This Kenji Ito final boss banger track isn’t even on youtube.
I don’t recognize this world anymore
I’ve finished the game with all 4 characters now, in 120 hours, and have restarted again with Urpina to unlock her True Demon Ending since I couldn’t get it on the first try (despite following the guidelines online (oh god I might fail again))
I’m also interested in Balmaint’s and Talia’s alternate paths and, eventually, replaying with Leo. I have not beaten the superbosses or gotten even half of the regional items.
I might play this game until I die
Wait, how long is a single playthrough? I never finished my first playthrough, with Urpina. I think I got through only her first- maybe second- story arc but that already took me 52 hours. I felt like I had a good fill of the game at the time but want to come back to it at some point.
I think my first playthrough took me 50 hours then each subsequent one around 20-30. Not being confused about the mechanics, using fewer characters and spending 0 time in mines all helped significantly reduce game time I think
Restarting with Urpina on the Adill conspiracy path I reached the final bosses in like 5 hours. (But I got properly trashed with my 300 max HP and poor weapons and now I need to grind forever)
Each character you’ve finished the game with appears on the title screen + new events involving them and their personal retinue can happen in other playthroughs + you can carry more stuff from one playthrough to the next the more times you’ve beaten the game (capping at 4)
so i kinda bounced off this at launch but i’ve been addicted since december lol, at the end of a “know how all the stuff works + totally got that 42 attack speedrun twinspike spear twenty minutes in” leonard playthrough
balmaint still to go, i gather he’s even more on rails than the urpina/talia early game?
After a few abortive attempts at beginning Romancing SaGa 2 and SaGa Frontier I decided to give this one a shot. I’m enjoying it! I’m not sure I’m doing well, but I’m also not doing terribly, which is how SaGa games often feel, for me. I was a bit dismayed at getting Leonard to begin with, but I’m enjoying his rapport with Elisabeth.
Excellent timing, as I’ve just gotten to the final boss with Leonard on Scarlet Grace.
On that note, I realize, given that you have to go through it with multiple protagonists, that you’re probably not supposed to choose the harder difficulty settings when fighting the final boss the first time. That said, approaching it while underpowered and figuring out workable-with-luck strategies–be they “hope like hell for stuns” or “pay actual attention to your characters’ order on the grid to trivialize the boss’ backup”-- is quite fantastic, after having gotten more or less used to battles with lower stakes. The lower difficulty levels end up feeling condescending in comparison–not that I’ve actually beaten them either.
(But dammit, SaGa really never jokes around with final boses, does it.)
compared to scarlet grace it’s amazing how the rushed CGs, stilted translation choices and less generic fantasy setting take the opening cutscenes in emerald beyond from “threadbare but kind of charming” to “actively disorienting and surreal.” like,
the posed and posterized model stills with perspectiveless 2D art and minimum-resolution textures is so bizarre and the moment-to-moment writing mirrors it. switching to a 3d model overworld so my 3/4 perspective still image of a cartoon car can commute home. getting stopped on that commute because a child has challenged me to a dance battle where we fade between still poses. taking the png train to space and suddenly getting told i’m searching for my heart. written out like that it sounds more compelling than it is… i couldn’t believe they picked the songstress to showcase for the demo until i learned that:
every platform got a different scenario for its demo
(sample size of two) they are all kinda like that
the ui is more stylized than scarlet grace and a lot less functional, down to little stuff like “casting time up and casting time down effects are in different sections of the manual” and “you can’t see half the health bar for the character you have selected in battle” and “the text for this skill only scrolls because they made the box for it really small for some reason.” lots of symbols that don’t have any kind of tooltipping and if an explanation was hidden in the glossary we didn’t find it.
the quest writing is painful when it’s trying to be funny (which is a lot of the time) but hilarious when it’s just trying to be Videogame. the scientists in this sector (sector of what? where am i? what is this spaceship… dimension… thing?) have read a cursed tome, so you walk around the map getting different variations of guys saying “help, i read a tome and now i am cursed!” and you break their curse by playing a minigame where you put a triangle block in a triangle shaped hole. @contentdeleted and i thought we’d softlocked the game for several minutes because of how finnicky the controls were for dragging and dropping a triangle onto another triangle. then you get a page from the cursed tome you can immediately sell back to the scientists you freed, unless you haggle too much and piss them off. honestly great
then you find another quest that’s mostly schrodinger’s cat puns and god it is webcomic writing in the worst way
it felt like all the production time in scarlet grace went into making a really tight battle system and i think they succeeded at that where most saga games collapse under their own cool ideas and ambition. emerald takes that foundation and adds some new takes on the saga bespoke racial mechanics, with each of the scenarios focusing in on a different one. that owns and is the most interesting thing going on that we saw, and i’m really curious how much it’s responsible for the team presumably running out of money/time/QA hours. there’s a lot of cool stuff in here (i regret not grabbing screenshots of any of the new monster designs, which are wonderful) and we were just constantly confronted with the ways it didn’t come together
The best way to understand Emerald Beyond is to go back to the first two SaGa - you were travelling this hub tower / inter-dimensional space filled with doors that lead to other worlds and each one was its own little surprise - maybe there’s a 4 hours cyberpunk adventure in Neo Tokyo, or a small world called Race World where you have to win a race before moving on and every NPC is talking about The Race, or maybe there’s a small flooded 6x6 tiles world with 3 NPCs going « GLUB GLUB… I’M DROWNING »
Emerald Beyond mostly expands on that idea, crucially not overexplaining anything, like the originals. Obviously it’s not the same because the team is a lot older and trends have changed… you can’t go back to the past… unless you pick up Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend
The biggest issue with Emerald Beyond is the comparison to all these remastered SaGas - Literally 8 SaGas out of 10 + 4/4 SaGa-likes have been remastered on modern hardware… But this new SaGa is the base version with normal battle speed and no fast forward during (too long) dialogue and terrible UI and slight delay that permeates everything etc
Really though they took the best setting (Gameboy SaGas) best battle system and quest design (Scarlet Grace), aesthetics are fantastic, the Kawazu touch is here, Kenji Ito music piercing through my heart. The math is inarguable, it had to win me over in the end, I’m in love now
I didn’t get a great screenshot of this, but I think it was a possessed motorcycle with two floating heads that had different personalities that control it. No build-up to this, no explanation. A Plus SaGa
