a little over 1.5 playthroughs into romancing saga 3 and i still feel like i have no idea what to make of this game. am i missing something? and if so, do i even want to find what it is?? i'm fascinated by this game. i think that it's not what i want, and never can be. and
...that's okay. i accept it. i'll love it anyway.
from the game design standpoint, i've never been more frustrated by a saga game. i think this is genuinely a mean game, in a way i don't feel from the other saga games i've finished. one of the first quests a player is likely to find is the rat cave, where you get apparently locked in against a boss fight that'll be genuinely impossible if you haven't prepared for it one way or another. you can leave after running away from it, but i feel like that sets the tone of the game. on my first playthrough i extensively used a character who leaves after you finish the first set of main quests, recruited another party member who (at the time of joining) is basically the worst character in the game only to learn that i couldn't kick him out of my party until finishing one of those main quests (at which point he does become better, but he was dead weight for about 12 hours in a row), and found myself stumped by other puzzles only to find that (after talking to people around the world over and over till i figured out what to do) the boss fights behind them were too fucking hard.
for a long time i thought that people who complained about saga's mechanics were people who struggled to meet the game halfway, but now i wonder if maybe they were just playing this game. hahaha. there was a point where i thought i'd entered the final dungeon too unprepared and was going to have to go back hours in the game. it's obvious to me that you can do all kinds of overpowered things, but the game really stonewalls you on most of them. i've had such a hard time learning skills that feel strong on my playthroughs (despite the bosses having so much hp and damage...i basically used the "bonus defense" formation constantly on the first one in particular) and the sharing system, which rs2 used to make up for the fact that you're constantly cycling party compositions, is just really random and potentially grindy here
and yeah, there's the commander mode. it's got its own foibles and feels (in a lot of cases) really overpowered, which given what i just said is a mixed bag. mostly because there's all this cool stuff with the combos and stuff behind it but using it feels like such an awkward way for me as a player to try and get around the things that have frustrated me.
and to me the bar for this series is so high. i love rs2, and think it's an incredibly elegant game, with so many aspects of the mechanics, structure, and narrative intertwining to reveal something that spoke to me deeply, and scarlet grace has some of my favorite rpg systems ever. i even really like unlimited saga, so to say that this game is probably closer to that end of the series for me is not some huge insult or even a particular disappointment. it's basically what i expected, honestly. still, when i think about games like saga frontier and ps2 romancing saga i feel like it's clear they learned a lot from this game.
and it clearly is the precursor to frontier, with its genre and tonal shifts, the main character gimmicks and collage of eccentric minor characters, and reintroduction of anachronistic and even sci-fi elements to the fantasy focused "romancing" settings. that weirdness is a lot of the game's flavor, even though not much of it is connected to the main characters, almost all of whom fall into one of two groups...they each have their own angle on the story, at least a bit, but the ones i've seen don't get much focus after the opening. though, in a way, that kind of captures the appeal of the game...of the whole series. everyone's weird enough that it's easy to wonder about them, and want to know more. seemingly unfinished ideas and sparse text are used to suggest something deeper than the game would ever be able to tell you directly, and even when i know there's nothing behind it i'm still drawn to it and impressed. like a matte painting of a canyon
something that really stuck with me about saga frontier came from the way the differences between playable characters lies at the center of their stories and the party members they get. it anchored many of the disparate aspects of the world and added a strange sense of discovery as the view i had of the world developed more, and made me think, even about random npcs with one line, over and over. and yet, even though this game really doesn't have the same extent of those things...i can only say that i'm still captivated. i don't think that some great logic underlies this game, that somebody seriously considered trying to worldbuild in a way that would justify all these things existing at once. pirates and dragons, costumed superheroes and vampires, racing battle-tanks and whatever fucked up gigeresque shit is up with buné's lair. nor am i convinced that this story of elemental lords as the harbinger to the annihilation of the world (and some other stuff also happens) has some profound thematic undercurrent. but it's just that this game has the creative spirit that's connected rpgs all across time and format:
"i think this is cool so i put it in the game"
