This comes out tomorrow in the US and I think might be out in some areas today already. It’s being released on pretty much everything (all consoles, PC, and mobile).
My recollection from the vanilla version’s release on Vita a few years ago is that it’s very similar in structure to Romancing SaGa 3, where you are given an open world map to traverse and explore myriads of quests an characters at your leisure. However being a SaGa game and all means it cannot be the same as any other game, so while RS3 consisted of many explorable RPG towns while the world map was simplified into a node based UI where you could select any location once discovered, Scarlet Grace inverts that and gives you a large open world to walk around and explore while giving no physical presence to the structure of any particular town or dungeon.
Instead, the entire game is a large world map you are free to wander and explore with all intractable locations, character, and dungeons represented as icons in the world. You’ll transition into dialogue with character portraits/models for towns and events, and you’ll transition directly into a series of battles when you enter a dungeon. There are no random battles; everything that happens is dictated by what you discover yourself. My understanding was that Kawazu had said he wanted Scarlet Grace to have a much larger emphasis on narrative and story compared to previous games so he’s stripped out a lot of the elements that occupied time between story moments. I guess this is also a bit of an inversion of what he tried to do with Unlimited SaGa. But at the same time I heard that the battle system is quite good.
I remember hearing Scarlet Grace was very well received and considered in high regard in the franchise so I’m excited to finally get to play it.
all of the impressions i’ve read from the jp release were super positive
a pal told me that there’s some quest line involving you finding a baby and they never completed it so their character was holding the baby in every cutscene for the rest of the game
i’ve never played a saga besides ff legend 3 and i want to but all of their names are in a big jumble in my brain and it seems like one has been remade every six months for the last two years or something and i can’t keep them straight at all
They’re all pretty different so it doesn’t really matter which one you play when. This is probably a decent one to try since it’s the latest and according to the Nintendo site it’s only $30 (and if it’s like Romancing SaGa 3 it’ll also have an additional discount on release).
While the Kobayashi artworks for the SaGa series are amazing I’m… really not sure the games themselves should try to emulate them that much. The art direction for this game is some real monkey’s paw wish
Anyway I bought it. I like the two voice acting options : « Default » and « Expressive » which basically mean « Normal » and « Hamming it up »
i want to buy this game, but when i checked US PSN this morning, it wasn’t up yet. glad to hear that it was well received, but as with all SaGa games, just going to have to wait and see what it is for myself.
If any of you buy the game on PC make sure to go the installation folder and play the mp4 of the game’s opening that doesn’t play when you boot up the game for some reason.
There was a cute sea monster trapped into a lake and I decided to open some sluice gates to free it. It promptly got attacked by another sea monster and died. The end.
3 people out of 5 died in the first battle, then I turned hard mode on and couldn’t go past the second battle. I went back to normal and am still having a difficult time.
The star system makes every ally share a limited action pool, and every RPG I’ve known that has tried something similar either didn’t do anything super interesting with it (Super mario rpg, Skies of arcadia) or was awful because of it (Hoshigami, Banner Saga) so I’m wary about this one.
In any case, status effects and defensive skills are immediately useful, which is a notable rarity for the genre.
after doing the classic DQIII/Ogre Battle/etc. opening, i apparently answered in such a way as to start the game with Dumbass Farm Boy and his band of friends/allies who are seemingly at different levels of preparedness (go into battle with a frying pan? sure!).
i’m still getting a feel for the game; it sure does feel a whole lot like a Vita/PSP game. but i think the battle system is pretty interesting and immediately engaging. trying to trap your enemies and pick off the ones stuck between your characters on the timeline is a novel approach, i think.
