the great rpg smith. i’ve highlighted the lesser-known kawazu contributions. really interested in Racing Lagoon, Wild Card, Code Age, and It’s New Frontier.
Racing Lagoon in particular needs a fucking english translation.
e: well apparently it’s rather english already. i ought to give it a shot, hmmm
i’ve heard wonderswan saga 1 is the way to go these days since there’s an eng translation now
saga 3 is not kawazu but is still p good actually. but yeah not as good
e: wonderswan saga 1 is incredible
romancing 1 is really really good on SNES (hilariously snappy in pacing and brutality), but minstrel song is more or less a completely redone game
Kawazu is the shit, it’s like that “vulgar auteurism” thing they talk about but more visceral since it affects the interactivity in weird ways, not only the pacing and tone. I get a kind of pleasure just by reading the wiki of his games to see people trying to explain the math behind it.
Scarlet was registered in Europe, I think, I hope.
Did any of you play Legend of Legacy? They tried to go full SaGa with it but without Kawazu it felt like a student trying to impress his teachers. Kato did a good job with the writing, though
i hope you dig this!!! not just because you know, liking things is cool… i feel invested in the idea of having a way more articulate poster evangelising rs2 here
i also haven’t gotten around to frontier yet
the ~10 hours i put into legend of legacy seemed like a pleasant saga-lite, a lot of the signature mechanics but it didn’t seem like you could irreparably fuck yourself over
which may/may not be missing the point, idk
honestly i want to play through most of the kawazu library at some point (not, uh, all at once, because i’m not that crazy)
it me, the girl who started the “weird rpg mechanics” thread and has been slowly picking apart the genre for months while planning her own weird and stupidly ambitious game
I sunk about 20 hours into it, and probably will go back at some point. More thoughts below.
Yeah part of the problem is actually that you can’t totally fuck yourself over, but you need to grind to advance at a pretty brutal level. So like unless you get really lucky and the RNG blesses you with the right skills, all you end up doing is slowly levelling up a little for each stat, and it eventually peters out. It is a super pretty game, and pleasant as hell so I will probably go back to it, but it lacks a lot of the weirdness and story that Kawazu stuff tends to get across, so it ends up feeling kinda limp.
I played through all of this with friends and it was a pretty neato thing, but not necessarily worth the hassle. Still, I would be on board for this.
yes! I’ve played through it probably more than any game other than final fantasy tactics so I can give tips! it’s a combination of seven 3-5 hour RPGs that share the same world & (some) party members & there’s almost no grind because you learn abilities totally at random & most of the tough fights require learning how to do combos rather than normal RPG things like buffs and healing
there are only two quests that are largely complete and don’t just hang together through half-broken script flags, and those are T260G and Red. you should probably play (or at least start) those two first so you have a general sense for the world and how the game works when you aren’t trying to figure out where to go.
the third-best one is Blue’s because even though it’s 80% comprised of sidequests that other players can do, you become extremely overpowered and don’t need to do anything more than those sidequests
Asellus and Emelia are both on the busted side – lots of p ro b le ma tic plot elements & not really enough content to save you having to build up specially for the final bosses, except that building up only makes the difference between a 3 hour quest and a 4 hour quest and you can kind of split it up among stuff you like from the good characters so it’s not so bad
Riki and Lute are the “expert” characters, the former requires you to be really good at the combo system & know how to build up finicky monsters to get anywhere, and the latter has basically no quest other than a bullshit final boss so you just fuck off until you can kill him, which basically just makes it a shoddy version of Blue’s that you can forego unless you really want to get to the debug room.
there are like two good abilities from every school of magic & mecs are great if you just overload them with spare swords and jumpsuits and shit to boost their stats
the game is extremely snappy – no random battles, the fights themselves go super quick, no healing outside of fights, and even the run animation seems kind of brokenly fast. plus the visual design is deeply deeply weird (it’s square in their prime making a kusoge, including FFVII-style insane perspective shifting, what’s not to love) and the music is great
SaGa Frontier is real good! it’s the most approachable SaGa in 2017, imo (though i haven’t touched most of the iOS remakes). start with Red’s quest 100% and finish it. after that do whatever you want, though i think Asellus’ is particularly intriguing and weird.
yeah, asellus’ is thematically quite neat, but it also has the least pleasant actual battles by a significant margin – there’s the most evidence of actual cut content for her (as opposed to just weird kawazu game design), and the pacing / general sense of “where do I go next” / fitness to challenge the final boss once you reach him is worst in her quest by far