Krizzx wrote: ↑Thu Apr 03, 2025 3:12 pm
I never would have gotten into Saga games if not for Saga Frontier 2. The gameplay, music, the story. They were like nothing else I ever played. Also, I wouldn't really call it linear. It jumps around in time between multiple characters and you can permanently alter certain events in the game depending on things you do. Like, I accidently got Cordelia, or whatever Wil Knights wife is named killed in a mission. I thought I would get a game over or have to restart. Its kept going with her dead. Scarlet Grace is not bad. It doesn't belong on a list with Unlimited Saga or Emerald Beyond. You also left out the Last Remnant. It doesn't have Saga in name, but that was 100% a Saga game.
Last Remnant generally isn't considered a Saga game similar to how Maken X / Maken Shao isn't considered as a Megami Tensei game, although imo Maken is much more worthy of that label than fucking Kuznoha Raido.
I did forget that Remnant existed though, that game also plays much more like Saga.
I'm not saying Saga 2 is bad at all (I'm implicating that it doesn't get hated on as much for diverging away from the SaGa formula, because Unlimited, Scarlet & Emerald exist.), when judged as a stand alone, or a game that has nothing to do with Saga.
I would call it a masterpiece, because the music is beautiful (Saga 2 is the 2nd best Saga OST after Unlimited Saga) and the gfx stood out back then, as is the storybook style narrative. It's just that this feels way more like a Final Fantasy game than it does a SaGa. You could even just rewrite the names and countries to relate with Ivalice and it would feel like a Rpg version of Final Fantasy Tactics, or at least one that predated XII.
I'm not denigrating Saga 2, I'm saying that it plays nothing like a real Saga game kinda like how during its era, Street Fighter 3 was generally not considered as a real Street Fighter game by diehard Street Fucker fans.
SF3 does retroactively feel more like a SF now if only due to how Street Fighter 5 & 6 went completely off the rails.
That's debatable with Scarlet Grace. It had the most complex combat of the series, but that's also its downfall since every single battle feels as long as a typical Strategy game battle, but all you really do in that game is read some boring text and then pursue more battles, and the battles are stacked upon battles. I generally enjoy that within the context of a dungeon crawl but that's because dungeon crawls are endurance tests.
In Saga games, you instantly refill your life after every battle so the resource management was only limited to the actual battle. What does govern the good Saga's is that they present you with an open world, and an hard imposed time limit where you must beat the game somewhere around 8 - 20 hours, because if you play past a certain point, you'll be forced to fight end game boss style enemies as your normal encounters with the actual bosses being near impossible to beat.
I like SaGa because it punishes your choices, but it also didn't really seem to have a correct choice.
You simply worked with what you have. In Saga Frontier 2, I do recall that there was a proper way or META to play it, and if it were a normal Jrpg that wouldn't be a problem but it's SaGa.
To me a SaGa game is defined by throwing you into a completely hostile world, and you're thrown to the wolves to figure it out yourself since Saga games generally don't even bother to teach you how to play it.
I think Minstrel Song was the only one that actually came with a tutorial lol.
Minstrel Song is the only one that actually warns you and reminds you of the time limit that governs all of your actions.
All of the Romancing Saga games have the time limit, as does Saga Frontier 1, where you'll eventually reach a point of no return, simply because you'll simply be too weak to fight the enemies. They eventually become stronger than you if you just pointlessly kill shit without putting any thought on the progress of your adventure.
This is why Scarlet Grace is boring as hell to me, every single battle feels like you're playing the End Game of a SaGa.
Not in terms of difficulty (which is moderate) but the lentgh of the battle. The fights take too damn long to finish and it's partly because Scarlet Grace tried to be more realistic and prevented you from being too over powerered.
Which again also kills part of the appeal for me, because part of the fun of a SaGa game is breaking the game.
Saga Frontier 1 had a few characters who completely broke the game just due to their innate traits.
Blue is obvious since he's the only true pure magic user.
Asellus is another one, because she can completely break past the stat limit with her Mystic skills.
When faced with so much build variety from the previous game, Saga 2 felt really bland in comparison since none of the characters were truly unique from each other except for maybe Gustave (Who's the exact opposite of Blue.), but you don't even get to play the end game as him. You're stuck with that loser Will.
I don't get the linear vs non-linear argument like one somehow is better than the other. When Zelda stopped being linear and structured, it stopped being memorable. Go back to Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, or even a Link to the Past. There are loads of memorable, defining, standout moments throughout each of those games. Now, what are the memorable, standout moments in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom? Then, on the other end of linear you have FFXIII. The whole game was like 1 big hallway until you get to the Calm Lands like area near the end. Linear or non-linear don't matter. What matters is that its done well.
I agree 100%. I prefer linear games (of course I would. I view arcade games, as gaming in its purest form where the game lives & dies by its ruleset.), but it's like you're forgetting that SaGa games are wholly defined by their non-linearity. Everything about SaGa is supposed to be free form, which also includes the combat. You're always given the freedom to spec out your characters any way you wish so long as you've unlocked the skills for it.
You're really only limited by your stats, which don't seem to be hardcapped but most SaGa characters have a completely different spread of stats that reflect their personality so they don't all start at a good place.
As I said earlier, the best part about Saga's open world is that you're given a time limit.
SaGa games are the only open world games I know of, that punishes you for mindlessly exploring lol.
I absolutely hate the redesigns. Elma was originally designed to be a reference to Tel-Os from Xenosaga with her brown skin, white hair and almond shaped emerald eyes. Who was, herself, a reference to Mary Magdalene.
The differences in these designs are so subtle that they don't matter to me. I'm just going to make her run around naked anyway so what do I care? You make it sound as if Elma went from DMC1 Dante to DMC2 Dante, who are actually completely different characters in everything but name.
These two Elmas simply just look like different artist renditions of the same character. These differences aren't drastic like Leon from RE4 & RE4 Demake, where he looks like an avg guy in the demake, but looks like some kind of god of beauty or ladies man in the original. That's what I liked about that era of RE, it looked like you were playing as gods in the form of humans, and it played like they were gods.
None of the two Elma's look avg and it's debatable on which one looks more generic. They both stand out.
Who cares about Lin, she's just some 13 year old and looks it. I just use HB or L in her place because she seems to be a tank hybrid anyway whereas the other two are pure tanks.
I was going to ask if Elma were Catholic Mary or Gnostic Mary, mainly because I have a hard time imagining Elma doing La Pieta. (That's the first image that comes to mind whenever I hear the name Mary. Magdelene) She's basically the main character, and there doesn't seem to be anyone above her since your main character is a boring piece of shit who simply exists and merely tags along like in most Jap games that allow you to create your character.
I did spoil the ending just based off of your comments and I was impressed by what I saw.
I disagree with your assertion that she's Mary. She's basically Sophia, and she's even depicted as a visitor/alien from outside of the perimeter. I was wondering why Galea was basically written out of the XC series, since I always thought that she was the Sophia analog. Now I understand why Monolith seems to always depict Elma as the strongest or give her the most focus in their xenoblade promotional arts that also feature the other protags, and even in other games that she's in.
IMO, Melia is the Mother Mary figure and she fits both the Catholic & Gnostic depictions of Mary. She was basically Gnostic Mary in XC1 where she's a fellow traveler & possible love interest in the game, and Catholic Mary in XC3 where she's depicted as motherly but still watching over the savior of her world Shulk, even after he disappeared. All other Christian depictions of Mary are irrelevant since they just depict her as a whore lol.
Their faces are so undetailed now.
Both just looks like anime shit to me.
I saw it hinted by some people that they may be trying to connect Elma to Alvis, which means they are retconning the entire lore.
The original Xenoblade X was meant to be a completely different universe separate from Chronicles. It also had Chronicles removed from its name to signify this, but Nintendo of America re-added it so people would falsely think they were connected for marketing. Looks like this is being forced into the Chronicles universe instead of being its own thing, now. It was interested in seeing the direction X would go with the big reveal in the ending, but its looking like they are just going to link it Xenoblade Chronicles 1-3 now. No more exploration of the X universe or Mira.
I don't think you're interpreting what Xenoblade actually is. It's not really an episodic space opera like Star Wars is, although XC2 was the most space opera & exopolitical of the 3 and even the Torna expansion gave it more of an episodic feel where Torna is basically Empire Strikes Back.
These games are just an anthology of loosely connected stories based off of biblical allegory, nearly all of it is just gnostic but I also see a lot of analogs to Genesis especially in XCX. I came in thinking "So this is why XCX is considered as a side story? It barely has anything to do with gnosticism.", but then the Terminator cyborg reveals happened lol.
I'm also aware of the end game plot twist regarding the Lifepods, but that just makes the game even more Gnostic than I originally thought it was especially due to the Elma reveals. It's just much more subtle with it than XC3 where you outright see a cringe cutscene of a Noppon claim that "Noah isn't evil, the world is", lol.
I dunno it was funny as fuck to me, because it was a Noppon saying it.
It's part of the fun of the series, trying to identify what version of gnosticism that the latest Xeno game is using.
It sure beats the shit out of playing a new Yakuza where the only thing that's new between each game is that the characters get older, uglier, and progressively more retarded.
What's the in-lore retcon? Your argument stems from the intentions of what was originally intended for XCX, but Xenoblade Chronicles 1 itself was never meant to be related to the Xeno franchise and was simply tacked on by Iwata as a show of respect to Takahashi. (Why does his wife never write the games anymore?)
All of the games that came after Xenoblade 1, including the DE now have clear connections to Xeno as a whole
and I don't have a problem with that because Tetsuya Takahashi has always intended for the Xeno games to be about philosophies that he wanted to teach to the youth, but he figured that the message would get through to them much easier through a video game than it would if he taught them verbally.
We simply knew nothing about Alvis in XC1. XC2 revealed that he's related to Mythra & Malos and they were all created by Klaus who was the Demiurge analog for XC1 & 2. (The brilliance of that is that they turned him into a relatable Valentinian in XC2, as opposed to the much more common demiurge depiction from XC1.)
Pneuma (Mythra), Malos, & Ontos (Alvis) are basically Aeons but only Alvis truly fits the literal description of an Aeon.
By XC3 he's the only one of the 3 still alive (or still functional since Mythra basically became human after Pneuma died, due to stupid ass Shonen animu reasons.), and he still functions as the core Administrator of the Xeno universe. (He serves a similar function as Miang from Xenogears, except he's depicted as above the demiurge in both XC1 & XC3, rather than under like Miang was to Deus.)
I hate multiverses, but that's not what Xeno games are going for. They're trying to depict a gnostic & vedic derived form of spirituality that's entirely told through the veil of Sci Fi. (Most Sci Fi stories are actually just veiled religious allegories, because they come from a mindset that I also share, that religion is mostly written by cargo cult retards who misinterpreted the high technology that they were witnessing. Xenogears even went to the trouble of detailing the history of their world's cargo cult, although it's actually just referencing our real world.)
The universe setting they're using, is just trying to represent that no matter how many times that you think you're in the real world, you really just find yourself inside another simulation.
In each of the Xeno games, they're always searching for Pleroma. Whether that'd be Rex's Elysium, XCX cast trying to come back to their human bodies, Shulk's world without Gods, or the XC3 cast literally trying to get out of a simulated world, to return to the simulated world that they originally came from which would be the dual worlds of Xeno 1 & 2.
Xeno X being a completely different continuity doesn't mean shit, because it too is merely another layer of Maya, or the projected reality.
Which depiction of Earth is actually real? XCX or XC1's? (Although if I recall, we don't actually see Klaus's Earth until XC2.)
The answer doesn't matter.
Earth itself is the Xeno analog for Pleroma, or the actual reality beyond the illusionary worlds.
It's the original state that all the other simulations imitated.
The Christian word would be Heaven, but I feel that Heaven is too loaded of a word and has been completely poisoned by Christian retards who legit believe that they'll be rewarded with Golden Mansions in Heaven when heaven is just a state of mind, not an actual place made of gold, lol. Within the Xeno games, the word pleroma makes more sense since they always reveal their paradises & utopias to be made up fake garbage, whether that's the end game reveal in XCX, or Rex's childish quest for Elysium.
They're all just referencing the same dilemma, man's search for Heaven on Earth but then have to cope with the reality that they were being driven by false hope.
Even if Xeno X ever had a direct sequel, it would just end up like Xeno 1 - 3, where it doesn't function like a traditional
chronological story. You're meant to interpret the games as an anthology that merely share some characters who actually are from the previous games (Only a few, Rex, Shulk, Nia, Melia and Poppi.), but they've lived so long that the realities they inhabit are no longer the same projected world that they resided in back when we were playing as them.
Each of these worlds has an incarnation of specific people such as Vandham, who generally serve as the awakening but awakening generally involves a form of suffering (suffering is exercising for the mind. You must feel pain, to achieve gain. It's a similar concept with the mind.) or trauma which is what this guy represents and is also why he rarely ever survives any game that he's in lol.
It's similar to the bible where you'll sometimes come across familiar names but those familiar names will take on a completely different role depending on the context of that specific story.
We see this happen with Rex & Shulk who were basically the savior figures of their respective games.
Savior but not exactly Jesus. I don't think any of the games have tried to depict Jesus yet. Elma would actually be the closest because she's a mysterious foreigner from outside of the world. That description also fits Sophia & she's most likely a Sophia analog because Elma is also depicted as trying to fix a mistake, as was Galea/ Meyneth.
The entire conflict of XC3 is basically just retards waking up to the reality that they were living within a self imposed prison world that was completely fabricated by their elite classes, but their solution is to return back to their equally as dysfunctional, and equally as fake simulated/illusionary worlds by merging the two fictional (it's fictional within the in-game context) worlds into one.
Xenoblade setting is basically a story that has no end, but it does have a beginning, the original scenario with Klaus & Galea and ironically their beginning could also be its end, because from what we know the real world in the Xenoblade setting is either the Earth that's depicted in Klaus's universe, or the Earth that's depicted in XCX.
Me personally, I think it'd be cool if it turned out that pleroma was actually just Chrono Trigger or Xenogears.
Xenogears itself was originally meant to be Final Fantasy & then Chrono Trigger, but Takahashi is such a hardheaded fuck, he made Xenogears anyway when he was supposed to make a Chrono Trigger sequel.
It doesn't matter to me what it was originally intended as, so long as the end destination is just as interesting.
In this case, the Xeno series is far more interesting than anything Final Faggotry ever did. (aside for FF6 & FF7, but you could easily fit those two games into a Xeno setting. FF6 would work better as a Xenogears style flashback.)
Chrono Trigger has an interesting setting but I think they completely dropped the ball with trying to implement dualism in Chrono Cross. When I speak of "As Above, So Below." Chrono Cross is somewhat how I envision it. Both worlds affect each other with the real world taking precedence, and the lesser world being a complete distortion of that world.
Although the Persona 2 games & the original Persona did a much better job of that but that's pretty obvious considering who made those games. (obvious really. Look at how P3, P4 & P5 have fucking nothing to do with the microcosm & the macrocosm. Outside of the Velvet room which just doesn't even bother to make sense in any game it appeared in after P2 lol.)
Xenoblade 2's conflict somewhat represented this when their world fell apart & changed shape after Shulk killed his fake god from his setting. Even though his god, is the same god from XC2. XC2 was Valentinian inspired so they depicted Rex being friends with him. Whereas someone like Malos basically represents your typical modern day edgelord gnostic who just wants to kill god. The interesting thing is that Malos became distorted due to his driver, who was an analog for the Vatican.
Now, back to the direct and Duskblood. I have ZERO issue with PVPVE.
Is that what it is? I was under the impression that it was just pvp slop like the latest Elden Ring game. If it's PVPVE, then who cares? That's what Bloodborne already was.
Main point in the "Soulsblight" thread was how I am sick of seeing everyone trying to make a souls-clone. I'm sick of seeing the same game over and over and over. From Software should've changed its name to "Souls Factory." The whole reason I like From Software is because they made creative and original games that were unlike anything anyone else put out. I'm happy they are doing something unique
Yeah I still need to reply to that. I ain't got time to because I am trying to make a game since I feel pressured to because I don't want people to spread demos of that k7 sindrome thing, which I feel is not representative of my work. Sure people like it, but I don't give a shit. I only did that long ago, to show an artist how I turned his art into a moving digital comic .
If peeps want to spread anything, I'd rather it'd be an actual game and not some digi comic.[/quote]
That Donkey game at the end of the direct looked fun. I'm guessing they've finally moved on beyond DK the 3rd, because this one looks like a new DK after 20 years of the one from Donkey Kong Country.
My first thought is that he was either Diddy grown up or Kiddy Kong grown up.
Them prices, though... I hope they're just placeholders. I liked what I saw, but not for that much fucking money.
The hilarious part is that these are the digital prices for a non-physical product that requires no shipping or manufacturing, so Nintendo can't even blame tariffs on that. That's just Shitendo being greedy assholes.
The physical prices are even worse, but even that looks like Nintendo tax where they just price hike the game because Nintendo knows that their 40 yr old kid audience will lap up any price tag and allow Nintendo to bust a nut in their mouth so long as the name brand is Nintendo lol.
Not even gaystation fags are that loyal to their piece of shit plastic.
Only the console itself is reasonably priced and is exactly what I was expecting to pay.
