SaGa Series Discussion

[Grampy_Bone]

what would you recommend for a first SaGa game?

I agree with Damned Registrations, SaGa Frontier is a good starting point, although I think the PS1 cg art style has aged poorly. It's like 7 mini-games in one, so it's very streamlined and you progress quite quickly.

Romancing SaGa 3 is also very noob friendly, it's pretty forgiving and looks gorgeous thanks to the beautiful sprite work, and the remaster released recently isn't too bad. It's a very open game though so if you want something to lead you through a story you'll be lost.

SaGa Frontier 2 is good if you want a more linear, story-focused game with less free roam (almost none actually) but I find the battle system pretty bad to be honest. Some others here really like it tho.

 

[Lincolnberry]

Thank you both!

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Made it to The Fallen in The Last Remnant at BR 41, with zero trouble at the Six Bases. I have several Hex users but no cachexia yet, so I've got some grinding to do. I'll finish up sidequests and do as many weapon upgrades as possible, maybe beat him by BR 50ish.

I've seen a lot of complaints about being 'BR screwed.' Because enemies get stronger as your BR increases while your stat gains dry up, eventually you hit a point where the enemies are too tough to beat and you can't level up anymore. That's crap. I think people who complained about BR were just shocked by the difficulty spikes. Some bosses are ultra cheap or luck based if you do them early, but that's just a SaGa thing.

To be fair, the game loses the ability to challenge you in random battles pretty quick. You have to go out of your way to link enough enemies in one fight to even start to be a threat. So players waltz through the dungeons and figure the boss will be just as easy, only to get a rude awakening when they're spanked. I don't see how they could have done it any differently though, the game's battle system really needs every fight to be a huge skirmish to work properly, but that would make the game very tedious.

 

[eric__s]

I've seen a lot of complaints about being 'BR screwed.' Because enemies get stronger as your BR increases while your stat gains dry up, eventually you hit a point where the enemies are too tough to beat and you can't level up anymore. That's crap. I think people who complained about BR were just shocked by the difficulty spikes. Some bosses are ultra cheap or luck based if you do them early, but that's just a SaGa thing.

I've beaten the game with BR in the high 30s and there's never a point where the game is too hard for you to beat, but there are a handful of parts that are extremely difficult and require 4-5 tries, like the Jager battle in Wyrmskeep, the Fallen and those twin sisters at the Six Bases. Those are insanely difficult. Once you get over those hurdles, though, the game is a fun but fair challenge. Low BR runs like that are the only way to make really good characters that you get towards the end of the game, like Wyngale and Khrynia, viable. If you're too strong by the point you get them, they're worthless.

 

[Thorakitai]

How do you defeat that powerful boss in Leonid's dungeon?

My team of Ellen (Martial Arts/Axe/Earth), Sarah(Bow/Lunar), Nora (Hammer), Robin and Charl managed to defeat the bosses in that dungeon until I've hit a brick wall against that Skeleton-Centaur boss that can perform two turns at once.

How do you beat that bastard? The team is at 350+.

Also, so far I'v just decided to kill every monster in my path (except if there's too many or retracing steps) but is there a downside to that?

 

[Damned Registrations]

How do you defeat that powerful boss in Leonid's dungeon?

My team of Ellen (Martial Arts/Axe/Earth), Sarah(Bow/Lunar), Nora (Hammer), Robin and Charl managed to defeat the bosses in that dungeon until I've hit a brick wall against that Skeleton-Centaur boss that can perform two turns at once.

How do you beat that bastard? The team is at 350+.

Also, so far I'v just decided to kill every monster in my path (except if there's too many or retracing steps) but is there a downside to that?

I have vague memories of hitting a wall there and coming back a bit later and beating him, but I can't recall what I did differently or how much my stats had improved. It looks like you don't have a dedicated mage though. Does that boss use heavy spells? I recall being able to beat at least one nasty boss by spamming some low level magic to change the ambient element so it fucked over the boss magic so it wouldn't rape me. It might disable/enable passive healing for the boss too depending on the element.

 

[Hyperion]

Made it to The Fallen in The Last Remnant at BR 41, with zero trouble at the Six Bases. I have several Hex users but no cachexia yet, so I've got some grinding to do. I'll finish up sidequests and do as many weapon upgrades as possible, maybe beat him by BR 50ish.

I've seen a lot of complaints about being 'BR screwed.' Because enemies get stronger as your BR increases while your stat gains dry up, eventually you hit a point where the enemies are too tough to beat and you can't level up anymore. That's crap. I think people who complained about BR were just shocked by the difficulty spikes. Some bosses are ultra cheap or luck based if you do them early, but that's just a SaGa thing.

To be fair, the game loses the ability to challenge you in random battles pretty quick. You have to go out of your way to link enough enemies in one fight to even start to be a threat. So players waltz through the dungeons and figure the boss will be just as easy, only to get a rude awakening when they're spanked. I don't see how they could have done it any differently though, the game's battle system really needs every fight to be a huge skirmish to work properly, but that would make the game very tedious.

BR determining difficulty is something that was an issue on the 360 version, the PC version smoothed out the difficulty curve of high BR. However, to help with the difficulty curve allies would automatically upgrade gear in the original. This is no longer the case in all other versions so have fun grinding out those Guild Tasks and trying to get Circular Albic Hide, and Butterfly Eyes.

Another common misconception is that you need Cachexia to beat The Fallen. It's just a cheesy way to make the battle even easier than it needs to be. Characters with high individual HP like Torgal, and Caedmon are key to that fight so you can have Unions with good HP without needing a full 5 units per. This is even more important the further you go, and is exactly why Wyngale, Khrynia, and even Irina suck. Paris does everything Irina does, but with triple the HP, and doesn't steal the Nightbloom from Emmy and deny her the Ninja class. Yuniver and Zolean are two others who fall into that category, and are worse than some of the generics you have available the whole game, Faye in particular.

 

[Hyperion]

How do you defeat that powerful boss in Leonid's dungeon?

My team of Ellen (Martial Arts/Axe/Earth), Sarah(Bow/Lunar), Nora (Hammer), Robin and Charl managed to defeat the bosses in that dungeon until I've hit a brick wall against that Skeleton-Centaur boss that can perform two turns at once.

How do you beat that bastard? The team is at 350+.

Also, so far I'v just decided to kill every monster in my path (except if there's too many or retracing steps) but is there a downside to that?

Tiger's Ferocity formation trivializes the entire game. 350HP might be a bit low, usually 400ish maybe even 500 is more ideal for his castle because Poison Gions spawn there eventually - one of the best grind enemies, and Yami is about on par with an Abyss Guardian in difficulty.

 

[eric__s]

Are there any differences between the PC and remastered versions of The Last Remnant besides graphics? Every ounce of my body is telling me to replay the game for the 80th time.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Also, so far I'v just decided to kill every monster in my path (except if there's too many or retracing steps) but is there a downside to that?

No, you can't over grind in that game. The worst that happens is the monsters get tougher but that only pushes your characters hp gains and sparking rate up so it's fine.

350 hp sounds early. Just come back later.

Are there any differences between the PC and remastered versions of The Last Remnant besides graphics? Every ounce of my body is telling me to replay the game for the 80th time.

I lost my PC copy and they took it off steam so that's why I'm playing the PS4 one.

Some long-time bugs were finally fixed in the remaster and they added a sprint button.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Another common misconception is that you need Cachexia to beat The Fallen

Whats your strategy without it? I never said you need it but it does make the fight more bearable.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I've been interested in trying LR out for a while, is it still chained to that shitty online microsoft service thing?

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I've been interested in trying LR out for a while, is it still chained to that shitty online microsoft service thing?

Its off PC entirely. Only way to play is find an Xbox copy, buy the remaster on PS4, or torrent.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well that makes that choice easy.

 

[Hyperion]

Another common misconception is that you need Cachexia to beat The Fallen

Whats your strategy without it? I never said you need it but it does make the fight more bearable.

I make 4, sometimes even 5 smaller Unions. Each one should have AoE Healing and / or Revival Methods. If Wyngale stays alive, or your Unions move quickly you can double Flank him every turn. This keeps his Morale in check, and reduces the damage he deals considerably. Usually I keep 1 Union stacked with my most powerful Units (Caedmon, Gaou, and usually Rush are the top 3) and have them attack at all costs to make sure I keep the DPS up.

Of course you can just do the Wisdom's Echo cheese and breeze through to negate the need for strategy and stomp him in 3 turns.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Ah, pathetic. I got two Hundred Flowers off, second one dealing over 100k damage, and I still lost. Emmy was the last union left and she got botched, survive two rounds with her guys doing nothing every turn until Armageddon.

 

[Thorakitai]

I've gotten the dolphin statue before activating the Forneus quest. Is there a way to recruit Herman during the quest or did I just screw up in recruiting Black?

 

[Hyperion]

Screwed it up

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Black sucks anyway.

 

[Damned Registrations]

So Last Remnant so far has been as much of a mixed bag as I remembered. Finally broke down and checked a wiki when I reached that god awful desert quest. After walking around for fucking ages to hit all those markers, some douche appears somewhere in the massive zone and I'm supposed to find him? Fuuuuuck that. Of course once on the wiki I started reading about all the other shit.

You can never equip allies, so a ton of the items are entirely pointless. Like anything race specific. Or basically anything you won't personally use, which is probably a single class of weapons. What the fuck. Selling monsters and learning new skills (never mind changing classes, which I didn't know was a thing) are absolutely opaque clusterfucks. And then characters have weird mystery stats like 'Gluttony' or 'Love' or 'Handiness'. Which affects the AI? Jesus christ.

All this stuff would have been cool if it were under the player's control at all, but as it's presented it might as well just be totally random with most of the cool outcomes impossible to achieve. If you go in blind you'll likely get a bunch of very boring samey characters using all the same shit. But having read the wiki, I know the range of skills and classes and such now so I can't really be hyped for it any more. Urgh.

Combat, likewise, is potentially interesting but kinda ruined by the fact that you can save before every fight and everything is super fast so there's no real consequences, and again, you've got little control over things. You'll often get turns where your guys just don't want to fucking heal themselves or use any of their powerful moves. Especially if you want to actually be remotely tactical and have them target specific units or be in a specific part of the battlefield, as opposed to cycling between every target like a slot machine for a command where they'll actually nuke shit.

Also, fuck that harvesting minigame. I forgot how obnoxiously slow that shit is and how aggravating the limited uses and one time treasures are.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

You can never equip allies

Not exactly true but I agree it's still a stupid system.

The way it works is allies will ask for items in your inventory based on their 'focus' which is either balance (HP and AP items) combat (STR and DEF items) or mystic (INT and RES items) Everyone starts as Balance and asks twice during the game what they should switch to. So you can have them do Combat to grab strength items then go balance to grab AP items. They also request weapons too and if you know what you are doing you can skip most component hunting by buying top-tier weapons to override their upgrade path.

On PC I believe there is a mod to allow you to manually equip everyone, I think it's just an .ini file change.

 

[Hyperion]

On PC I believe there is a mod to allow you to manually equip everyone, I think it's just an .ini file change

It's one word. Change a word from False to True and you can fully equip them, but it does require some finessing to get the allies material requesting the new upgrade line.

But having read the wiki, I know the range of skills and classes and such now so I can't really be hyped for it any more. Urgh.

That's kinda your fault. Skill system is somewhat different from normal SaGa because it's not RNG, but deterministic based on skill levels you can't see.

Finally broke down and checked a wiki when I reached that god awful desert quest. After walking around for fucking ages to hit all those markers, some douche appears somewhere in the massive zone and I'm supposed to find him? Fuuuuuck that.

That whole zone blows, but once you get the map it's much easier.

And then characters have weird mystery stats like 'Gluttony' or 'Love' or 'Handiness'. Which affects the AI? Jesus christ.

As I understand it, the 4th stat's name is irrelevant but as it goes up the character becomes more of a "team player" and will reassess more often in battle if the conditions call for it. Amongst other things.

so there's no real consequences, and again, you've got little control over things.

Saving wherever has always been a SaGa thing, you shouldn't be this surprised. You have plenty of control over things if you disable amd enable all the skills you want them to use, and have the AP for it. Mixing physical and magical, however, is in most cases bad because they tend to conflict with the AI of certain classes. Top tier classes are intended to be extremely difficult only available to a few people because of how powerful they are, as well as being intended specifically for someone who's going to lead a Union.

You'll often get turns where your guys just don't want to fucking heal themselves or use any of their powerful moves.

Everyone ignores base / Max AP and wonders why they don't use their strong attacks. If you have 100 AP for the union, you're probably not going to get a turn that uses 90 of it. Also, Morale factors in the attacks used. Higher Morale means better Skill usage, but stronger enemies typically rule the Morale Bar.

As for the healing bit, i have no idea. I've played the game 4 times and unions not healing themselves has never been an issue. You need to know that certain Command types in battle allow for units to make assessments as necessary during the turn, while others lock them into place (i.e. "Attack with <type> Arts!" will never cause a wounded ally to change his basic attack to Revitalize, while "Give it everything you've got!" or whatever will cause allies to reassess on the fly and heal as necessary) action-wise.

 

[Damned Registrations]

To be fair the healing thing has only happened once so far, but it did cause a wipe. Retards just didn't want to use their healing items. And yes, they had plenty in stock.

And for all my complaints, it is a cool game. I like how much it lets you off the rails (Pagus complained when I ditched the city they brought me to for the rando desert quest, but didn't actually stop me) and the amount of content is pretty crazy. It reminds me of SaGa Frontier in how parts of it are unfinished though, which makes me sad.

Everyone ignores base / Max AP and wonders why they don't use their strong attacks. If you have 100 AP for the union, you're probably not going to get a turn that uses 90 of it. Also, Morale factors in the attacks used. Higher Morale means better Skill usage, but stronger enemies typically rule the Morale Bar.

So why do I get 2 targets where they're using 7 and one target where they're using 29? That doesn't make sense. They should be more or less equal, not night and day difference just by attacking an identical group of enemies slightly to the left.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

So why do I get 2 targets where they're using 7 and one target where they're using 29? That doesn't make sense. They should be more or less equal, not night and day difference just by attacking an identical group of enemies slightly to the left.

There's so much fuckery with the command RNG. idk what it does half the time. The game doesn't figure its worth blowing your whole AP wad every turn unless shit is getting real.

It will pick commands from whats available. The union leader always gets first priority so if you turn off everything except their strongest attack you should get it every round.

 

[Thorakitai]

Finally completed that Water Abyss Gate quest and beat the first Abyss Lord after multiple deaths. (My party is at 400+ Hp)

That boss fight is quite fun, had Nora and Boston as my main damage dealers, Ellen constantly shutting down it's hp regen by casting earth magic in between german suplexing that giant boss while Sara and Muse alternating using their magic to heal and to attack. Had to shatter one of the rare healing canes but it was worth it.