Jarpig pride worldwide (Let's talk about JRPGs)

[Sima Tuna]

Gen 4 is my favorite for poggermins. Battles are kinda slow-paced but there's actual postgame shit to do and some semblance of challenge.

[Licorice]

Finished Valkyrie Profile

An unreasonably long and unskippable intro (Almost 45 minutes, interrupted by short sequences where you can move your character a screen or two, and a combat encounter) leads into the main "game loop", which is do "spiritual concentration" to reveal where the next character recruitment vignette takes place, or a dungeon, then proceed to recruit the character or clear the dungeon, then repeat. Doing these things advances game time, or you can just advance it from the menu. At fixed intervals of game time, your "performance" as a Valkyrie is "evaluated", which determines how much money (called "materialize points") and items you are rewarded. There are no shops, you can simply buy items from the menu at save points or in the world map, or craft them at any time. Sacrificing recruited characters makes the Asgard gods happy, as does sacrificing dungeon end rewards, and failing to do either makes them upset. Making them too upset means you get the bad ending "C" where one of the gods will murder you, otherwise you get one of the two other endings depending on something called a "seal value" which you can either ignore (and get the default ending "B"), or manage carefully and get the "A" ending.

The game has solid foundations with regards to challenge. Firstly, the experience pool is strictly limited, save for an oversight in one room in one dungeon in chapter 5, which allows enemies to respawn without advancing game time (re-entering dungeons respawns enemies, but it's sound as it also advances game time). Secondly, good performance in combat requires understanding your party, your equipment items, spells, and enemy, as well as execution. Combat is essentially a fighting game inspired (very obvious when you fight the vampire "Brahms") combo execution mini-game.

Despite these solid foundations, you will easily overlevel even on "normal" difficulty (it's even easier to overlevel on "hard") by just fighting any enemy you come across even if you bee-line to the boss. The standard solution to this for challenge oriented JRPG players is to simply run from combat encounters. The developers included that option too, but thankfully went one step further and not only made all enemies visible, so you can traverse around them in the dungeons, but gave you a means of freezing them in place, making it even easier to avoid them.

There is a bonus dungeon at the end of the game, called the "Seraphic Gate" which I have not yet cleared, which gives you access to all the characters you recruited, even the ones you sacrificed, plus a few others. This seems like a fun sandbox, and I kind of want to clear the game again with a low level party to make the most out of it.

Ironically, the most challenge is probably found in the "easy" difficulty, as you have fewer characters to recruit (and therefore sacrifice), fewer time periods between chapters, and fewer dungeons to clear. I already want to try a bee-line to boss, avoid all enemies, low evaluation run on easy to create a good challenge save for the Seraphic Gate, likewise for hard, but to have more characters to play with.

On the other hand, I don't have any strong desire to do the dance required for ending A again, as it doesn't really affect your overall strategy in tackling dungeons, but rather just restricts the order in which you can visit some places (including one dungeon I guess), depending on how many characters you are sacrificing, the trick being to take advantage of the fact the seal value caps at 100. Indeed, the ending A end game dungeon might even be easier than the ending B one.

My biggest complaint about the game is that there is no story sequence or vignette skip feature. For a game which otherwise gives you the tools to skip ahead to the (player determined) challenge, this is a huge oversight. Fixed in the sequel, AFAIK, although I have never played it. I suppose at the time this game was created, developers didn't have much confidence that RPG (derived) gameplay could be entertaining by itself, as opposed to a vehicle for delivering a story, which is the main event.

The pixel and character art is gorgeous, being the works of brothers You and Kou Yoshinari. There is a slight mismatch in their styles, and you can easily tell which artist drew which character, with my own preference being Kou's drawings. Backgrounds are pre-rendered 3D in parallax layers with mismatched perspective, yielding a paper diorama feel. I quite like it. The music is great, it's very JPC action RPG sounding, and there's a definite influence from that era when it comes to dungeon traversal as well. I played with the standard US voices, as I was not aware there was an undub patch, but they were surprisingly OK given the writing, with the exception that some of the battle voice samples were poorly mixed. Writing is not great, and takes itself too seriously for its quality, but neither is it terribly offensive - some interesting characters relevant to the main are left undeveloped, IMO obviously for the purposes of a sequel.

It's not a very long game, which I like. It took me 28.5 hours on this initial run. "100%" speedruns seem to be in the range of 6 hours, at least half of which seems to be story sequences. "Fun building" runs could take you even less.

To conclude, although one of the least offensive, it's still a Jarpig, and comes with all the trappings of the genre, mainly that you have to squeeze challenge out of it (made convenient), a lot of unskippable snail speed dialogue, questionable writing, and needlessly long, unskippable battle animations (may be alleviated when playing with an emulator). But if you can accept that, you get a great combat engine sandbox with plenty of "fun building" to be had. I look forward to playing through the bonus dungeon, replaying at least on "easy" (actually hardest), and also playing the sequel to see how it compares.

[BIL]

The music is great, it's very JPC action RPG sounding, and there's a definite influence from that era when it comes to dungeon traversal as well.

Motoi Sakuraba, always a performer. I'm not as familiar with the A/RPGs he's soundtracked, but they're in my VGM folder with all his badass action/STG music (Granada, El Viento, Sol Feace) all the same. Check out his track "Reminiscence" off FM Sound Module Maniax, if you haven't - heavenly! (great album in general)

[Licorice]

Check out his track "Reminiscence" off FM Sound Module Maniax, if you haven't - heavenly! (great album in general)

Indeed I had not. Awesome collection!

[Sengoku Strider]

I was really in the mood for an old school rpg the other night, and finally convinced myself to give the AGES version of Phantasy Star 1 a serious go after it had been sitting on my Switch for over a year. I have to say, having finished the game in its original form already, this is a much more comfortable experience, but one I'm glad I'm doing with the real thing already under my belt. It's a shame this line got cancelled before M2 could give us PStar II with an equivalent form of dungeon automapping and lightening up the encounter rate. That game would benefit from these tweaks so, so much.

I'm playing it with the FM soundtrack, which is a really cool experience. Off the bat, it sounds flat-out wrong. Like, the title screen music sounds out of tune. The town theme doesn't have that charming wonkyness. But over time it's grown on me, in places sounding like it's the "real" version of the soundtrack. I'm actually really impressed with what they pulled off with 4 op FM in 1987. FM is a complicated form of synthesis, and Yamaha had only introduced it for commercial use in 1985. I cannot imagine how utterly mind-blowing this game must have been for the Japanese kids who got to try the full-blown experience back then. In audiovisuals it absolutely obliterates anything computer RPGs were doing anywhere at the time.

I'm also playing through in Japanese this time and left it set to katakana...I see why people found the original awkward to read, on account of it is. But it's really interesting seeing the original text. Some of the items with made-up names are even more incomprehensible, making me try to wrap my brain around what things like ruoginin or porimeteraaru are (wound up as 'burger' and 'polymaterial' in the English version). On the other hand, some items were arbitrarily changed - Perseus shield became Mirror shield for no appreciable reason. Sandworm was changed to 'crawler' in English...but then leviathan was changed to sandworm. Lich became evildead, but druj became lich. Tajim was changed to Tarzimal (why?). Cyborg Mage became sorcerer. Chaos sorcerer became magician. Centaur became horseman. All these perfectly usable English words were wiped out...sometimes because of character limits, but many other times because the translator was just being weird. Tyrone -> Odin was an upgrade though. Fortunately the game has a glossary only a + press away, which wonderfully has Japanese names with English descriptions.

Anyway, the game moves much faster in AGES mode, I got most of the way through it in just a few hours. So I can definitely recommend it on that basis alone. And of course the original version is still in there for anyone who wants the full graph paper n' grind experience. I haven't tried the PS2 version, so I can't speak to that, but otherwise I think it safe to say this is the definitive version of the game.

[Vanguard]

A new doujin game called Boushi Sekai, or Hat World in English, just got translated on /vrpg/. It feels very SaGa-ish. You choose from six different main characters and gain stats and techniques semi-randomly mid-combat and have a lot of control over where you go and what order you do things in. I'm really digging it. The combat and character building systems are a cut above JRPG norm, the art and animations are very good, the story is both interesting and genuinely funny, and the Valkyrie Profile-like sidescrolling exploration is a nice change of pace too.

https://mega.nz/folder/09FRHYSR#VKxBWy9oTNffPNJlnvsEBA

Unzip it with UTF-8 encoding and/or Japanese locale enabled so your filenames don't get messed up.
To do that on Windows 10, go:
control panel -> region -> administrative -> change system locale
Both options are in there. I don't think there's any downside to leaving the UTF-8 encoding box checked permanently.

Spoiler

I've updated the above image and its tinyurl link in is now correct and leads to the same place as the mega.nz link.

[Sumez]

Been quite a while since I've managed to delve into a jarpig that actually interested me.

But I decided to finally dig into Golden Sun this year. I played it when it came out, about 9 hours into it judging by my old saves, but just dropped out of it for some point, and I barely remembered anything about it. I added it to my planned backlog coverage because HLTB pins it at "only" 20-25 hours, which felt feasible to me on a handheld system.

Now, Golden Sun isn't really anything out of the ordinary. It's a very basic Dragon Quest style RPG (and by that I mean, very specifically drawing on the same aspects all the DQ games, not just "the jrpg formula"). Combat is dumb, because all enemies die in 1-2 hits, and every character in your party is powerful. There's a potentially cool class system where elemental creatures that you find, usually well hidden throughout the game, will beef up your characters, and mixing and matching those elements will give your characters entirely new classes with different skillsets. You can even give up some of those creatures for a few rounds of a battle to employ their individual tactical skills. But you don't need to actually ever do any of that, because every character is super powerful with just all the ones aligned to their own dedicated element equipped to them, and you'll steamroll through the game with no effort at all. It's the textbook example of the "just use your most powerful attacks to win" flaw in most jarpigs.
Otherwise I do love the game, it has a certain charm to it, and even though your progress through the map is very linear, it often rewards going off the beaten path, and some times returning to old places.

But here's the big twist to it - the game has no ending. I knew about it ending on a cliffhanger, but it's not even that, the game just ends halfway through with no meaningful story beats to break up the story. And the sequel picks up exactly where the first game ends, except with a brand new party starting at base levels. Really, I would recommend that no one ever consider playing the first Golden Sun unless you are also planning on continuing with the next game immediately after. It doesn't feel like an ambitious huge game broken into two big parts, it feels like a deceptive marketing strategy that makes the Pokémon approach to "companion games" seem extremely mild by comparison.

But the second game actually works well on its own, too. So if someone wants to try Golden Sun but can't be bothered to slog through two games, really just start with Golden Sun: The Lost Age. I think it's cool to play both back to back, but if I didn't already have them both I'd have felt super cheated.

The Lost Age is just a much better game in every way though. In fact, outside of the still toothless combat system, it's just everything I want from a jarpig!
You're given free agency to just go around the world like you want with pretty much no direction at all. There's a goal for your main quest, but for the first vast majority of the game you'll just be faffing around with all kinds of other pointless stuff that doesn't tie into that, and I love it!
By the time you get a boat and are able to roam the world a little more freely (something the first game sorely lacked), it takes a page right out of the DQ2/3 book, and it's up to you which towns and dungeons you want to visit. Almost anything can be done in any order you want, and it's hard to tell which parts are optional and which aren't. At no point does anyone in the game tell you what to do, but there are definitely a few places where making progress pretty much hinges on paying attention to the talk of townspeople, which only adds to the player agency.

But what really ties all that together is the puzzle interaction skills you can acquire all over the game in both more and less expected places. Things like pushing/pulling objects from afar, revealing hidden items, diving into the sand to go under obstacles, freezing surfaces, etc. that allows you to interact with the exploration sections of the game is what makes every dungeon in the game feel unique and engaging to explore. The dungeon design in this game is simply brilliant and uncompromising. The puzzles are not very tough, but they are often very clever, and the game always has faith in the player to figure out stuff on their own. Continually earning new interaction skills also make every bit of progress feel ever so more rewarding. Even the towns usually have one or more interactive sections - some times obvious, some times very well hidden, that rely on thinking somewhat outside the box, and being willing to explore.
Really, like I said the first Golden Sun can be skipped if you're in a hurry, but The Lost Age is a very big recommendation.

[Sengoku Strider]

I played through the original Golden Sun back during the GBA era. It was quite impressive and enjoyable for its time. A couple of years back I bought the 2nd one on Wii U and tried to get into it, but i couldn't recall a darn thing from the plot so I was feeling kind of lost from the start. It's hardly War & Peace, I'm sure I could push forward through it just fine, but it did make me want to get the first game before the service goes down in the spring so I can play them back to back for the full experience.

[Sumez]

Playing both back-to-back is cool as long as you make sure you don't burn out already during the first game.
But don't do it for the plot. The plot of the first game is literally summarized by a single paragraph in the intro to the second one. That's how much actually happens in it.

(and that's fine, honestly - I'm currently 25 or more hours into The Lost Age, and so far no plot has happened at all - and I'm loving it)

[BryanM]

Pretty much everything is the same thing over and over. Just with a different coat of paint. 'is why so many were angry at them re-using the same medusa head sprite for forever.

In that same vein, I think I'm done with Disgaea 5.

Story was flat, predictable, repetitive, etc. Not having the diversion filler in the middle really hurt it.

One aspect I like about these games is there's a multitude of different ways of making the numbers go up, just some are more effective at doing that at different times. It's not just walking back and forth in a forest smashing slimes. Maybe Disgaea doesn't do a great job of it, but I think that should be a core aspect of almost all jRPGs.

Another is that there's almost no dead time, you can almost constantly be putting in inputs. I've heard that they tried to turn it into a kind of incremental game in 6, and that would be a massive misread of what their audience wants.

The low budget does make me wonder at what could have been with this series. Even Persona games are a bit minimalistic, and they actually sell a few copies of those.

Of course there is no real interaction between the player and enemy units once you enter paperclip maximizer mode, and everything becomes about who has the biggest number. Probably the most enjoyment to be had out of these games is to ignore story battles, ascend through the item world, start to get the best items, wonder what the hell you've been doing with your life, and then moving on. Rinse and repeat every six years.

[Vanguard]

So far I've completed 3 of the 7 routes in Hat World and this game kicks ass. I'm ready to declare it the best SaGa game. Anyone who enjoys turn-based RPGs and can at least tolerate a high concentration of anime waifus should definitely give it a shot.

[Licorice]

So far I've completed 3 of the 7 routes in Hat World and this game kicks ass. I'm ready to declare it the best SaGa game. Anyone who enjoys turn-based RPGs and can at least tolerate a high concentration of anime waifus should definitely give it a shot.

Have you played the other SaGa games, including stealth SaGa games like Last remnant? How would you rank them?

[ZacharyB]

Last Remnant, at least for XBox 360, was only half-baked. I think I remember every shop being useless, because it was intended for a game mechanic that never got implemented (you can't directly change equipment on allies, and if I remember correctly, even the player character has limited choice). Not sure if they managed to finish it for the PC re-release.

Every other SaGa game is really good, if you start playing with an idea of how you want to play. The reason for that being, you can usually build up any character any way that you want, and tackle the stories in a more freeform order. So, the game adapts in part to you, instead of the other way around. One of the reasons I couldn't stand Octopath Traveler was that I tried to play it like a SaGa game, it seemed set up like a SaGa game, and it just wasn't.

[Sima Tuna]

I don't think any SaGa game will ever top the holy duo of Romancing Saga 3 and Scarlet Grace Ambitions. One thing I'll say about SaGa games, is that almost every SaGa game is good at being a SaGa game. It's sort of like eating pickled vegetables. Some pickled vegetables taste sweet. Some taste sour. Some may be a bit bitter. Some are crunchy, some aren't. If you like pickled vegetables, you'll (probably) like all of them. If you hate pickled vegetables, you'll hate all of them. They're all a little bit different, but all kind of the same.

SaGa is always SaGa and it's never anything but SaGa. If you like SaGa, then the overall level of quality of each SaGa game is pretty high. But if you find you hate SaGa, then I can really only recommend maybe one or two of them, on the off chance you might have a little fun. Romancing Saga 3 being so easy compared to the others, I find that's the "sweet pickle" of SaGa games. I can suggest that one to people who might not like SaGa games normally.

The difficulty of SaGa games, as well as the impenetrable nature which gives them such allure, will always act as a deterrence to mainstream audiences. Although there are some genuinely difficult rpgs, most rpg players aren't specifically looking for a rough challenge. SaGa games aren't the hardest ever, but they can be pretty punishing at times. Remember, Final Fantasy II got a really poor reputation. I still have no idea why. I mean, spaghetti code is a point I'll give them. The code in the original nes version be fucked up. But the PSP re-release? The GBA version? Fantastic. Amazing game, is FF2. Gameplay is Saga-lite with a little bit more linear storytelling. People still look back on FF2 and think it's shit, and I don't understand why. I guarantee you that if a SaGa fan plays FF2, they won't form the same opinion of it than mainstream FF fans did. If you can wrap your mind around even the easiest SaGa game, then you can find something in FF2 to love. Because it's Kawazu as fuck.

Spoiler

IGN gave psp FF2 a 6/10. I'd give it more like 9/10. It's the definitive version of FF2 and FF2 is a fucking cool and super ahead-of-its-era game.

But then, if I had a penny for every time a "hard" game got a bad review...

[Vanguard]

Have you played the other SaGa games, including stealth SaGa games like Last remnant? How would you rank them?

No I'm making unsafe assumptions about the quality of SaGa games I haven't played based on the ones I have, even though some of the ones I haven't played like Unlimited SaGa and Scarlet Grace appear drastically different from the rest. I liked Romancing Saga 3 the best out of the real SaGa games I've played fwiw.

I do think Hat World makes a number of big improvements to the SFC Romancing SaGa formula, at least. You can still choose what order to go through the different areas of the game but you're never left to just wander aimlessly until you find a quest (Romancing SaGa's fatal flaw imo). The difficulty scaling is based on how much progress you've made rather than how strong you are or how many battles you've fought, so you don't have to worry about being penalized for fighting too many battles or anything like that. And grinding enemies is still not very productive because your odds of gaining stats or learning abilities get better as you fight stronger enemies, so the best way to progress both for your party's growth and the plot's progression is to keep challenging the next boss. There's an upgrade that lets you see the upcoming turn order and you have a bunch of ways to manipulate it, which adds a good amount of depth to the combat system. It has a Chrono Cross-like element field system, complete with super moves you can use when one element fills the gauge completely, but it is both more relevant and better executed than the system in Chrono Cross. You have a lot more direct control over your characters' builds in Hat World than you do in RS and switching new abilities in is fast and easy if you need to respec. Boss fights are frequent and generally well-designed. There isn't one best tactic to use for 99% of the game, which you can't always count on with RPGs. I would rate Hat World's combat a tier below top tier doujin RPGs like Helen's Mysterious Castle, Potato Flowers in Full Bloom, and Labyrinth of Touhou, and a tier above most of the better corporate JRPGs like Etrian Odyssey and SMT.

[Sengoku Strider]

No I'm making unsafe assumptions about the quality of SaGa games I haven't played based on the ones I have, even though some of the ones I haven't played like Unlimited SaGa and Scarlet Grace appear drastically different from the rest.

Whoah, pump the breaks here. SaGa Scarlet Grace has the best turn-based rpg battle system of all time.

Of all time.

Put a couple of (hundred) hours into that game first before making declarations about the franchise.

[Vanguard]

Scarlet Grace has been on my to-do list for about a year now (since you gushed about it earlier in this thread). I'll get to it eventually. Simply selecting locations on a map sounds like a huge step up from the directionless wandering of Romancing SaGa.

[Licorice]

Whoah, pump the breaks here. SaGa Scarlet Grace has the best turn-based rpg battle system of all time.

Of all time.

How does it compare with e.g. Labyrinth of Touhou 2 (the best I've personally experienced)?

[Sumez]

You can still choose what order to go through the different areas of the game but you're never left to just wander aimlessly until you find a quest (Romancing SaGa's fatal flaw imo).

I'm curious why you think that's a flaw? In my opinion, being able to just go out into the world and find your own quests, without anyone telling you where to go, is probably the biggest strength of those games.

[Sima Tuna]

It's also not hard at all to stumble across a ton of quests. Especially in Scarlet Grace Ambitions. You already know where every interaction point is, thanks to the storybook layout. Odds are very good that your first playthrough will be a mad dash of quest to quest, broken up with maybe some grinding when you hit a brick wall of difficulty. IIRC grinding is not punished much or at all in Scarlet Grace Ambition. In my main file, I was hella overpowered and nothing about the enemy formations seemed to change. Bosses were difficult but they were bosses. A basic frog enemy remains a basic frog forever.

I don't know if I'd say Scarlet Grace Ambitions has the best battle system of any RPG, but damned if I can think of another that matches it. I do enjoy the default RS3/Minstrel Song "saga" combat engine. Maybe not as complex, but it's a tad more approachable for folks who play other RPGs. Baiten Kaitos is another game with excellent combat. Final Fantasy Tactics is an old favorite of mine. I've spent hundreds of hours on FFT. As a kid, I used to boot up my ps1, pop in FFT, turn on some music and just play all day. I never got tired of finding new ways to exploit the systems and synergies.

[Necronopticous]

Did a commentated run of Vagrant Story yesterday focused on systems & level design, and showing how to go through the game quickly and efficiently without any farming, affinity grinding, or excessive crafting. Thought some of you might enjoy! Here’s a link to the VOD:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1645441552

[ZacharyB]

You can still choose what order to go through the different areas of the game but you're never left to just wander aimlessly until you find a quest (Romancing SaGa's fatal flaw imo).

I'm curious why you think that's a flaw? In my opinion, being able to just go out into the world and find your own quests, without anyone telling you where to go, is probably the biggest strength of those games.

He might be relating to the way time works in most SaGa games. If you are going from town to town looking for things to do, and you happen to be in between the "time" (event rank) where opportunities in a specific place can pop up, you can wander aimlessly for hours, talking to people, just hoping for someone to give you an objective.

(The solution to this is to fight a few battles to advance the time, then make the rounds again, but, it's still essentially "making the rounds", just looking everywhere to try and trigger something, which might be tedious.)

[Blinge]

You can still choose what order to go through the different areas of the game but you're never left to just wander aimlessly until you find a quest (Romancing SaGa's fatal flaw imo).

I'm curious why you think that's a flaw? In my opinion, being able to just go out into the world and find your own quests, without anyone telling you where to go, is probably the biggest strength of those games.

So you gonna play romancing SaGa 1 on SFC yeah?

[Vanguard]

I'm curious why you think that's a flaw? In my opinion, being able to just go out into the world and find your own quests, without anyone telling you where to go, is probably the biggest strength of those games.

Because the combat systems aren't good enough to carry the games on their own (setting aside the possible exception of Scarlet Grace) and all of the interesting content is associated with quests. I don't want to walk around for 30+ minutes so I can find one and start playing the game again, and I don't want to talk to every single NPC in every town every time I've fought a few battles just in case that unlocked something. By far the best way to enjoy a first playthrough of one of the Romancing SaGa games is to follow a guide that tells you how to start all the events.

Exploration gameplay should be designed so that the player will regularly and naturally stumble upon something interesting, or failing that, they should at least have ready access to clues pointing them in the right direction. SaGa's approach to open world design fails at both.

[Vanguard]

I'll give this Scarlet Grace business a shot. Weak, standard, or strong enemies? Any obscure mechanics I need to know about?

[Sumez]

By far the best way to enjoy a first playthrough of one of the Romancing SaGa games is to follow a guide that tells you how to start all the events.

That would be a terrible, terrible way to play Romancing SaGa 2, pretty much foregoing everything that makes it amazing :S

[Sima Tuna]

I'll give this Scarlet Grace business a shot. Weak, standard, or strong enemies? Any obscure mechanics I need to know about?

I don't think Scarlet Grace Ambitions has any real "traps" that I can recall. Some bosses are hard, but that's to be expected. The magic system and combat are unique, even among other Saga games. You should be able to learn from playing, though. So I won't spoil. Sparking techs works like in any Saga game, although certain moves can only spark certain techs. Sparking magic is done by absorbing magic from the environment until you reach a certain threshold, at which point sparking the next-highest magic spell is nearly guaranteed.

I'm pretty sure weak, standard and strong enemies (if you're referring to the preview window given before entering a combat zone) are fairly accurate classifications. If you fight a "weak" group, they will be weaker than a strong group.

As I said, I don't remember any massive dick moves. Just make sure not to advance the main story to a point of no return before you're ready. I think you'll know when that's about to happen though.

Scarlet Grace Ambitions would be one of the most approachable Saga games, if not for how difficult combat can be. The old SaGa rules still apply, however. You want a full team ASAP (even a team of scrubs) and it's advantageous to build one character as a tank who can shield weaker members (like, say, mages!) FYI, there is no penalty for recruiting everyone you meet. Recruiting one character might lock you out of someone else I guess, but that's part of the game. You can only bring a certain number of members into battle, but you can hold way more than that in your roster.

It will probably take you a while to get the hang of the Ring system and how to utilize it best. Give yourself time and don't worry about grinding too much. Again, I did a ton of grinding when I played and never noticed any negative result. Grinding made the game easier overall for me.

Spoiler

I looked it up and apparently Battle Rank will rise if you grind in a lot of different spots at the same time. But if you grind in a single location, the BR gain is only 2%. The benefit far outweighs any potential enemy buffs.

[ZacharyB]

As I said, I don't remember any massive dick moves.

Unfortunately, I do:

I was trying to beat the game with a party of all-mages, or mostly mages, and, the thing about mages is that they take multiple turns to use magic, because it's busy being casted. This is balanced out by magic being powerful, compared to melee combat.

But, I accidentally triggered the most insane form of the final boss, and I can't finish the game with my chosen party, because, in addition to his all-stunning move used during this version of his first form, I don't think enemy strength accumulation has a ceiling in this game. You can grind to have a party of people at 999 HP, and the opponents' matching strength will still mean that you die in 2 hits. This is constant throughout the entire game, and it's usually a good thing that keeps you on your toes. Using typical techniques, enemies always take 2-5 hits to defeat; your party members, 2-4 hits.

The deciding factor in battle will usually be status effects, like stunning and poison, and special effects, like blocking attacks, interrupting opponent moves, or augmenting speed. (And the united attack, of course, but that isn't applicable here.) And with essentially no grinding practical, you can't beat the final boss's version of these elements with some parties, which is un-SaGalike!

[Vanguard]

My early impressions of Scarlet Grace are overall positive.

For anyone who hasn't played the game, how the battle system works is every turn you get a certain amount of stars, and these are shared action points for your entire party. Generally a basic attack costs one star, and special attacks and magic spells will usually cost more. You gain more stars as combat progresses, you might have four on round one, then five on round two, and so forth. You choose a formation for your party at the start of every fight which influences how many stars you have, among other things. Often you will not have every character in your party act on every turn, but that's ok! Anyone who isn't using any stars automatically defends, which you might want to do anyway. I always like to see RPGs where the defend command is good for something because most of them have a defend command and most of the time it's totally worthless. Another cool thing about the star system is that you're much less crippled by the loss of one or two characters than you otherwise would be. If two of your dudes die in Romancing SaGa and you go from five actions to three. That's really bad, you need to get those guys back up asap. Here when two of your guys get killed you might go from five standard attacks to three super moves which most of the time is still perfectly workable. I haven't seen anything quite like this shared action point system before, but I like it.

There's a turn order gauge on the bottom of the screen so you can see when different abilities will go off, and you can see what the enemy is planning, though certain enemy abilities show up as ???. Can't say I'm a fan of the ??? thing. It's often used for enemy counterattack abilities, and not being able tell what is being countered limits your ability to rationally respond to their choice. At the bare minimum it would be nice to be able to see which abilities it could be, out of the moves I've seen that enemy use in the past. Complaints about hidden information aside, I love it when RPGs give you more information to act on like this. In your typical Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest combat system you end up spamming your best abilities over and over again in nearly every fight, because they don't give you enough information to be able to do better than that. The enemy forecast allows for reactive play and makes Scarlet Grace's combat system 100x as interesting as those are.

One of the coolest parts of Scarlet Grace's combat system is the united attack mechanic. How it works is, whenever something dies, their icon on the turn order gauge disappears, and the characters immediately before and after them smash together. If both of those characters are on the same team, they recruit all other characters on the same team adjacent to them, and they all initiate a united attack. In a united attack, everyone involved gets a free hit on someone from the opposite team, potentially dealing a good chunk of damage, and they get a discount on the star cost of all of their abilities on the following turn, allowing for an elaborate followup attack. Both teams can trigger united attacks both for their team and for the enemy team which enables some cool tactics. If you've got a character who is about to die, try to manipulate their turn order so they're in between at least two of your other characters, then you've put the AI in a tough spot because if they finish your dude off, you get to counter with a united attack. You can even use provoking or tanking abilities to get your character killed deliberately. Suicide bombing! United attacks make target prioritization and turn manipulation really powerful.

The overworld feels kind of like the Kings Bounty RPGs. Feels like there's always something interesting to check out, and in the first few hours I've already seen some worthwhile choices and consequences. I prefer conventional RPG exploration over this if it's done well, as in Dark Souls and Demon King Chronicle, but SaGa games usually do it badly so this is a nice step up. The battle rank system seems to be pretty well-implemented here. I'm not a fan of level scaling in general, but this looks like one of the best implementations of the concept. I appreciate the attempt to make every battle matter, even if they didn't quite succeed.

The worst thing about Scarlet Grace so far is that a lot of things are needlessly inconvenient. Different smithies having different specializations is stupid. Just a pointless waste of time to walk around the world map to find the one you need, especially since loading into different areas on the map is pretty slow. The UI is kinda bad in general, changing stuff like your party's equipment and your party members' orders are much more awkward than they need to be. An autobattle function would be nice for cleaning up chaff too. Gaining flux at the end of a battle is a waste of time too, there's no meaningful decision making there. Just assign that shit automatically without making me watch the animation after every single fight.

The super deformed graphics are a huge improvement on the weird dwarf people from Minstrel Song, but I still feel like it's such a shame that they have Tomomi Kobayashi creating amazing art for these games and then they go and make the games look nothing like what she drew. Especially in this game, since the dialogue and NPC interactions are presented like a visual novel, why not just use her art as dialogue portraits instead of the weirdly unanimated 3d models they went with?

So far I feel like this game's combat system is about as good as Hat World's, possibly a little bit better. I definitely would not put it on the same level as Labyrinth of Touhou or Potato Flowers in Full Bloom.

I'm pretty sure weak, standard and strong enemies (if you're referring to the preview window given before entering a combat zone) are fairly accurate classifications. If you fight a "weak" group, they will be weaker than a strong group.

There's a difficulty option in the menu for making enemies stronger or weaker. The default seems about right to me. Haven't game overed yet but I have wiped and had to retry a few times. And thank you for your advice!

And with essentially no grinding practical, you can't beat the final boss's version of these elements with some parties, which is un-SaGalike!

Sounds SaGalike to me. You'd want an optimized party for the full power Destroyer/Oblivion and 10 fatestones Saruin too and this sounds like the same thing. Searching around the internet suggests that battle rank does max out and that revisiting old areas raises it so slowly that you might as well not worry about it. You have to replay an area between 20 and 34 times (depending on its difficulty) to raise your battle rank by 1. I've also seen claims that the final boss is unaffected by battle rank.

[Mortificator]

Did a commentated run of Vagrant Story yesterday focused on systems & level design, and showing how to go through the game quickly and efficiently without any farming, affinity grinding, or excessive crafting. Thought some of you might enjoy! Here’s a link to the VOD:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1645441552

Awesome! I'm gonna take a look after I finish my stalled playthrough