i’ve played about 40 minutes so far. i have no idea what is happening.
is it possible to lose battles? how do you get more money? how do battles even work at all?
the game refers to a 30 year old as “an older woman”. too mean, squaresoft.
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all anime
Look up a guide. Game is incomprehensible until then. You can definitely lose battles and iirc when you battle your commands trigger a roulette wheel that determines how well they are executed.
hey I also bought this Sunday
I get the feeling my characters are all the Black Knight as they continue to take blows while at 0HP. Bandits flee in terror
okay, so i just did some reading, as i was also totally baffled by all my characters being totally fine at 0 hp. you’ve got hp and lp. lp is your actual health, and if it reaches 0, you die. the lower your hp, the more chance you have of losing lp when you get hit
Like a couple tabletop systems, which is sensible except for the names they ascribed. There’s also something weird where tabletops use that to describe near misses while the videogame always shows a sword literally going through your face.
it’s not far off from the tabletop system of hit points and vitality points.
HP and Life Points?
So is the manual just badly written or doesn’t explain anything or tries to promote PlayOnline or what is the deal
The Japanese wikipedia page indicates the different characters have very different difficulty curves that make some much easier to complete the game with than others. I wonder if it’s more pronounced/severe than Frontier. Maybe @Drem can tell us.
Come to think of it, maybe such weight being put on differentiating the flow of different scenarios was an overcorrection after the odd dual narratives of SF2 and the extremely minimalist storytelling in Wild Card.
my copy didn’t even come with a manual D:
i worked out how to investigate things and open chests and the like though
this is a pretty tabletoppy game
Unlimited SaGa is awesome
It is definitely possible to play it not understanding anything, then completely hit a brick wall halfway through
Here are my tips.
- Use R3 (or something) to rest and restore HP in the field after battles
- Characters who do not act during one round will regen some HP.
- I never got anything really useful out of stone tablets in 7 playthroughs. Familiars are better for magic.
- Magic is slow, so you can use it at the beginning of a round to set up a huge combo. (your enemies will also deal a huge combo but it’s often worth it)
- Axes are the best for dealing HP damage, knives are the best for dealing LP damage. You should use both. This is one of those rare games in which swords aren’t that big of a deal.
- Forging is super complicated. If you want to steamroll everything, get a faq and aim for Reverse Delta (axe skill)
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- Don’t use Myrte as your first main character, he has low LP and the hardest final battle
- Guns are cool but I forgot why
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I’d recommend starting out with Laura because her story is straightforward. I don’t have much experience with the other stories admittedly but they can vary a lot in difficulty and some can emphasize certain mechanics more than others. Once you learn the game this gives you a lot of replayability.
US isn’t something to be played for story or narrative or anything of that ilk so don’t ever have any expectations on that front; it’s all about learning the mechanics and building your characters to win the game. The manual tells you very little and with how little information the game gives you about its mechanics I feel like it must have been designed for getting people to discuss the game online and piece it together through group discussions. The game was indeed designed to evoke tabletop games and with that frame in mind several mechanics make more sense for how they were implemented.
The LP/HP thing is a standard SaGa mechanic though.
On my first few attempts at a playthrough I never knew you could press L3 to rest and replenish HP. My attempts after that always stopped at the same part of Laura’s quest where you and the boy get separated in the mountains when a bridge breaks and you have to contest with roaming skeletons, and I was stuck there until I learned more about growth panel placement and built my characters stronger. I eventually got up to the final boss of Laura’s story but my characters’ weren’t built well enough to beat it without obscene amounts of luck. Some SB people watched me livestream the boss and the question that kept coming up was “is it supposed to take this long?” and it of course ultimately ends in my party being wiped. But it was still a fun game!
Like Tulpa said towards the beginning consult the FAQs on GameFAQS whenever you run into something you don’t understand. The Game System FAQ is a good overview and if I need some more details or want an alternate explanation on something I’ll consult FAQ for a specific mechanics like Skills FAQ or Character Growth FAQ. My playthroughs were processes of playing the game and constantly looking back at my computer to go “okay, how does this panel I got affect my character’s stats?”, “how did I do a combo just now?”, “what weapons do I want for this stat”? The mechanics can get so idiosyncratic that I couldn’t progress very far at all without reading about things. You’ll pick it up after a while but I play so infrequently that I essentially have to go through this every time I play. There are also tutorial videos/Let’s Plays too that I browsed in the same way so I could see a visual explanation of something, like growth panel placement.
Without an understanding of how the game worked whenever I looked at message boards with tips like Tuxedo’s I’d go “I don’t understand what any of this means” (not to say Tuxedo’s suggestions aren’t good- I’m sure they’re grrrrreat!)
I have been meaning to get back into it recently, I’ve just been too lazy to pull out a small TV and my attempts at emulating it a month or two ago had graphical glitches.
This is going to sound weird but try playing the game in 5.1 surround sound if you can. It’s got great atmosphere.
3 Likes
i started with laura because the game actualy said “you should start with this character for your first time”
No no, it’s for surrounding yourself with the chorus of chirps and rustling branches when you’re exploring a forest and the light lapping of ocean waves when you’re skipping across stone paths on a coast. It sounds surprisingly nice for a game with such a simplistic presentation, although with Kawazu’s statements on how he wanted to create atmosphere without using traditional visual presentation elements (part of the tabletop RPG conceit) I suppose it’s not a weird idea for SE to have spent some actual work on mixing the 5.1 track for ambient noises.
Well, the music is good too.
Is this the one with the slot machine
RIP?
Their sagas were limited.