Thread 722993718

Is Romancing Saga 2 a good game?

Yes

No

>>722993718 (OP)
I think it's just okay.

Maybe

I don't know.
Can you repeat the question?

>>722993718 (OP)
I look like that.

>>722994132
pic

I want a girlfriend, or femboyfriend that look like that.

You're not a boss of me now!

>>722993718 (OP)
Yes.

YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME NOW

>>722993718 (OP)
I enjoyed it enough to go through once.

Yes. Now I'm waiting for the R. Saga 3 remake.

YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME NOW

AND YOU'RE
NOT
SO
BIG

it's one of the best jrpgs

>>722993718 (OP)
Yeah

>>722993718 (OP)
Yes, but Scarlet Grace is way more fun

Life is unfair

>>722994460
For me, its the Imperial Guard

>>722993718 (OP)
>>722994460
sex with ninja

>>722993718 (OP)
it inspired the devil of decline which is one of my all time goat so yes

>>722994382
Nah, Final Fantasy V, by the same studio, first. They already did a Mana and a SaGa game, so they can step up.

>>722996431
They already said that R. Saga 3 is in the pipeline. Not sure when, but it will be done.

the original is goated

>>722993718 (OP)
absolutely

Whats the difference between romance, frontier and unlimited?
should i skip those and play the hijab cop one first?

>>722993718 (OP)
i have never played the original, but the remake is really good

>>722997514
Romancing and Frontier follow the same general formula of (fairly) traditional JRPG except you have a lot of freedom in how you progress

Unlimited is unfiltered autism in its purest form

>>722997514
frontier was supposedly gonna be romancing 4 but they changed the name because the game went back to monsters n robots setting of the gameboy games. frontier 2 naming makes no sense though since it's like a linear iteration of romancing 2. the series does whatever it wants with naming honestly. but it's more tied to platforms if anything since first 3 saga games are on gameboy, romancing games are on snes, frontiers on playstation etc.

>>722997514
>romance
Middle ages like series. Bunch of quests to do and you can often do them in no particular order.
>Frontier
Frontier 1 has many worlds you can explore but each route has certain story beats you have to do. There's more freedom or less freedom based on the route. Also it has four races that develop differently.

SaGa Frontier 2 is magic based since it's a magical world which everyone draws magic from materials. You also are limited to the time periods the map allows you to enter while you can often bounce between two stories.
>Unlimited
Board like game. You move your piece on the board, you have a chance of success and failure to disarm traps, unlock chests, jumping over rubble, and so on to simulate die. You also get panels after you beat adventures rather than grinding enemies.

>>722997360
What the fuck was her problem?

>>723000240
they're closing and she wants to go home

>>722993718 (OP)
I adored the remake, I'd say it's a great game not merely a good one.

>>722993718 (OP)
I want to marry Rocbouquet and start a family with her!

Has anyone attempted the remake's highest difficulty? Is it good challenge-wise?

>>722993718 (OP)
SaGa is my favorite series, I think the RS2 remake neuters a lot of what I think makes these games special but frankly none of that matters to most people. It's still like an 8/10 objectively, but I don't think it'll ever fully sit right with me.
>>722997514
Each console gen got its own title for each game, almost as a sub series.
>Game Boy trilogy
Linear with a focus on character building and strategy. Its equipment/weapon system differs from other games in that weapons all differ greatly in use and function, while having durability (generally enough to last long enough until you can buy or find more), making the general focus of the game on planning and strategy.
>Romancing trilogy
This is where the nonlinear open world format took place for the series. Sparking became the series signature feature here as well. The GB games leaned sci-fi, while these are medievel fantasy. You choose a character and are dropped into the world, to go do stuff and complete and overarching main quest until you reach the end.
>Frontier 1
SaGa greatest hits album. Takes gameplay mechanics from both GB and Romancing to create the ultimate SaGa game of the time. Each protagonist has their own story they follow with different endgames, final bosses, and endings (not the case in Romancing). They're all still set in the same world, so seeing the ways they overlap with each other is fun.

cont.

>>723001497
Sure, why not. I also thought it was a great remake. Only thing that sucked about it was Suit / Full Plate armor being useless. I really don't understand how something so blatant got past their balancing as it's something that smacks you in the face immediately. Overall it's not a huge deal but it is so obvious that it feels jarring they didn't fix it before launching the game.

I've been playing Minstrel song for the retro achivement points, and it's rapidly become one of my favorite jrpgs. can't recommend it enough

>>722997514
>>723002502
>Frontier 2
Probably the closest to a "traditional" JRPG you'll get with SaGa. You play through a series of viginettes over the span of a century following different characters and perspectives throughout one very long conflict. This is the first game in the series to not have long term character building as a big emphasis, but I still think it's a good game.
>Unlimited
This is the controversial one. It came with a tabletop RPG-style guidebook in Japan, since it takes heavy inspiration *from* tabletop games. Move your piece around the board, roll for skill checks, get in battles, solve the dungeon, repeat. Nobody will tell you it's a very intuitive game, but I think it's worth sitting down to try to learn. It's very creative and forward thinking in many ways IMO.
>Minstrel Song
Remake (or really a reimagining) of RS1. RS1 is somewhat notorious for being kind of a rushed game, and many ideas mechanics that became fully fleshed out throughout the 90s were still in a rough draft state in RS1. To me, MS is the fulfillment of the very ambitious vision RS1 didn't quite reach.
>Scarlet Grace
Vita game with a budget of $3, that's why it looks like that. World exploration is pretty condensed compared to previous games, there's not even any dungeons or anything like that, but the open world quest system is still fully intact. The battle system is one of the most fun and creative battle systems I've played in any JRPG.
>Emerald Beyond
The fact that it exists at all is a fucking miracle. It's an iteration on Scarlet Grace while taking a lot of inspiration from the GB trilogy and Frontier 1 with a return to sci-fi and multiple character types/races. My favorite game to come out in a very long time.

Apologies for the walls of text, just happy to see a SaGa thread on here.

>>723003250
I've only played through Ameya Aisling's path, once, and was put off from EB forever. It felt too railroaded to me. The entire time I was waiting for it to open up and let me go explore, and then it ended. Are the other characters any better? I was expecting it to be more like SG but it wasn't. Combat was way better, but the hyper railroaded campaign felt awful to play.

>Game punishes you for playing it (fighting enemies)
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING

>>723003489
Ameya might be the worst possible introduction to EB with no real indication of the what or why behind it. Her story is cut short if you don't fulfill specific conditions surrounding cat collecting. Fwiw, it's game that absolutely intends for you to do repeat playthroughs, so my recommendation would be to play Tsunanori first as a proper introduction, and then go from there how you like.

It's pretty good

>>723003489
nta but Suignas and Diva are longer campaigns with a lot of worlds to visit before the final boss. Ameya's playthrough is short because you have to clear the Witch world with the other characters to extend it to the true endings with the final boss

>>723003489
Emerald Beyond is very railroaded. They made it idiot proof when it comes to progressing through the game.

>>722993718 (OP)
What's the lore behind this Santa outfit? Can I get it in game?

>>723003879
It really isn't, it's the most complex game in the series when it comes to progression by far.
Only thing they did differentely was avoiding dead ends like in most of the previous game

>>722993718 (OP)
Too much missable shit.
>just replay the game bro
I am not going to replay JRPG sorry.

>>723003672
>Game punishes you for playing it
how?

>>723003879
People tend to make this out as a bad thing, yet there are so many different scenarios that can happen in most of the worlds you visit. Plenty are so easy to miss as well if you're playing blindly
People didnt give this game a fair shake at all, even fans of the older games and that is sad.

>>723003672
>Game punishes you for a being a grindy scrub instead of looting all the best gear in it's many dungeons

>>723004204
Romancing SaGa 2 has a hidden mechanic where enemies get stronger the more battles encountered. Good way to deter grinding.

>>723004112
Progression as in knowing where to go immediately. It isn't like Lute's route in which if you know where to go you can get to the final dungeon within 5 minutes, but the game never tells you how to progress so a new player will be plunging themselves blindly into the world trying to find a means to progress the story. The way Emerald Beyond is designed does avoid that for most routes with players being locked into worlds and having green threads to follow to objectives to progress the game.

>>723004313
you get stronger as well. Grinding sucks and many people consider it a waste of time.

>>723004313
SaGa games have Battle Rank. It replaces enemies with new enemies. Not like level scaling Elder Scrolls games.

>>723003250
Appreciate the write up.
been looking at getting into these for a while, along with the Shining series

i wish i could tell when there's gonna be a time skip. So far, that's the only big issue in this game imo

>>723004105
Anyone? I must know before buying this.

>>723004313
To clarify, in the original and remaster Romancing SaGa 2, getting into encounters will slowly increase the enemy/battle rank, even if you run away or win. The remake only increases it when you win.
>>722996048
Fucking HakanaiBlue is attempting to remake the third game instead of just translating it and releasing it. That fucking retard.

>>723004619
It's probably some Christmas advertisement or an event for RE Universe the gacha game.

>>723004598
i mean, the game should tell you if a quest ends with a time skip. I might have missed the tutorial that explains that, but the game doesn't seem to give any hints

>>723003763
Shame since Ameya was the one character I was the most excited about.

>>723004536
No problem, hope you enjoy. Also, Shining the Holy Ark was the game I bought a
Saturn for lmao. It's great, can't speak on the Genesis ones though.
>>723004619
it's from one of the mobile games, RS2R doesn't have any alt costumes or anything like that

>>723004371
You do have the threads that tell you where to go to progress a specific questline but what they don't tell you is what actually happens in any given node for progression, and in all worlds you have multiple threads active at the same time including various unspecified conditions such as loops, the internal progression order of any given quest or other specific in-quest choices so at the end of the day you're still very much proceeding blindly for most of your playthroughs because while some things might be visible now the meat of the game still very much isn't visible.
Something like Frontier might feel more open at first but it's just a surface level impression as it's nowhere as complex, freeform or with much if any player input compared to Emerald Beyond, Lute can risk getting stuck into the last dungeon 5 minutes in but effectively he doesn't really have much meat to his scenario at all, Frontier is also very guilty of having tons of empty dead ends for everyone at nearly all points of the game, you're Blue and you're going to Fascinaturu? Too bad, nothing happens there, enjoy giving your LPs to Gozarus like everyone else, you're anyone but Riki and you're going to Yorkland? Absolutely nothing to do there unless you've started the Tarot sidequest, I don't dislike the old games' progression but sometimes it did filter people for the wrong reasons and Emerald Beyond fixed that as much as I still hate the threads.

>>723005203
I'm not arguing outcomes, just general progression. It's okay to wander around and have those dead ends. I enjoyed being lost and then finding my ground in the Romancing and Frontier 1 games. I know why they did what they did to be more approachable to people that aren't use to getting lost in the world, but it was one of the aspects I appreciated about the series.

Emerald Beyond is still a fun game, it's just that I wish there were certain things that catered to my taste.

>>723003672
>time moves forward
>monsters get stronger
seems logical to me
>>723004313
bosses don't scale so it doesn't deter grinding. also gear research is tied to amount of battles fought. and you need certain level of weapon/magic skill to learn new moves. RS2 is the game where you should fight as many battles as you can while moving forward. otherwise your arsenal will be extremely limited for the battles that matter. the whole "don't grind" stigma applies to maybe two games which are minstrel song (original version event rank is super lenient) and the last remnant. any other saga game you can and should grind as much as you like.

>>723005605
Yeah I can see where you're coming from and I largely feel the same, I just think it's a bit misleading to say Emerald Beyond is very railroaded even if it does give you that impression at first.

>>723003107
Yeah, it's fantastic. Top three video games of all time for me, behind RKA and PoP: SoT.

>>723004992
Dang

>>723003107
Minsaga is one of the few games in the series I hated the more I played it.
Just felt like a bad speedrun through boring dungeons and enemies with very minimal differences between the protags. Too many encounters are also trivialized by just having high defense, even True Saruin to an extent. It made me appreciate all the changes that came with Scarlet Grace more.
And the Aldora/Darque questline was designed in such an awful way if your stats got too high.

>>723004245
based

>>723005653
Of course. You still want to engage in battles and win so you can increase your aptitude and spark new techs. Just don't go out of your way to re-enter a dungeon just to beat up same enemies again. If it's your first visit in a dungeon, get into as many as battle as you can. That's how I do it anyway.

I can't wait for Unlimited Saga remaster. I salivate over playing it portable. Sorry, not interested in a Deck

sequel . . please enix

>>722993718 (OP)
I played the remaster and I thought it was very good

>>723004882
it's kinda of annoying. There are a lot of missable content in this game. There's no indication of when time matters. Sometimes it's ok to sleep while some quests are active, other times sleeping will skip the quest

>>722997082
>original
The remaster filtered me so hard at the start that I uninstalled it out of rage.
>third dungeon (or second if you skip gob nest)
>one of the first chests you can open in it is a fucking mimic that will absolutely slaughter you if you dont go in knowing it's there
I've never seen another game that had mimics put them so damn early. I'm half expecting to walk into a regular town with npcs wandering around, and open one of the area chests only for it to contain a mimic in the remake.

>>723010667
The mimics are there to teach you to not get cocky and run away from fights, there's no rewards at all for beating them and they only really exist in the mansion in Somon.
Frontier has a funnier mimic where there's a chance you get a penultimate final boss spawn and get absolutely robbed just because

>>723011331
I refuse to run from fights because the game has a visible fight counter. The fact you're forced to not win fights ruins my numbers even more.

>>723010667
the mimics are part of the storytelling. kzinssie is a weak runt who has to use all kinds of underhanded tactics to beat anyone, like holing up in a mansion full of monsters guarding every entrace and laying mimics as traps. and he spent all his time mastering an instakill move to cheese anyone who got near to him. the remake kinda ruins this by making him an actual boss instead of a pushover he was in the original.

>>723011457
BR doesn't particularly matter outside of the final boss submechanic which honestly you'll never manage to fully activate without actively going for it because the number of fights you need for it to matter is unrealistically high, there's no shame in running and it's not a bad thing unless you try to turn the game into a boss rush for some reason.
Running away from fights is a good thing and more often than not the best option later on in the game where you have to fight nasty shit like Termite Battlers that can randomly decide to wipe you in the opening round with Stone Rain spam if you're not in Rapid Stream, or things like Chariots which take way too much effort for the rewards they give you.

>>723009871
I think this is what ends up turning a lot of people away from SaGa, but it's also one of the things I think is coolest and most interesting about it. Not being able to do everything in one playthrough is very deliberate and applies to most games in the series. I like having meaningful decision making in what I choose to do in each playthrough.

>>723003848
>pic
AIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE

>>723009871
And that's okay. It's your story. It is also impossible to do all the content in a single playthrough. Different boss forms at different stages of the game, saving a race or getting shadow magic, how you tackle the land ship, and so on.

Part of the fun is making your own experience and scraping by.

>>723004313
>>723004473
>>723004478
>jrpg equivalent of SBMM
lmao pass

>>723013271
It doesn't scale to your characters. If you think battle rank scales to party power then you fundamentally don't comprehend BR.

>>723003829
I respect developers that respect titties. this game ruled.

>>723012701
I think SaGa would do better if marketed to people who play WRPGs and dungeon crawlers as opposed to typical JRPG fans. JRPGs fans are too used to playing games where the progression is just go from point A to point B, setpiece to setpiece, and every challenge can be negated by just grinding.
They casualized the Romancing SaGa 2 remake to bring in new fans and it still got a lot of flak simply because it's open ended and you can miss things. There were reviewers that complained about not knowing where to go even though the game throws quests points and reminders at you every time you step into an area or look at the map. So many JRPG fags are so used to guided experiences that their brain melts the moment a game presents itself with a modicum of choice with the possibility of missing out on things.

>>723015331
Never thought of it that way before but I think I agree. FF2 is unironically the closest point of reference most jrpg fans have to wrpgs in my experience, not even fucking Skyrim (which has an action based leveling system anyways) or anything way more mainstream than that.

I've always thought of SaGa as a fusion of JRPG and WRPG stylings, which I think is ts strength, but I find it hard to disagree that sticking to JRPG labels and conventions are the biggest thing holding it back. Emerald Beyond is one of the most creatively forward thinking games I've ever played, genuinely nothing like it beforehand and I think it's a great direction if it can be refined.

>>723015331
>here were reviewers that complained about not knowing where to go
the remake kinda fumbles on few parts of the game by making few of the QoL changes take precedence in how the game functions. for example in the original you didn't have markers above townsfolk indicating you have to talk to these people to advance the plot, you just had to talk to everyone until you figured shit out. I remember getting stuck in the remake because in the steppes I talked to everyone marked and nothing happened but apparently there was one tent I hadnt entered that had the last guy in but he doesnt show up on the map. I had no such issues in the original years ago because you just go through every guy instead of the guys marked on map.

>>723015331
The problem with SaGa is that it's too western for JRPG fans but not western enough for WRPG fans, it stands in a very awkward inbetween where it only appeals to hardcore, unbiased RPG fans who are a rather small minority in the market.
For the average JRPG fan SaGa's too weird, "obtuse" and lacking in cinematic qualities and sex appeal to grab their attention, which is why the RS2 remake was somewhat well received since they reworked it to become as generic and normalfag friendly as possible with very little of the original game and intent remaining.
On the other hand for the average WRPG fan SaGa's too japanese, it lacks an indepth character creator with a CHARNAME main character, it doesn't really follow the perceived D&D's philosophy of roleplaying that shaped the CRPG market where NPCs exist to infodump wiki pages on you and fellate CHARNAME to oblivion, it lacks the romance options, the formula of the isometric RPG genre that so many worship is not there since it's still "4 niggas in a row" with battle transitions.
It's an awkward middle ground where it's really neither fish nor fowl and coupled with Square sabotaging it to not have it establish a niche since the very beginning you have a cult franchise that despite its qualities and influence on the genre struggles in finding its already limited intended audience.

>>723016492
Yeah. I do like WRPGs, but I really don't enjoy text dumps when it isn't pertinent to what I want to do and is often just flowery to try to immerse someone into the world, but I doubt most common folk would talk to a stranger like that.

I enjoyed Baldur's Gate when it was mostly exploring the wilderness and see what's out there. The game halted for me when I actually got into the city itself and had to run around talking to everyone. Games like Fallout and Shadowrun (Genesis) I enjoyed more since there's less NPCs thus easier to get to the point and allow me to do my own thing.

I enjoy JRPGs a lot as well, as long as there is something interesting going on. Even found DQI and II interesting due to how the world unfolds and how new items and information allows you to access new areas. Or a game like Mana Khemia with its item synthesis imbuing items with additional attributes and a time line battle system to hopefully constantly stagger enemies into not acting in battle.

>>723015331
People who play most JRPGs want visual novels that trick them into thinking they are playing a game. People who play most WRPGs want the same thing but with choices and character creation. People who want dungeon crawlers or RPGs focused on the gameplay are a small minority.

>>723017698
It's what I really enjoy about SaGa. It isn't about developing the characters, but your impact on the world you are in.

bump

>>723003848
What game

>>723021994
use context clues, I believe in you