 Remastered 70% off>Romancing SaGa 3 Remastered 70% off>SaGa Scarlet Grace Ambitions 70% off>SaGa Frontier 50% offWhich one should I get? Or do I just get them all?
>>727645507Literally all of them are good and worth the money, you can easily spend 100 hours replaying RS3 alone
I don't get the "Don't grind" mantra that this series seem to get. You're not going to get stronger by avoiding fights. Minstrel Song has an event rank that would mess up quests if you do a bunch of battles but that's about it?
>>727645867Through the years lots of people just blindly fought everything they came across and got scared by their first boss or high BR encounter suddenly mopping the floor with then.Once word of mouth about the BR got around and people completely misunderstood how it works it got this stigma, most people think BR works like TES' level scaling or FF8's level scaling.
>>727624481Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song. >>727625569>The rest of the SaGa games are just "ok" by comparisonTo be honest, most RPGs are just okay in comparison to most SaGa games so that's just a testament to the quality of Minstrel Song. >>727630110>The worst thing about it is that quests disappear depending on how many battles you foughtNo it isn't. It strays away from the player being the center of the world and actually being a world in which time progresses in. It also makes it very exciting on additional play throughs to find quests you didn't even know about or discovering how to actually accomplish a quest you didn't know how to get further in on your previous run.
>get the desire to replay Alliance Alive again>decide to avoid fighting the superbosses and try to avoid grinding to see how the game plays>lots of difficulty with just regular water devils out on the ocean>need to clear out some Lv.1 and Lv.2 dens just to expand the guild network between lands>Harukei Castle final fight was actually difficult>realize that I'll need to fight a Lv.5 water devil den at some pointIt's kind of interesting, but I'm still disappointed that the game makes me fight all these boss-level encounters anyway. Then again, I'm not exactly skyrocketing in Skill ATK levels or learning new skills rapidly with this method either, so I wouldn't really say that I'm catching up quickly due to having more difficult fights. If anything, I'm lacking so many talent points that I don't have the talents (like the second "learn skills even faster" talent) even unlocked yet.
>>727645867Grind smarter, not harder is the idea of the series. If the enemies are not giving you much tech points, go somewhere else.>>727646420One reason I could never fully get into SaGa is because of being a collectorfag, wanting to unlock the battle data in Bestiary and getting the at least a copy of every items in a JRPG that I play. It requires grinding and SaGa games punishes you with its Battle Rank system by making new set of enemies that are stronger than you, making some of the monsters possibly missable and possibly soft locking you due to the difficulty.I only played SaGa Frontier 2 and Romancing SaGa 2 RotS because those two are rather light in punishment when it comes to battle rank scaling. In RotS case, you can freely grind the moment you hit the final emperor anyway since you'll hit the max battle rank anyway, assuming you fight normally, so might as well get what you want.
>>727641919Both games do different things within their combat system. Emerald Beyond is a bit "faster" with a focus upon combos or breaking enemy combos. I really enjoyed how potent and viable counter attacks are in Scarlet Grace. I have complaints such as getting additional traits often requires learning skills from different weapons while you can only equip a single weapon in Scarlet Grace.
>>727624481I thank Romancing SaGa 2 remake for introducing me to this series. I don't see how the game is for people who hates the series. If anything, it made me play the rest of the games.
>>727645507I'm a SaGa fanatic, they're all worth it. On the other hand the series is polarizing so if you dislike one chances are you won't be able to get into the others due to how progression is handled with advancing the story, how the game guides you to each story beat, and character growth mechanics. SaGa handles them differently from other JRPGs.
>>727648272I beat Legend of Legacy awhile ago and I kinda like the mechanic in which if you revive a downed guy their max HP is reduced a bit.
>>727648906I already own Revenge of the Seven and Minstrel Song Remastered and enjoyed both of them. I like hard games. I plan on playing all of them at some point. Minstrel Song is currently my favorite gameplay wise.
>>727648816>I don't see how the game is for people who hates the seriesBecause it was your first game and you don't understand just how much it butchered.OG SaGa 3 on the gameboy was the same.
>>727649227It's definitely a good way of handling HP when out exploring. Everybody at full HP at the start of the fight means you don't need to manage resources like Potion inventory or an ongoing MP meter, but dropping the max HP until you visit an inn still makes fights risky and you need to choose between retreating or keep going with the lower HP for the character.Alliance Alive kind of breaks that when you're out sailing on the ocean, since you can just go belowdecks at any point and heal up. Water Devil Dens prevent that, and the fights get tougher the more you do (fights chain together so HP doesn't recover and enemies get stronger) which makes it tougher to either dodge enemies or fight a buffed up boss at the end. Regular dungeons don't do that, which does kind of make them a bit easier unless there's enemies that can one-shot your characters in them.
>>727649253After playing Minstrel Song Remastered and a bit of RS2 Remastered, yeah I can see where you're coming from. Characters performing an attack after choosing the command for all of them is something I wish it was kept in the remake rather than characters immediately acting after a command.
>>727649739It's not just that, what they did to the battle system is just one part of the problem.That game deliberately removed a lot of longstanding SaGa elements like the ability to save anywhere, it butchered the original battle rank into a patently worse version, it completely removed the armor mechanics rather than rebalancing them, gameplay wise it changes a lot of things that now make no narrative sense anymore like dungeons not being cleared out of monsters once you complete a questline, some questline got changed into something completely different that doesn't make sense in the original lore...there's a lot of things that went wrong and a lot of bad things from the original game that did not get fixed either.Once you get to play the original and more importantly, once you get to play the rest of the series and all the other remakes and their original versions you'll start seeing all the things that are off about ROTS and why it's a huge fall in quality.
