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Oh, Saga Frontier. I remember I had a PlayStation disc back in the day that had a bunch of preview videos for Square games. For some reason, the trailer for Saga Frontier really got me excited and hyped for the game. A few years later, I finally got my hands on the game, started as the robot (who's name I can't remember for the life of me), played for a little while, and then...got completely stuck. So I restarted as another character...and ended up completely stuck. Fast forward to a few days later, and I had given up on the game. The technical stuff went completely over my head at the time, and when I wasn't getting steamrolled by enemies I was lost in the pure sandboxyness that some of the character's stories had. Eager to see how this LP goes and to find out what I missed out on!
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Sep 19, 2013 22:56
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God, this game. I think at various points through my life, members of my family have played and beaten all but two quests, and not once have I sat down and had the time to take the long road and complete them all. Even with a plan to do so. I'm not sure if I'll say "this ends today" or not, but I'll be eagerly watching, and seeing just what else has been found out since the last one. This has been just an enormous part of my youth, after all.
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Sep 19, 2013 23:56
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I've always enjoyed this game, myself. I've never actually *beaten* any of the stories, but I've gotten to the final battles for all of them except Riki's, and that one was close. I'm also enjoying the system mechanics info as well, so thank you for that. Trying to spoil as little as possible, but when you get to Blue's quest, are you going to be taking votes for which schools to go for?
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Sep 21, 2013 01:43
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Derek Barona posted:I've always enjoyed this game, myself. I've never actually *beaten* any of the stories, but I've gotten to the final battles for all of them except Riki's, and that one was close. I'm also enjoying the system mechanics info as well, so thank you for that. Probably not unfortunately, I'm trying to pace out the sidequests over the quests so that the less story intensive quests still have some new things to show off. Unfortunately, this doesn't leave a whole lot of room for those types of votes.
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Sep 21, 2013 01:50
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There's only one choice worth voting for in Blue's story anyway. Two choices are obvious because that's the best way to show off a ridonkulous bug as well as a significantly less ridonkulous bug, and the rest are either inaccessible or not a choice to begin with. SO!
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Sep 21, 2013 02:23
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RabidWeasel posted:The dialogue in this game is so weird
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Sep 21, 2013 04:21
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Today we'll be running a few errands and doing a bit of grinding. The first thing we have to do is re-recruit some of our old party members because they got kicked out for some reason.  Liza's right there so we'll start with her.  Are you OK? Yeah, I am OK. By the way, what's Annie like?She looks very open and easy going. But actually she's the complete opposite. She grew up in a very tough neighborhood. So, she knows how to take care of herself. She's hard working and serious about her work, but never opens up to anyone. You probably understand her better because you're both the same age. You're really kind, Liza.Me, kind? Everyone tells me I'm too bitchy. I don't know what the others say, I know you're kind. Would you like to hang out together until the next mission?Sure. Anyhow Roufas told me to watch your back.  Annie's outside the cafe, and this is where you can find Annie in most other quests. Annie is actually one of the few characters who can be recruited in any quest.  The mission is completed. Did Roufas say something to you?No, he said I am free till the next mission. Would you like to hang out with me until the next mission?OK, maybe we can go to the mall or something. The entrance to the right leads to the Koorong Airport. You'll be visiting it a lot as the Koorong airport is the only path to about half of the regions in the game.   Here's the list of regions you can access from Koorong. First we'll be taking a visit to scrap to pick up a few more characters. To the New Land  Every time you depart from the air port you get this little transitional screen of a ship flying through space. There are actually a decent variety of ships that can show up depending on where you're going. Sunset Town   So this is Scrap, they've got a bit of a western style going on that's kind of neat. Our destination is the bar with the blueish sign near the middle of the screen. Let's Swing   Depending on the quest you can pick up anywhere from 2-5 characters in the scrap pub. As of right now we can pick up three of them and can pick up a fourth if we were in the middle of a certain quest.  Hey my name is Lute. (Lute got Emelia to talk about herself.)  Lute is pretty much the most generic character in the game. You can put him in almost any team, but he'll very rarely be the strongest contributor.  The lady with the purple hair is Mei-Ling, she'll be filling in as our fifth character temporarily until we get a few more characters from the plot. The guy with the green hair is Riki. He's a monster, and we'll cover those in a later quest. The other characters in the bottom right are T260G and Gen. Unfortunately they won't join us right now.  You look real familiar. Where do I know you from?Hm...I don't think we've ever met. Oh, I know!! You're the super-model I see in magazines. What are you doing here? (Emelia explained very quickly) Really? That's horrible, I can help you beat Joker.  Hi, I'm Riki.You're so cute. Come with us. Unfortunately if you try to talk to T2G0G or Gen you get the following. (I'm not good with machines.) Hey lady wanna drink with me?  After we fill out the party we head back to the Scrap port. Every time you leave this lady will charge you 100 credits. This is the only airport that charges money, and it's quite irritating. It ensures that Scrap is a region you visit once and never again. (Unless you want to abuse a certain glitch that we'll cover when we have more characters who can benefit from it)   At Koorong we transfer over to Shrike to pick up our last character and do some grinding.  After Koorong, Shrike is one of the regions where you'll probably spend most of your time. It has three dungeons with varying degrees of difficulty and a couple characters to pick up. We'll be making a quick stop in Mu's Tomb first. Ancient Tomb of Mu    Roufas is chilling inside of Mu's tomb. Between starting you off in Despair and hiding Roufas out in Mu's tomb the game really, really wants us to start the Rune quest, but gently caress that it can wait.  Weirdo? Whatever...Let's go find the Rune. With Roufas, we now have a decently varied team to start out with. Emelia will start training up in guns, Annie and Roufas in swords, Liza in fists, and Mei Ling with magic. Alone   And what better way to start out then with the Bio Research Lab. The Bio Research Lab is a fairly notorious area for grinding in Saga Frontier as it's one of the areas with a +2 Encouter Rank modifier.  The first thing we do is save. With a full team and a bit more stats we should fair much better than trying to fight the mechs in Despair, but we don't want to press our luck.  Our first fight is against a Amorpilla and his buddies. It goes fairly uneventfully until this happens...     Locomotion G is one of my favorite fighting techs just because of how brutal it is. Liza basically suplexes the enemy back and forth like 7 times. The damage is also pretty good for this point of the game.    We also get our first taste of magic while wandering around. Mei Ling comes equipped with the basic Light magic spells. The two basic spells are fairly self explanatory. Sun Ray is your basic damage spell and Starlight heal, your basic healing spell. Light magic is one of the better magic schools in the game. It gives you a little bit of everything as well as one of the best all purpose damage spells in the game. It's also worth mentioning that any healing skill in this game functions as revival. You can cast Starlight Heal on an unconscious ally and they'll pop right back up. This is of course balanced out by the LP mechanic which puts a hard limit on the amount of times you can revive a character.   I didn't get a good shot of it earlier, but all the enemies in the Bio Research Lab start as these scientists and then transform into enemies once you bump into them. The backgrouds to the fights are also pretty cool. You never have to go to the Bio Lab for any of the main storylines, but it's still a pretty cool place to wander around. It's very atmospheric.  I didn't get screenshots of all of the sparks because most of them aren't too interesting, but Roufas picks up Swallow Swing, Double Slash, and Stun Slash, and Annie picks up Hard slash. Unfortunately, Emelia kept getting killed, and she's probably the one who needed to raise her stats the most. Mei Ling runs out of JP to revive her so we decide to book it out of there.    We head over to the Street area of Shrike. There's not much else to do here but visit the inn which is free! It's a nice bonus that just solidifies Shrike as one of best regions for leveling.  So here's our stats at the end of the update. As you can see, Emelia's fallen behind, but I think she'll catch up once we're not fighting really tough enemeis. Next time we'll continue with the main quest and we'll get to see what makes Emelia special when she's the main character!
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Sep 21, 2013 20:01
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Saga Frontier is still one of my favorite totally underrated games of all time. I don't care if half the storyline (including an entire main character arc) got slashed during development or that the battle system can be an unbalanced mess (as the thread title mentions), I love it so hard. I just kind of wish Mystics didn't get screwed over so much. They're not horrible characters, per se, but pretty much everything they can do, a human can do better. Which is a shame because in terms of personality the mystics tend to be badasses.
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Sep 22, 2013 06:36
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dude789 posted:Probably not unfortunately, I'm trying to pace out the sidequests over the quests so that the less story intensive quests still have some new things to show off. Unfortunately, this doesn't leave a whole lot of room for those types of votes. Alright. Yeah, Blue's quest is basically second place on the sidequest-a-thon list behind Lute, so I can see how you'd want to have that be paced out somewhere better along the way.
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Sep 22, 2013 06:52
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God how did I miss this LP for so long? SaGa Frontier is one of my absolute favorite games, and as I am want to do have some irrelevant details: I don't believe the Spotlights in Despair do anything but I'd have to go back and check. I think I remember running through all of them for fun when I was a kid because I didn't quite get what they were supposed to represent. Also the boss there is much weaker for Emilia than for anyone else for obvious reasons, it's also much smaller for her. Koorong is a mistranslation, it should actually be Kowloon as a reference to the former and infamous Walled City in Hong Kong. This is why it's a dimly lit and disrepaired Urban sprawl and a sort of neutral zone in the game. Dude789 hasn't mentioned it yet I think but Koorong is the only port that travels to certain locations, but thankfully those tend to be places you don't need to go very often. The Lady at the port in Scrap will actually let you out if you have under 100 Credits, you won't be fined at all though you'll have to say you'll pay her anyways. While you can make a good party member out of any monster I always went with the monster who starts with Supersonic because as has been pointed out Sonic skills are nuts. And I like he/she/it starts as a Tidi. There are definitely better Monster skills but Supersonic and the thread title technique of Scream can tear stuff up until you get the real heavy-weight battle cleaners.
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Sep 22, 2013 08:25
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Lute was always in my party, because I picked up early on that anyone could recruit him. So I looked up character-specific Gameshark codes and made sure he always had a HyperionBazooka, RobotSuit, and some other stuff.  ...I was a horrible cheater back in the PS1 days. 
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Sep 22, 2013 09:11
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Ah, yes. The bio lab. I remember that being grind central for my runs.
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Sep 22, 2013 09:28
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I forgot to mention this before, but since you went to the Bio Lab I wanna throw it out there that the track that plays in it is easily in my top three for favorite song in the game. It's amazingly fitting for that particular dungeon, and I'm really sad the amount of cutting during development relegated the Bio Lab in general down to an optional area where some clearly gnarly stuff has been going on.
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Sep 22, 2013 15:23
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I love the poo poo outta this game. It just oozes with charm for me. I've always loved the sprite work and seeing the art book just solidifies everything for me. I read the last LP and I'm looking forward to reading this one.
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Sep 22, 2013 15:41
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This game was so completely and utterly unforgiving. It was always amusing to me how you could pick just the slightly wrong path and end up horribly murdering yourself. Or alternatively, accidentally grind into making the next story fights pathetically easy (particularly if you happened to find certain shops by random exploration). I'm fairly confident that a lot of the weapon/fist special attacks in this game directly inspired later SQEnix games' special ability animations.
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Sep 22, 2013 16:02
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I'm not really a fan of Light Magic. Even though there are some useful spells in that school, I find it pretty basic and boring compared to the other schools.
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Sep 23, 2013 02:21
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Thwack! posted:I'm not really a fan of Light Magic. Even though there are some useful spells in that school, I find it pretty basic and boring compared to the other schools. Well Light Magic is all about offense, which is slightly problematic because Magic's true value tends to be support. Nonetheless Starlight Heal and the Advanced support spell in the school are both really nice to have and the attack spells actually are pretty nice. Also Light Magic is also better than its opposing school except for one prominent exception.
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Sep 23, 2013 03:00
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Omnicrom posted:Well Light Magic is all about offense, which is slightly problematic because Magic's true value tends to be support. Nonetheless Starlight Heal and the Advanced support spell in the school are both really nice to have and the attack spells actually are pretty nice. Also Light Magic is also better than its opposing school except for one prominent exception. The problem is that that exception is one of the single best spells most otherwise-physical-focused characters could ever ask for, making its opposition kind of the default choice for anyone that's not going to be slinging spells all day everyday.
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Sep 23, 2013 03:12
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dude789 posted:
This is what tripped me up and made me never play this game. I started out as Blue I think (because I was a teenager and omg anime hair,  ) and as far as I remember I had absolutely no sense of where I was supposed to go or that I could recruit random people. After stumbling across three or four dungeons by myself and immediately getting murdered I turned it off for good. I'm excited to see what I missed out on!
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Sep 23, 2013 03:57
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Gameplay Update 2: Sparking As discussed earlier, Sparking is the main method humans use to learn new skills. There are two different methods to spark a skill or spell, in battle or after battle. Sword and Fist skills are learned in the middle of battle, and Magic and Gun skills are learned after. Today we'll be covering both of those methods. Sword and Fist techniques: First of all, to learn a sword or fist skill you must have an open slot in your skill list. If you have all 8 slots filled, you cannot spark a new one. A sword or fist technique can be sparked anytime that the character uses a Sword or Fist skill. Every skill has a list of potential skills that it can spark and a difficulty value assigned to these skills. If you're looking them up, lower values are better and it can be easier to spark a certain skill with some attacks than others. Fortunately this is usually fairly intuitive. For example the high level sword skill Triple Thrust is easier to learn when using Thrust (Difficulty Value 29) than it is to learn with a regular attack (Difficulty Value 33). In fact, some skills can't be learned from certain attacks at all. For example, when Liza sparked LocomotionG in the last update she was using AirThrow. If she were using a basic punch attack, she would not have been able to learn LocomotionG. Once you have the difficulty value, that is compared to the learning rate of the enemy in a formula of (Difficulty Value + 10) - Learning Rate of the target enemy. If it falls between 0-19 you have a chance of learning an attack with lower numbers once again being better. The result number is then matched up with a given value in a table and a random number between 0-255 is rolled. If the random number is less than the value generated from the table you spark the technique! If you're interested, the table can be found in Zaraktheus's mechanics guide which I linked in the last gameplay update under the section on Sparking explanations. So, going back to our LocomotionG example, Liza was targeting an Iron Hopper with a learning rate of 8 and learning LocomotionG from Air Throw has a difficulty of 17. This gives us a final value of (17 + 10) - 8 = 19 which when mapped to the table gives us a final value of 1. We were actually exceptionally lucky! Since we only had a value of 1 we must have rolled a 0 on the random number check and got a fairly powerful ability for this point in the game. We only had a .4% chance to learn the ability (it was actually a tiny bit lower than that because we also failed any previous ability checks but I digress). For reference, the highest learning value against easily encounter-able enemies is 36. If Liza were fighting one of those the formula would be (17 + 10) - 36 = -9 which gets rounded up to 0. There the value would be mapped to 20 and she would have a ~8% chance of Sparking Locomotion G each time she uses Air Throw. There are however two important caveats to sparking. The first is weapon or spell mastery. When a character is equipped with 6 or more skills which take up WP or JP and no skills which take up the other. (So 6 spells and 0 fist, sword or gun techniques for example). They will get achieve weapon or spell mastery which is indicated by a crown in their skill status menu. This has the effect of lowering WP or JP costs of all skills by 1 and essentially doubles the chance to learn the skill. For example if Liza had weapon mastery when trying to learn Locomotion G from an enemy with a learning value of 36 she would have a final mapped value of 40 instead of 20 giving us a ~16% chance of learning the skill which ends up being the highest possible chance to learn a skill. The second caveat is talent. Every human has a list of fist and sword skills that they have a talent in. All of this mapping and calculating only matters if a character has a talent for a given skill. If they don't they will only have a .4% chance to learn the skill regardless of the difference between difficulty and learning rate (You still have to have a final value ((DifficultyValue+10)-LearningValue) < 20. You can't luck out and get an endgame skill off a .4% chance). You can see why talent can be really important when determining a human characters overall worth! It's also why some posters were pointing out that I was quite lucky when Annie sparked Swallow Swing against the boss of Despair as she doesn't have the talent for the ability. Spell and Gun sparking: Spell and gun sparking works pretty similar to sword and fist sparking but there are some key differences. -You don't have to have an empty ability slot to learn a Gun Skill or Spell -You can only learn magic new magic if you have the gift for it which is obtained by doing various sidequests. -You can only spells from the same school as the magic you're using. No learning Rune spells if you only used Light Magic in the fight or vice versa. -The difficulty values tend to be a bit lower -You can only learn one spell or gun skill per battle -The learning rate comes from the main monster of the fight (the one who's from the family represented by the sprite on the map) rather than target -After acquiring the mapped value, the value is multiplied by Intelligence/64 before being compared to the random number making it more difficult to learn magic and gun skills early, and much easier later once your stats get high. -The random value is rolled between 0 and 99 rather than 0 and 256, upping the maximum probability you can learn a certain skill to 40% instead of 16%. This is probably to counteract the fact that you only get one chance to learn a skill per battle. Certain Human characters also get a "bonus" to their magic and gun learning rate which is represented by a 0-8 number which is added to the monster learning rate before it is subtracted from the (difficulty rate +10) value. This can make characters like Rouge or Mei-Ling who have a bonus of 8 and 6 respectively able to learn high level magic or gun skills quite a bit earlier than they would otherwise. Mystics learn magic using the same pattern that humans do. Unfortunately, Mystics are only given 4 spell slots so they cannot get Magical Mastery to boost the learn rates and all Mystics have a magic bonus value of 0. This might seem insulting since Mystics are sort of seen as the "magic casting race" but the way that Mystics gain stats makes it much easier for them to focus on intelligence and bump that stat up to increase the intelligence multiplier.
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Sep 25, 2013 01:22
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Really wish I had known about the talents when I first played this game. How many hours have I spent in SaGa games just trying to spark a certain skill?
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Sep 25, 2013 02:29
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Funny story about the gun/magic learning bit? Emelia is heavily hinted at being talented with guns, given that she starts with guns and gun skills when you recruit her in other chapters, but she's actually one of the few people that gets no bonus to learning guns or magic, meaning that while she IS good at using guns, she has a hell of a time learning their skills. I can't figure out if this was an error or just Square being sneaky dicks, but considering it's Square, I'd say... well, OK, even odds either way.
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Sep 25, 2013 04:56
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Bufuman posted:Funny story about the gun/magic learning bit? Emelia is heavily hinted at being talented with guns, given that she starts with guns and gun skills when you recruit her in other chapters, but she's actually one of the few people that gets no bonus to learning guns or magic, meaning that while she IS good at using guns, she has a hell of a time learning their skills. I can't figure out if this was an error or just Square being sneaky dicks, but considering it's Square, I'd say... well, OK, even odds either way. Yeah I got suckered into making Emelia use guns the first time I played her scenario. Afterwards, I realized what her scenario exclusive 'ability' did, well, I abused the gently caress out of that. Otherwise I don't recruit Emelia at all.
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Sep 25, 2013 05:15
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Emelia is actually the character I use the most often. She's easy to recruit and she has decent starting stats and a talent list that makes her good at almost everything. She doesn't have a talent bonus for guns, but as I mentioned in the first gameplay update, learning gun and magic techniques is much less random and a bit of patience and fighting in high level areas will be sure to get those last few skills. While she might not be good at learning gun skills and magic, as Bufuman pointed out, she's quite good at using them due to her high starting Will stat and her bonus to Will growth. I usually end up making her a sword user though in other quests.
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Sep 25, 2013 12:47
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One of the ironic things I've always noticed about this game is the fact that, despite this extremely complicated and fairly well-designed system made to encourage customizing your party members and thinking up various ways to use them in every playthrough, things like the sparking talent bonuses makes it so that there are a LOT of people you will find and pretty much only use for one set role in the party (swordfighter, martial artist, mage of death, etc) because they're so naturally skewed towards those talents that it almost makes you feel genuinely stupid to try making them do something different, no matter what the game says about being able to. I tried making Gen into a mage once, just to see if I could. It didn't go very well.
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Sep 25, 2013 23:32
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Man I love how this game mixes kitchen sink realism and totally surreal poo poo indiscriminately.
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Sep 26, 2013 02:04
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swamp waste posted:Man I love how this game mixes kitchen sink realism and totally surreal poo poo indiscriminately. It's basically the logical extension of the human/mutant/mech/monster multiracial makeup in the Final Fantasy Legend series from the Game Boy, which were developed as SaGa games in Japan but rebranded into Final Fantasy because IV-J/II-US and VI-J/III-US were selling well. It even carries over the vaguely schizoid world design of having vaguely medieval areas next to high technology or Wild West, only connected by travel agencies instead of giant tower/magic beanstalk/time-traveling stealth bomber.
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Sep 29, 2013 19:35
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It's not just the areas, but the people as well. It isn't immediately obvious just from starting up, but one of my favorite parts comes from the fact that most of the characters each have their own unique abilities or gimmicks that they bring to the table. T260G and Riki are the most obvious, being a Mech and a Monster respectively, but each of the humans have something that make their quests individually special from the others as well.
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Sep 30, 2013 04:24
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I remember picking this up recently and doing Riki's scenario early since I wanted to get the most painful one out of the way. Riki's scenario also has one of the biggest dick moves this game has to offer. A question, though, will you be showing off/exploiting the junk shop glitch in Scrap?
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Sep 30, 2013 04:43
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Dugan Nash posted:I remember picking this up recently and doing Riki's scenario early since I wanted to get the most painful one out of the way. Riki's scenario also has one of the biggest dick moves this game has to offer. A question, though, will you be showing off/exploiting the junk shop glitch in Scrap? Yeah probably in either Riki or T260's quest. Should have an update out sometime tomorrow.
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Sep 30, 2013 04:59
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Dugan Nash posted:Riki's scenario also has one of the biggest dick moves this game has to offer. [/spoiler] Riki's scenario is the meanest all around. It starts difficult, gets worse, has a couple dick moves within it if I am remembering correctly, and then pulls a couple massive dick moves at the end in a sort of wicked one-two groin-punch. It's awful.
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Sep 30, 2013 15:35
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To put it bluntly, I would say that parts of Riki's scenario are great examples of bad game design.
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Sep 30, 2013 16:48
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Raitzeno posted:Riki's scenario is the meanest all around. It starts difficult, gets worse, has a couple dick moves within it if I am remembering correctly, and then pulls a couple massive dick moves at the end in a sort of wicked one-two groin-punch. It's awful. Well, I know which scenario I'm starting with when I eventually re-start my replay of the game again. Nothing like starting with the worst and moving on to better things.
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Sep 30, 2013 17:21
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Hooray, a Saga Frontier thread! This is one of my favorite PSX era games, and I'm stoked to see it LP'd. Yes. As an anecdote, I tried Riki's quest first, and I didn't have a memory card. Let me tell you, MagmaSlimes can go straight back to hell. Alkarl fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Sep 30, 2013 |
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Sep 30, 2013 17:37
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Kliff posted:Well, I know which scenario I'm starting with when I eventually re-start my replay of the game again. Nothing like starting with the worst and moving on to better things. Good luck since Riki gets garbage sidekicks and monsters are generally subpar at best. Oh, and sidestep the biggest dick move this game has by never using Mei-ling in your bread-winner party. EVER. Just trust me on this one.
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Sep 30, 2013 18:42
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Before we leave Shrike we have one more quick thing to show off.   This is the Shrike Bookstore by bumbling around we can find three books offering a bit of background information on some of the areas of interest in Shrike. The lady at the desk will give you some tips on where to find the books.  King Mu began his conquest with a vision of unifying the entire region. By the end of the 4th century, most of Shrike was under his rule...his kingdom was at its height in the late 5th century. King Sei advanced to the nearby region, but due to his unexpected death, his kingdom was split among his sons and ruined.Note 1) King Sei's campaign was also known as the "Legend of the Rings". There are many poems about rings in "1000-Day Journey", a book which suggests the actual existence of the rings. King Mu said: "Swear your allegiance to me, and you shall live." To which the dragon answered: "I'll be loyal to your majesty as long as I live." King Sei first took the crystal ball, then the sword and finally, he stood in front of the mirror. The princess continues to mourn even after the burial. 3 years later, she decided to go see him. Taking the ball, the sword and mirror, she placed them on the altar. Suddenly, she saw a light and a secret passage opened before her. Tomb of King Mu: Hours 10:00-5:00: Located at the bottom left corner of the map. Known as the "Shrine of Victory", it's very popular with athletes and businessmen. King Mu's bedroom supposedly contains a giant stone with the inscription of Victory. No one who has entered deep inside has ever returned. Those who want to live a long life should stay out. Tomb of King Sei: Not open to the public. Location: Upper right corner of the map. This ancient tomb remains unexplored to this day and there are no plans to open it. Rumor has it that theives who enter it will die in 7 days from King Sei's curse. Many have seen spirits of ghosts in the area. A hot spot for occult fans. These are all well and good, but there's also a little easter egg hidden between the two shelves in the middle.   It's a prono mag. How classy. Each of the characters has a different reaction to it. Emelia, being an experienced member of the modeling industry points out how ugly the girl is.  With that done we head back to Koorong to advance the plot. Pictured above is the boar Thinky Whale mentioned who loves talking about his "luxurious" fur. We then go back to the Gradius headquarters and talk to Roufas.  Yes, right here. I'll go. Emelia. This is quite a surprise.Well it's a dance right? I'd be perfect.Hmmmm...maybe this will work. All right you go with Liza. What about Annie?I have another job for her.All right. Emelia, don't forget your mask. You won't be able to participate in the contest without one. Don't worry I won't!! Maybe I'll meet a masked prince! Oh Emelia, so gullible and naive. Shingrow  So this is Shingrow. They have a pretty neat visual style going on. I believe this art is also the one used in the banner image in the OP.  Emelia, put this on. No thanks, I bought my own dress. Just put this on.  So as Liza just stated this is a martial arts tournament and Gradius decided that tiny frail Emelia was the best choice to enter it rather than Liza, one of the best martial artists in the game. A martial arts tournament? Then this isn't a ball? What are you talking about? Didn't you know Shingrow Palace sponsors a Masked Martial Arts Tournament every year?You guys tricked me again!You're the one who volunteered. Now hurry up. You actually have to get in line to talk to this guy. It won't let you cut.   Pink Tiger. Please proceed to the next room. I think it's a neat touch that Emelia's dialogue font changes once she changes into her costume. It's not just a cosmetic change either. Emelia's big benefit when she's the main character is her costumes. By wearing a costume she can substitute her talent list for someone else's. The Pink Tiger outfit gives her Liza's talent list so despite looking incredibly stupid, it's worth it because Liza's talent list is one of the best in the game. Battle 2   Emelia demonstrates this almost immediately by sparking Rolling Cradle against this swordsman. The game is actually pretty consistent about the masked tournament. All the enemies you encounter are wearing masks. Sadly this is the only one we'll see.  Yeah. The new talent list isn't enough to save Emelia from her hideous starting stats.  The king and queen of Shingrow give us praise despite our dismal performance as Joker zips past behind them.  We meet up with Annie and Roufas in the lobby of the palace and with the team all together we enter an exciting chase sequence of us getting lost in the palace.    The castle highlights one of the biggest problems with Saga Frontier. The backgrounds look nice in screenshots but it can be really hard to see entrances and exits when playing it on an actual console.   You'll look so much better with a little bit of a tan.Another problem is that some of the objects you can interact with don't exactly jump out of the screen. The reddish box is actually a chest containing a sanctuary stone, an item that functions like a tent in Final Fantasy games. They're actually pretty rare here because you can use them almost anywhere.   Aren't you hot in that thing? Where is joker? Who invited that guy?The locals don't have the most interesting things to say but the queen will fully heal your party if you talk to her.   Every so often you'll see Joker leaving a room as a bit of an indicator of where to go. If you follow him, a couple of Yellow Fighters fall down from the ceiling. To proceed forward you need to examine the red vase which opens up the staircase under the floor. God how I'd love some of that fresh fruit! I wonder if there's a switch to move the floor.  We could have reached this room by heading right at the lobby, but there's a gap in the floor which prevents us from proceeding unless we go around. There's a switch where Emelia is standing that raises the floor and allows us to grab the treasure, a Ceramic Sword. It also unites the man who wants fruit with the lady with the fruit basket just bellow.  Heading right even furthur leads us to this area where more yellow fighters try to catch us, but we easily avoid them.  Uh-oh. That sprite in the middle is a giant type enemy. They're usually extremely tough enemy types you only find towards the end of the game. This could be tough.  Didn't you know this is a restricted area? Did you see a masked man?Yeah I saw him.Where did he go?I'm not telling you. In fact, he told me to get rid of you. Or not. The boss of this area is a Goblin and he's extremely easy. He hits about as hard as the yellow fighters and has a little more health. The only danger in this fight is if they manage to combo someone.     This fight's pretty easy, but I get the chance to show off Rolling Cradle. Emelia's strength is still really bad so the damage is unimpressive but it's interesting looking. Also notice the different camera angles. The camera in Saga Frontier is dynamic during battles and will rotate and ban around as characters perform attacks. It works surprisingly well with the sprites and the combination of 2-D and 3-D reminds me somewhat of Dangan Ronpa.   A few turns later and we win the fight handily. We're treated to another concept art piece immediately after the end of the fight. The game then dumps us rather unceremoniously back in the Gradius HQ and that is where we will pick up next update. See you then!
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Sep 30, 2013 22:46
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Any RPG that lets you have a female lucha wrestler wearing a pink tiger mask in your party is a good one.
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Sep 30, 2013 23:27
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Thwack! posted:To put it bluntly, I would say that parts of Riki's scenario are great examples of bad game design.
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Oct 1, 2013 03:55
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Raitzeno posted:Riki's scenario is the meanest all around. It starts difficult, gets worse, has a couple dick moves within it if I am remembering correctly, and then pulls a couple massive dick moves at the end in a sort of wicked one-two groin-punch. It's awful. A one-two punch you say? that's like a combo... a... combo... combo. combo! 
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Oct 1, 2013 03:58
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Yesssss! Pink Tiger Emelia is the only costume you need if you want to wreck every boss in this scenario. Basically, having two Lizas is just too good.Shitenshi posted:Asellus would be in that category too, but waltzing around waiting for the next boss to ambush you can get old pretty quickly. Yeah, that can be annoying if you nonchalantly go to your aunt's house in Shrike with only a single character in your party only to get massacred. It can also be a pain to have a boss fight while grinding or simply traversing through an area under'leveled'. Despite that, Asellus' scenario is probably my favourite one next to Red's and I am happy dude789 is doing her scenario last. Since you gotta leave the best for last after all 
Thwack! fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 04:11
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