Red, T260, Asellus, and Riki have the most unique, story-forward quests, with genuinely challenging final bosses, and I’d rank them in roughly that order of ascending difficulty. The first 2 have the most unique mechs of any story as well, and mechs are pretty easy and fun to use.
Asellus and Emelia both have pretty weird and occasionally broken-feeling plot beats, so I wouldn’t play them first before you have an idea of the game’s expectations.
Blue is very open-ended, but also very fun and overpowered, so I’d recommend doing his quest second or third. His quest also provides probably the best overview of the magic system and miscellaneous recruiting opportunities. In general you want to go Light / Arcane / Time with him (and you can always second any party members you get later on into the Shadow labyrinth for free to learn the missing magic); Space magic is underpowered (though the quest is fun and the Space magic teacher is worth recruiting with Riki or Lute) and the Rune quest is sort of redundant with a lot of other characters’ routes (plus most of the good rune spells can be purchased rather than learned, unlike the other schools).
Lute is also very open-ended, but you should probably do him last if anything, as you can challenge his final boss after about an hour (plus however long it takes you to minmax with your accumulated knowledge) and it’s really more of a victory lap.
Riki’s quest is among the best-polished as mentioned but it requires knowledge of both monster building and the combo system in order to succeed and can be pretty tough otherwise; I’d do it second to last.
Emelia is pretty whatever and I guess they default you to starting with her because her quest is so theoretically simple, but it has some dumb gotchas and the build-up to the end is an unremarkable grind. Her best asset is being about to switch talent proclivities on the fly meaning she’s the only character who has an easy time learning 4/4 of the moves in Dream Super Combo (the closest runner up otherwise is Liza with 3), which is the strongest single character attack without making use of combos or magic synergies.
one of my favourite ways to assemble a party with Blue is to start both the rune and the arcane quests immediately after getting light magic, go to scrap to get a full party of people you mostly aren’t going to want to use, go down to the Koorong sewers to recruit Dr. Nusakan (who is I think contingent on starting the rune quest, which you don’t need to further pursue), then go to IRPO to recruit Fuse and start the ice mountain dungeon, where there’s an optional boss fire dragon that’s vulnerable to an instant death spell that only Nusakan has that early, and will join you if you beat him.
by then you’ll have one of the arcane cards, along with Blue - Nusakan - Fuse - Suzaku as four of your main five plus any one of the scrap recruits, and you’ll get Gen later in the arcane quest who you’ll most likely want as your fifth.
Mecs are generally the best tanks and healers, you can load them up with infinitely many suits of armour and artillery, Gun and to a lesser extent Sword users are only really good once you’ve figured out combos so I’d focus your physical characters on fighting moves earlier on, Mystics are arduous to build up and really shouldn’t see much use outside of Asellus’ quest (though practicing with Nusakan on Blue’s before that or even Mesarthim on Riki’s is a good idea), and Monsters are actually really strong and slightly less arduous to build up but the trick is that their morphs determine their stats to a ridiculous degree, and their morphs are determined by a set of 2-4 abilities that you’re deliberately retaining as a sort of core build while replacing others for regular use, some of which can only be gained under exotic circumstances. You might want to look that up unless you’re having fun feeling it out, since there are only really like a half-dozen viable endgame morphs but a lot more viable abilities. Magic is pretty much always good and it’s unlikely you’ll have more than 1 or 2 dedicated mages at a time so just use them however you like.
game is a lot of fun, goes fast, very flexible and audiovisually interesting.
I think this is the first time any of these SE remakes actually looks good, though I still haven’t played it on a big screen. With every other post-PS2 SaGa I’ve bounced off at some point cuz I can no tolerate how homely they are.
It’s also so much faster now, this is how games should feel!!
Can you remove the button tips on the right side of the screen? I thought one of the options did that but it didn’t do anything.
Wait you can do both rune and arcane quests with Blue? I’m rusty
I remember Lute being very unexciting if you leave him for later since he has so little unique content. I’d choose him as 2nd honestly, when sidequests are still exciting
Anyway, I love how one of my boys turned into a hideous giant slime
Saga Frontier’s game speed has always been extremely pleasingly fast, I’m surprised whenever I go back to it, I’d be amazed if they cranked it up even further
oh and to get a little further into detail about combos – 4 or 5 person combos are the primary endgame strat you’re going to want in all the advanced playthroughs (Riki and Lute) if you don’t feel like trying to give everyone DSC or take advantage of the super powerful broken Arcane + Time magic combo (once is enough with Blue generally, and no one else does it better).
Generally, mixing an “up” move and a “down” move will get you a combo, and you can typically add a “straight through” move to make it 3. To go beyond 3, you’re usually relying on random chance, but guns combo extremely well and the multipliers on 4 and especially 5-person combos are well in advance of pretty much any other attack. You can easily finish 2/3 of the characters’ stories without having to learn this stuff (just like the monster system), but they’re reasonably usable systems if you feel like learning them later on.
okay good it’s not just me. I don’t think there are that many game improvements in the remaster, so I don’t think you’d be able to tell the difference if you just played the original aside from graphics?
