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SaGa Series Discussion

Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
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Jan 19, 2014
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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Not my thing, but if they want to push more SaGa stuff in the west, I'm not against the idea.
 

Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
Opening to 430 concurrent players on Steam today. Not surprising, but damn this lame ass world.

Got my copy and excited to have the day off to devote a large portion of to this. Going to kicking it off with Julian, of course.
 

Grampy_Bone

Arcane
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Wandering the world randomly in search of maps
Romancing SaGa 3 is the most SaGa-est SaGa of them all. This was the game where the battle system really took shape. It's also pretty forgiving in terms of the series' "Hardcore" features, can't really get into unwinnable situations unless you enter elemental palaces deeply unprepared. Highly recommended as a starting point for anyone.

Looking over the store page, looks like they took some, err, liberties with the localization. I'm guessing the original "Holy King" and "Devil King" just weren't cool enough, so they went with Archfiend and... Matriarch? Are you for real? Fuck off.

Fire these gay localizers.
 

Abu Antar

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
32 euros starting price for a remaster of a 25 year old game?

WTF?
I paid €25 on Swedistani Steam. I was tempted to buy it on my US Switch account. It's on sale for $23 or $24. (I forget which price.)
 

Abu Antar

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
32 euros starting price for a remaster of a 25 year old game?

WTF?
I paid €25 on Swedistani Steam. I was tempted to buy it on my US Switch account. It's on sale for $23 or $24. (I forget which price.)

It's 25.59 with the discount right now but I was talking about the starting price,still too much for such an old game
I suppose you're right. I know that my wallet is getting flogged but I'm a sucker for the series and I'm going to support it (and play it).

I'll do the same with Scarlet Grace. Sometimes, I willingly play the role of the sucker.
 

Jinn

Arcane
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Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
Eh, I was actually expecting it to be a little more honestly, knowing Squeenix's recent digital distribution pricing policies. I really don't think the asking price as that unfair considering the new work that went into localization. It is technically a new game for the west, after all. I'm personally just happy to finally have an official western version to play.

The port is excellent except for a couple of the same things that bothered me with the RS 2 port: the font is hideous, the UI elements in the party menu have that cheap "bubbly" mobile feeling to them, and the party menu background is smooth, ill-fitting, and bland (and the exact same one they used for RS 2). Besides that, couldn't ask for a better, more faithful update to the actual graphics. The pixel art scaling is gorgeous and leaves nothing to be desired. Same goes for the music: nothing missing or unnecessarily added to the beautiful score. It blows my mind that they didn't take the same route with SNES era Final Fantasy games, but I'm very glad they decided to stay faithful with Romancing SaGa.
 

Abu Antar

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Game can be bought on GMG for $19. I was in such a hurry to buy the game that I forgot to check alternate stores. Can't be arsed to refund on Steam and then purchase from GMG. I guess this is what happens when you stop buying new games on day 1.

Anyway, it's good old SaGa. One of my characters got smoked in the third battle, which means only 9LP for left her. I'm surprised at how much I remember from the game. I haven't touched the game in many, many years.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
I have never tried Saga games, but I have lost a lot of my youthful tolerance for walking around JRPG towns back and forth talking to people in lengthy cutscenes about Wise King and Evil Villain and oh my turns out all of that political intrigue was pointless it's actually about Sauron coming to Destroy the Universe.

So the question is, how much meaningful challenge / tactical decision-making is there in the actual combat and character building? I'm not asking for a JA2 obviously, but thinking relative to JRPG genre norms. Shining Force? FF5?
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
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14,982
It's definitely above par as JRPGs go. If you don't spoil yourself on anything you'll definitely find some satisfaction from the systems, since they give you a lot of options, including a lot of bad ones.
 

Grampy_Bone

Arcane
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I have never tried Saga games, but I have lost a lot of my youthful tolerance for walking around JRPG towns back and forth talking to people in lengthy cutscenes about Wise King and Evil Villain and oh my turns out all of that political intrigue was pointless it's actually about Sauron coming to Destroy the Universe.

So the question is, how much meaningful challenge / tactical decision-making is there in the actual combat and character building? I'm not asking for a JA2 obviously, but thinking relative to JRPG genre norms. Shining Force? FF5?

How much do you enjoy gambling and trial-and-error? SaGa depends on your tolerance for RNG and opaque decision making. There are a lot of tactical choices but the game doesn't give you much information to make those choices, you're expected to fail repeatedly before you figure it all out.

But to advertise SaGa 3 a bit:

-8 playable main characters and dozen-odd side characters
-Permadeath
-Possible to make almost any character into any type of role (fighter/mage/tank/etc) but choices can't be undone and it's gradual over the course of the game. You have to make decisions early and they take time to pay off.
-Some C&C to quests and character choices
-Hidden medieval Wall Street minigame
-Entire warfare minigame available only to one playable character
-Possible to play in AI auto-battle mode with unique bonuses like combo techs and spells (practically an entire different way to play the game).
 

Dyskolos

Cipher
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Apr 19, 2006
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571
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Eumeswil
Turned on my switch for the first time in at least six months to buy this and found saga 2 still running in the background.

Don't give me shit on the platform - this is next month's holiday travel family-annoyance insurance.
 
Joined
Dec 19, 2012
Messages
1,633
I bought Saga 2 on the Switch, as well. But it had some really awful input lag. Soured the game for me- I never played it for more than a few minutes. And I don't think it ever updated past version 1.0.0.

It really is my ideal platform for an older RPG like this but I have my doubts for the quality of the port unless I can confirm its quality somewhere.
 

Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
Yeah, so far I'd say this is quite a bit more difficult than Romancing SaGa 2, at least at lower levels. Had to restart about three hours into Julian's story because I ended up locked into a quest in an area I wasn't powerful enough for yet, which I found because I was exploring far-reaching places out of desperation. It's interesting that you can essentially start a New Game + with an incomplete save file, but I decided against it as it seemed kind of cheap and I hadn't really been smartly building my Julian (ie I stupidly bought him some magic, when I'm building him mainly as a tank).

Anyway, I've made it through the introduction again and have already found some alternate routes that I didn't before. I'm now able to build a competent party and explore at will. Overall having a great time, and was happy to find this challenge waiting for me.
 
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Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
Well, the game has peaked at 838 concurrent players on Steam, which isn't much, but a huge incline compared to Romancing SaGa 2's 189 all-time peak. Here's hoping it gets even higher in the next couple days, and that Scarlet Grace ends up shooting even higher.

I just want these games to keep on being made and coming to the west.
 
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Hobo Elf

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Feb 17, 2009
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Platypus Planet
Found a cave with a Blue Dragon that is super fucking strong. Luckily these games are so based that you can flee from almost anything, including boss fights, so I keep doing suicide runs to get a few attacks on the Blue Dragon and run away after I've sparked a skill or two. Got a bunch of really strong skills this way. Cheesy, yes, but my Monika was starting to lag behind REALLY badly, as in she wasn't getting any skill sparks. Now she got 4 new ones!

Edit: I'm thinking of compiling a small list of tips and tricks for the game. Probably not how to cheese it like the above story, but more like.. an explanation of how some of the game mechanics work, since some of them are pretty obscure and might go a long way in helping people play the game better.
 
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Hobo Elf

Arcane
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Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,999
Location
Platypus Planet
Alright, here are some some general tips that I'll throw in while my food is cooking. I'll add more later if I can think of anything. The list is going to be haphazard and not in any logical order.

-Mikhail's campaign is considered to be one of the hardest ones since he has lots of army battle shit which isn't a very intuitive system if you don't know what you're doing.

-Khalid has the highest Greed, a hidden stat in the game, out of all the main characters. If you cap out at 15 Greed (Khalid has 14) this will cause you to be locked out of some quests. Generally speaking asking for money during quests increases your greed and doing things for free lowers your greed. Capping out at 15 Greed means that your character will always ask for money payment as well iirc. OTOH there's no benefit to having 0 either (which is possible to attain), so don't feel too bad about asking for money every now and then. Actually, having 0 greed means that you can't haggle if I'm not remembering this wrong. Haggling itself is considered a greedy act and will increase your greed by 1.

-Sklill gains such as more MP, SP, HP, Weapon Skills and Magic Skills are rolled based on the commands you INPUT, not what you use. That means that slow characters can still get skill gains. Obviously you need people to attack if you want them to spark new techs tho.

-You can forget/relearn techs in the main menu. Sparking a tech doesn't mean that you "learn" it though. Once it has been "learned" (via use in combat), all characters can learn the tech. Unlearning a tech before you've "learned" it means that it needs to be sparked again.

-Quests are locked behind other quest, events AND HP. The party member with the highest HP is counted for this, but usually that's your main character.

-Encounter scaling works based on how many monsters you've killed of that type. What I mean is that the more frogs you kill the harder frogs you'll start to face in combat. Don't worry, harder enemies just means more skill gains and tech sparks. You can't make them out scale you. Some bosses scale based on EVENTS in RSaga 3 but none of them scale based on encounter rate, like in RSaga 2 where the 7 Heroes scaled based on events and/or encounter rate. AGAIN: in RSaga 2 enemies scale universally based on encounter rate, in RSaga 3 the individual enemy types scale based on how many times you've KILLED them so use Flee liberally if you feel like it.

-Magic is not as strong in RSaga 3 as it is in 2, so there's less pressure to get heavy elemental coverage. You don't need to rely on the strong spells to beat the game, though some of them are good and handy. It's good, but not mandatory is what I'm saying.

-You can dismiss party members at Bars when you talk too the Barkeep. They'll return to the place where you recruited them and you can always ask them to rejoin.

-Formations are super deep and important, a lot more deeper than what their simple in-game descriptions make them out to be. They are slightly intuitive since generally enemies will prioritize characters who are closest to them. Remember that some enemies have powerful attacks that hit your party in rows and columns, so changing a Formation might be a key strategy in victory to mitigate the amount of characters who get hit by such attacks.
IIRC some special spells and techs are also available in certain formations and when used by certain characters within the formations (i.e the top most character in a formation uses a Fire spell and bottom most character uses a Sun spell and then they combine into a fusion spell), so it might be better to just look this shit up on a guide if you want to go more in depth with them. Again, once you learn how to use these spells and techs it becomes intuitive and makes sense how they are done (usually characters who are side-by-side or on opposite ends), it's just that there isn't much in-game documentation to point these things out to new players. You just have to know that they exist unless you accidentally pull one off.
 
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Vorark

Erudite
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Mar 2, 2017
Messages
1,394
-Quests are locked behind other quest, events AND HP. The party member with the highest HP is counted for this, but usually that's your main character.

What an odd way to gate content albeit somewhat understandable. Guess it's a way to make sure at least one character will be able to survive a difficulty encounter.
 

Grampy_Bone

Arcane
Joined
Jan 25, 2016
Messages
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Location
Wandering the world randomly in search of maps
-Quests are locked behind other quest, events AND HP. The party member with the highest HP is counted for this, but usually that's your main character.

What an odd way to gate content albeit somewhat understandable. Guess it's a way to make sure at least one character will be able to survive a difficulty encounter.

HP is just a stand-in for levels, since the game doesn't have those.
 

Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
If you're talking about the rat cave, you can get out.

Nah, I was talking about monster hunting on ice lake.

where you meet Ward, and particularly the fish boss fight there.

Didn't have a full party yet and was slightly under-powered. Just enough to make it impossible. While the quest is active, you are only allowed to move between the village and ice lake. I feel like I could have ditched that particular party member to maybe get out of the quest, but thought I might as well restart with the knowledge I had gained up until that point. I'm about 6 hours into my fresh playthrough and everything is going much more smoothly, but still providing a good challenge. Thanks for trying to help out, though!

Alright, here are some some general tips that I'll throw in while my food is cooking. I'll add more later if I can think of anything. The list is going to be haphazard and not in any logical order.

Great guide, Hobo. Thanks for this. I was starting to take note of a few of these things as I was playing, with it all gradually dawning on me that Romancing SaGa 3 improves almost all the mechanics from 2 that tended to rub me the wrong way, with the level scaling in 3 being a huge improvement. SaGa series is pretty much the only group of games where I actually enjoy the way level scaling is handled, and while I liked how 2 discouraged grinding by basing scaling on battles fought, I think 3 handles it way better with specific enemy groups, no scaling on bosses, HP progression.

As things progress, I'm starting to feel like RS 3 will probably end up being my favorite of the entire series for a number of reasons.

EDIT: Something really annoying I've found is that if you initiate the Business Mini-game quest for Thomas, it prevents you from having conversations required to start quests with several NPCs, instead just thrusting you into the mini-game option screen. I don't know if this is by design, a bug in the remake, or what, but it's just bad. I've decided to abandon the Business quest in favor of doing the actual fucking quests in the game. BEWARE.
 
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LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Well, the game has peaked at 838 concurrent players on Steam, which isn't much, but a huge incline compared to Romancing SaGa 2's 189 all-time peak. Here's hoping it gets even higher in the next couple days, and that Scarlet Grace ends up shooting even higher.

I just want these games to keep on being made and coming to the west.

1,278 concurrent players yesterday. Looking at the graph, it seems mostly driven by Asian players.
 

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