Has anyone managed to get anything out of longswords?
I ditched one of my early longsword recruits because she was my worst team member by a long margin. I started using another longsword project character but he has been useless for like 10 hours now while other project characters turned out great. I’m starting to think he’ll just never be any good and maybe the longsword is the issue here.
Very weird because longswords have pretty much always been dominant in SaGa
I can’t check my PC for a bit too verify their novelists, but as Urpina longswords (Urpina) and short sword (Nessa) are my two most reliable weapons and my go-to for any serious team compositions. Longsword feels about what you’d expect fornthe “normal” weapon. It’s got good reliable damage and reasonable BP costs that become very cheap after even Rank 1, and it’s got a 1 BP protect tech with the option of holding a shield. It’s light on status effects but you get a cheap Delay tech early on which gives it timeline control very quickly. Shortly after that it gets a Ranged attack for quelling, which has a reasonable BP cost by Rank 1. So it plays a solid attack class; good single target damage for good BP cost. It’s a cheap and reliable class that so can fit into any formation since it doesn’t need a ton of BP to fully utilize its tools.
On the flip side short sword is loaded with status effects but is not as strong and is much more costly to use. I have to be more cognizant of how expensive my other team members are and how much BP it can suck up on a single turn, especially on earlier turns.
An additional cool thing about Longsword is some characters can unlock a Dual Wield role that lets you equip two longswords and unlock special dual wield techs that deal awesome damage. So those long sword characters can function as both the basic cheap attacker but also a heavy hitter.
That said, I don’t know that I need more than one Longsword on my team at a time. I got one more Longsword character named Chichi and while she doesn’t seem particularly great in the first place I just can’t find moments where her additional Longsword feels useful. I haven’t leveled her up much as a result. At least I can send her on express jobs for free crystals instead.
Interesting! I’ve had my longsword users do less damage than the shortsword / mace / spear users and much less than the greatsword / axe users, but maybe there’s some sort of hidden SaGa value I’m missing
At endgame now I’ve never sparked the ranged attack, which admittedly would be a huge thing. (I sure wouldn’t be able to see any use for bows afterwards though…) and the block move + shield does make the longsword the tied best weapon for tanking
Hah! I barely get much use out of Greatsword due to its BP cost and general slowness and I’ve been phasing out my Mace character as my Longsword, Short Sword, Spear, Arrow, and Martial Art characters have ranked up. I need to get back to my PC and check my stats and BP costs but I wonder how much our playstyle differed due to our characters, the order we got them, and our equipment upgrade paths. I started out with Longsword, Short Sword, Spear, Mace, and Greatsword. Relied heavily on Longsword, Spear, and Mace initially until Shortsword sparked a lot of status effect techs. Greatsword just felt too expensive to fit into my gameplans for too long and got left behind.
One issue I ran into eventually was that I was getting tons of terra crystals so I kept upgrading people down the terra weapon paths, which look like they tend to lower your mobility. My team got very, very slow and I’ve been working on mitigating that since. But because of that slowness, characters with fast moves and interrupts became valuable. Arrow’s Quick Knock almost always shoots that character up to first on the time line. Mace’s Seismic Slam AOEs with a chance of paralyze was really useful, although it only hits grounded. Spear seems to have a lot of variability in move speed that can move it up and down the timeline, which is useful not only for pre-empting enemies but engineering united attacks too.
But yeah, by rank 1 longsword has a 1 BP cost for techs that can protect, delay, and quell. I also recently sparked a tech that can do solid damage and chance to stun for I think 3 BP? Couple this with dual wielding and that Longsword+ formation that lower the BP cost of longsword techs and a longsword character can be really useful.
I finished this game! The final boss was crazy!
The battle system has grown on me to the point that I could see myself replaying the game a few times.
With a lack of affordable healing in battle this game feels closer to Slay the Spire than an average JRPG and it’s much better for it. I want healing abolished from RPGs now! Most battles are compelling because every health loss is felt, and the game goes out of its way to regularly reward risk taking (setting up a counter or an union attack, using status effects, etc) Even in easy battles the extra battle rewards are a nice incentive, you can go out of your way to get them and catastrophically fail, etc.
In the end I’ve found that greatswords were actually the best weapon type! Once you upgrade the basic attack it becomes the easiest most reliable way to do huge damage for 1BP. Flowing Slash also does huge damage, cannot miss, and lowers attack for only one BP after upgrading, which is nuts. I just use it on every enemy. Optical Slash is a counter that costs 1BP under Contingency plan, deals about 2x more damage than the brawler’s counter, and everytime it triggers the character goes : twisted :
You can choose what carries over to the next playthrough. Weird little bit: Notice how the default options are on the left and right sides and the non-recommended options are in the middle. I don’t know what’s up with that but I like it
Playing as Balmaint for three hours, I have a few more observations:
Bad news: Balmaint executes the churros guy one hour in
Each main character actually has a different overworld theme
I met the core team from my precedent playthrough and kicked their asses, it felt great. I think that option is only available because I finished the game once with Talia
Early on, battles are even more of a slog than I remember
All of Balmaint’s allies (except Albert) come with completely inadequate weapons for their stat builds:
Patricia - short sword - 10 dex
Robert - fists - 9 mobility
Isaac - bows - 9 dex
Clover - swords - 9 str
Marion - axes - 10 str
Balmaint feels strong but that’s only because all of his loser friends are warriors who put all their stat points into INT and CHA
i bounced off this after ~15 hours of being very impressed largely because of how railroaded i felt using urpina, are the other characters’ routes more saga like? fancy jumping back in tonight and starting over
I heard Leonard has a minimal main story and can go anywhere right from the start, you can go immediately die to the final boss if you want
that’s precisely what i want
now i need everyone around me to understand this was easily the worst year of my life so far and instead of celebrating its passing i need to sit in the dark with akitoshi
god yes
I was so happy when I got the healing spell and it turned out to take multiple turns to cast and then do nothing
I’ve also bounced off of this for now but that part was perfectly saga
I’ve gotten to the part of Urpina’s thing where I can just go anywhere and it’s pretty great. I’m sure I’m fucking up how to play this, but I’m having fun anyhow.
i decided to start over with the pottery witch and suddenly twelve hours had gone by oops
stumbled on a rank vi technical axe when my smithing rank was like ii so don’t let anyone tell you that treasure is worthless i guess. my man Tomato is turning everybody into paste now
you get access to an infirmary much earlier and i guess they operate on a “half your remaining resources” insurance plan so if you pace your smithing right you can avoid swapping out characters. “Do you want to restore all of [character]'s LP for one crystal?” is a very satisfying prompt.
i guess the ranged longsword attack i got early on with urpina isn’t standard? the longsword techs i’ve unlocked on Compass are almost all different (e.g. demilune vs triple slash), which hasn’t been true for anything else. my spear guy better get Mizuchi soon because conditional attacks are the main thing kicking my ass right now. was my first impression right that bows are kind of underwhelming? i didn’t give them much of a chance on my first run
after wondering where the writing is for 60 hours i’ve discovered it’s hidden behind the extremely intricate mercantile system
this game is weird
i used an ancient forbidden flame to uncover a decrepit and forgotten shrine. i investigate and suddenly there is a HARD fight with new music and a new prompt, BATTLE TO EARN THE BLESSING OF THE GODDESS MACHA
so i fight for a few turns and suddenly there’s a dramatic cut-in as the goddess descends and announces “let’s have some fun together!” she joins as an enemy. she can cast hypergravity in one turn. i hit her once and then a dialogue box pops up saying that she left. the battle ends with no rewards or hp gain. the protagonists are like “we did it!” and then it just… doesn’t come up again?
i thought i accidentally stumbled in on a superboss i was very excited and then very confused
I recall around the game’s original Vita release the stuff surround the gods was very mysterious. People had found ways to encounter several gods but people were not sure just how many gods you actually could find or what to do with them. So there might be something more to it other than it just being a one-hit wonder? Seeing the game’s contents being a genuine mystery among the playerbase was cool.
Oh dang, good stuff Tuxedo! The comparison to Slay the Spire feels apt. The combat really is this game, more-so than even Unlimited SaGa, and the combat design feels considered in a way that most JRPG-style battle systems are not (and perhaps cannot be). I think the ability to gain some sort of understanding how the enemy AI will act contributes a lot because you can actively plan around and with it. And it’s not just seeing the turn order and their actions ahead of time, but also the way you can gain an understanding of the AI’s targeting behavior based on the current state of the battle.
It moves the game more into the realm of Slay the Spire and Into Breach where you are given information on the enemy combatants to complete a battle through fewer, more decisive turns. I especially like how well the game emphasizes LP as a resource to be used rather than just a cushion in front of a quasi-permadeath; it encourages you to accept character deaths as a common occurrence and gives you ways to use it for your benefit (such as united attacks).
Somehow when I feel like I’m seeing many of the same enemies over and over the game rarely feels like it’s getting easier or my strategies more simplified. Somehow the enemy combinations always have some sort of wrinkle with either status effects or some big AOE and throws my entire formation off balance and I have to play more battles by ear, especially if I’m trying to aim for battle rewards.
How long was your playthrough? Just before the Christmas holidays I hit around 36 hours on Urpina’s playthrough and might be at what people call Chapter 2? Maybe I"m in the same place as where Booji is at because I seem to have more freedom in where I’m allowed to go (I went the opposite direction of where I was told to go) but I never got any kind of notification of a 'Chapter 2" so I’m not sure if that’s something that happens later or if that’s just a term people have been using to signify when the game structure games heavily during her playthrough.
Did you choose to kill the brother or spare him early on? I’m at a part where I’ve re-assembled the Emperor’s Saw and I guess settled much of the Earth Serpent stuff and need to go find the father again. I wonder how much changes if I killed the brother.
Also I love how the legendary weapon passed down through the ages in Urpina’s story is not a sword, an axe, a scepter, a spell, or anything like this. It’s a chainsaw.
I finished the game in 41 hours according to the save clock!
I don’t think the game has named chapters but Talia and I believe Ulpina have three clear acts.
As I understand the game’s structure:
The game has four main quests, each tied to one main character.
Each character but Leonard will do his own main quest plus one shorter version of two other quests (you can choose which depending on where you go! I avoided shards with Balmaint that way.)
Balmaint is slightly different than the girls in that his main quest spans the entire game instead of just being the first act, like Talia’s phoenix quest.
Leonard can probably do every main quest, or no quest? Idk
I tried not to kill him once, then killed him and then got sidetracked trying to chase down all the shards on the way to see my dad, and haven’t finished that yet. Oh I also fought that one god that Haley mentions upthread and got to the point in the fight where they leave.
Yeah this game is great.
Wait, if you kill the brother does the earth serpent stuff end there? Does the Emperor’s Saw not get destroyed, and you don’t need to go searching the world for an alternative, and you don’t then collect materials to re-assemble it, and you don’t unlock a mining system, and you don’t get involved in a small war while trying to get to the workshop you need to re-assemble the Emperor’s Saw? I legitimately have no idea what the shards you’re talking about are. Maybe it’s the Leonard thing Tuxedo mentioned?
I originally chose to save and went through that hard boss battle where I barely managed to scrape by. Then when I saw it gave me the choice again I legitimately had a stressful few minutes trying to think if I could really survive doing it again. I did preserver and go down the save path though. There’s a lot of content after that!
So, I did the first fight, then killed him, and yeah, I just have the saw (I think, I will check tomorrow). I’m supposed to go find my dad again, but on the way there, this woman showed up and asked me to destroy seven fragments of the Firebringer’s stone? So I am doing that before meeting dad, I think. I also have stumbled on all sorts of other stuff. But no, I have not done any more worm shit at all. so yeah, good stuff.
