Six is a max number of people you can have in your team at the same time! It’s 5 people fighting + another hanging out
If you remove somebody to get someone else there’s no guarantee you can recruit that person again. But your philosophy in SaGa should be « never look back » anyway
I’m not sure at all whether quests that involve recruiting a party member are completely blocked if you have a full team. Right now there should be a weird cool dude with a bright orange jacket and round glasses in one of the north cities with such a quest
i don’t recall seeing this cool guy, but i’ll look around. also possible i haven’t visited the right town, yet.
one qol thing i wish this game had was being able to easily tell you which towns you’ve unlocked. not having to take a look around the map and memorize all their names so i don’t accidentally pay for travel to one of them.
Okay, so in the space of about an hour or two of game time, Monika has been kidnapped, betrothed and shipwrecked. She’s been a mercenary in a sequence I did not understand and apparently had no do-overs (nice!) and now she’s basically a ronin doing stuff. I’ve joined up with a blacksmith and a street urchin presumably to search for a lost weapon, but I found a Foreboding Castle, and am now looting it because it was the closest thing available. I have no idea where this is going, or if it’s going anywhere at all, and I am into it.
So I went from not having a clue what to do to having possibly too much happening, and I think I’ve identified my first piece of unacceptable obtuseness: some of the exits on rooms are really hard to identify, in a way that feels very Metroid on the NES. I got stuck in the Archfiend’s Palace for a good long while because of this.
I got the ring! I’ve advanced in the tower, and I feel I might have gotten in too deep. I am definitely not prepared, but I am also not able to leave until I find a thing which I have not been able to find! I also found Thomas and progressed with him, which is how I got into the situation I’m in.
ETA: Okay, so I just wasn’t paying attention, which means I definitely got considerably farther than I needed to get–good for stats, at least. And I like that even in over my head, I could still win like, 40% of encounters.
I was looking at the gameplay video jodeaux posted here, and the Matriarch from the backstory was a dude in the original? That is not a change I’d have expected! Or is this just an iffy translation (although I can’t imagine how)?
My favorite part about starting it was how there are 10 different login bonus events and 15 gacha banners. I’ve always wanted to try it and the Dragon Quest Mobage out but by the time they surprisingly came out in English I was mobage’d out. But I’m glad I logged in now just to see what it’s like.
I like how brisk it is in general, and mechanically it’s got a lot of SaGa flavor in there. I recall hearing it’s actually pretty popular in Japan.
Last Romancing SaGa 3 thought for a while. I’ve realized what this game is: it’s Final Fantasy VI if Final Fantasy VI were just the World of Ruin–the part where the character plot bits are largely done and it’s really just about the side quests you choose to do in order to make numbers go up enough for the final baddie. With RS3 (at least in Monika’s story) the character bit just happens to last about an hour.
Thing is, of course, that the WoR is largely a step down from the rest of the game because most of the momentum and character progression just stops, and the combat just isn’t interesting enough to make up for it. Here, the series is much more suited for choose-your-own-adventure shenanigans. And it’s especially interesting given how linear the Game Boy SaGas could be.
I like the balance in Final Fantasy Legend / the first SaGa, it passes off as normal at the beginning then rapidly ends up utterly busted in a way you could only see in a Gameboy non-color basic RPG
Very charming now that RPG mechanics are very finely tuned and the term « broken » is used to describe, like, a skill that does 2x damage. Weak
Mechanics spoilers
There are 3 available classes: human, mutant, monster
Humans can only become more powerful by buying hp/attack/agility stat boosting items. There’s a good system in place for hp potions: you can buy inexpensive potions to raise your max HP up to 200, then you need to buy more expensive potions to raise HP to 400, etc. You have a max HP soft cap for each area thanks to this. Good system! Well there’s no such thing for attack and agility: attack and agility potions are available immediately, have no cap, and are pretty cheap, so there’s really nothing to prevent you from raising these stats to stratospheric amounts very early on and trivialize the entire game
Mutants get random stat gains after battle that, crucially, do not depend on the enemies they fight at all. In essence they get the same « exp » from fighting a goblin or God.
Fight a few more random battles than you should (by getting slightly lost, which will happen) and your mutant will break the difficulty curve and become an unstoppable force of nature for the rest of the game
Monsters… are worthless, they improve by eating monster meat dropped after battle which evolves them into other monsters, but getting them to evolve to relevant forms involves either luck or relying on complex mutation tables on gamefaqs, then of course they can devolve if you eat the wrong meat and for most of the game you’re more likely to devolve than evolve so better save before every encounter.
Monsters also can’t use any items and have very few skill charges, which forces them to go back to the inn constantly and run away a lot
I cannot stress enough how much a 4x monster team is an infinitely worse party composition than 1x human or 1x mutant. No contest
yeah i started with FFL2 because i have the impression that is the best one, but the monster mechanics are a little confusing/i didn’t try to read up on it. i have a baby dragon, but if it eats meat, it will become the thing? but none of the monsters i’ve encountered are cooler than a baby dragon :\
Not quite. IIRC in the original SaGa trilogy, there’s a two tiered system where all monsters are grouped into different families and sub-divisions, and you can check which family+sub-division combo turns into what monster by eating which family+sub-division combo.
In general, eating boss monsters gives you an immediate power spike, but the usefulness of that monster goes down over time as evolution paths are mostly downgrades. You can alternatively decide to chain eating the meat of weaker monsters, and while you will be weaker for the start of the segment to the next boss, your power by the end of it should generally surpass a “boss monster evolution” if you don’t completely screw yourself with bad RNG.
That’s funny, because I too chalked up that jank to FFL1 being an early portable RPG. Then I played RS2 and 3 this year and realized “no, that’s just how Kawazu rolls.”
RS3 has a level of polish to it, but RS2 is definitely of that same mold, down to the weird event flags and towns full of NPCs who all spit the same line. Progressing feels like trying to game the game.
