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I would like to request a formal extension on the GOTY deadline until we can figure out what's going on with SaGa Scarlet Grace
- Thread starter Dreamboum
- Start date
It's great to see people enjoying an entry in the SaGa series so much. I've always been drawn to the series one way or another, and I know it's pretty niche and unusual, but I sometimes get kinda annoyed by how most people outside of Japan don't really seem to "get" it.
I've played about an hour or two of SaGa Scarlet Grace, but have been busy with other things so I haven't been able to dig in. What I played so far was enjoyable and intuitive. Can't wait to get deeper into the game.
I've played about an hour or two of SaGa Scarlet Grace, but have been busy with other things so I haven't been able to dig in. What I played so far was enjoyable and intuitive. Can't wait to get deeper into the game.
Even in Suikoden and Chrono Cross each character had their own mini-stories. I've barely scratched the surface of Scarlet Grace, but within the first few minutes I had 8 or so party members recruited with only two of them having any form of a backstory.
Good to hear it gets better then. I chose the pottery woman and in the first few minutes a bunch of random characters with barely any exposition joined my party.
I asked moderators a week ago, they said GOTY voting is starting later this year, near end of December so that would already be a later deadline.
I can't see it winning overall GOTY but if there is a JRPG category is should absolutely be a contender
Well Ben's a dum dum
I will say that those accustomed to basic bitch traditional JRPG trappings may find the game off putting and weird at first but give it a chance
ESPECIALLY combat, character building/upgrading, etc..
I think there is just a Best RPG section, which is quite competitive and likely to go to Disco Elysium. I guess people could request for a JRPG section from mods/admin?
Each character starts with a seven person party as a requirement of the battle system and LP mechanics. Pretty much any other character other than the 5 "filler" at the start comes after a quest chain or is a town NPC.
Beating the game with a character will also spawn a long quest chain involving those "filler" characters and that main's deputy when you play the game as the other characters.
It isn't at the level of linear games with a cast of 7, but that isn't the standard that huge gameplay-focused open-world games should be held to.
The 8 main characters have a giant chunk of the game dialogue, but there is a fair amount of dialogue for the other characters, just spread across four campaigns and hundreds of sidequests. There's a lot of standards that are going to be more remiscent of DRPGs, SRPGs, TRPGs, and other RPGs that have had
exploration-heavy world maps and variable protagonists, like New Horizons or Sunless Skies/Sea.
yeah, no. Those are all jrpgs. Jrpg fans understand that these are all different types of games. Gatekeeping and condescending to fans of more mainstream series in a genre is so lame and it doesn't make people want to buy SaGa more.
I feel bad for saying this but what's been putting me off of SaGa Scarlet Grace is its art design. I REALLY don't like how the character designs and general aesthetic of the game look. I liked how games like Romancing SaGa and SaGa Frontier looked but this is...frankly, ugly to me, and that makes it hard for me to take interest.
I do love Saga Frontier's world, theme and aesthetics the most out of all the games in the series thus far
The scifi fantasy world was rad
Is Etrian Odyssey a JRPG? Is Wizardry? Is South Park? Is Darkest Dungeon? Unlimited SaGa? Temple of Elemental Evil? Crimson Shroud?
There is no widely accepted standard, so conversations always become a definitional mess. People routinely throws shit at Etrian Odyssey for not having plot and characters like they believe JRPGs should.
Even Dragon Quest kind of flops in the West because people are so narrowly accustomed to Final Fantasy as the standard for JRPGs, but that isn't what most Japanese-made RPGs are going for. The difference between Final Fantasy and a DRPG is way more substantial than one being mainstream and one being niche. They have fundamentally different design goals and moment to moment gameplay.
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It's a tremendous game and the 20% launch discount will be available for a couple of weeks still, give it a chance people!
It's easily one of the most refreshing experiences I've had in the genre in ages.
I recommend everyone and anyone who is into rpgs to give it a try. It's something special.
I recommend everyone and anyone who is into rpgs to give it a try. It's something special.
I keep reading good things about this game and I'm tempted since its Japanese release. What's putting me off is the fact that I never played any SaGa title, but you have to start somewhere.
I saw critics about the art style, I think it's amazing and a good transposition of Kobayashi design tho
I saw critics about the art style, I think it's amazing and a good transposition of Kobayashi design tho
I feel like Ben would be absolutely devastated to hear that he had this effect, lol.
How is it on the Switch? For games on multiple systems, I prefer the PS4 but it'd be kinda nice to play this portable and it doesn't seem to demanding for the Switch.
This is the first SaGa game to have decent tutorials. Almost everything is a lot more transparent than usual.
I pre-ordered it on Switch, sadly haven't had time to sink in my teeth yet but the first battle really gave me Into the Breach vibes in how much the game tells you. Really looking forward to it.
The Switch version runs at 60 fps, and I've noticed a little stuttering after leaving the game running over the course of days and days and days (as in putting the Switch to sleep with SG still running instead of putting the Switch to sleep and exiting the game).
The only other criticism of the Switch version I'd say is that the English text is Pretty Small
Into the Breach is a really good comparison. SSG tells the player so much, but it is within the context of RPG mechanics (general RPG mechanics, not JRPG mechanics or standards). Even into my third playthrough I'm learning tons about the battle system and setting up more chain reactions, combos, turn manipulations, and traps.
Yes, this is a bug with the Switch version. If you restart the game every once in a while, it should be stable.
Oh it just released? I guess there is no chance of it being on sale soon, I'll probably just grab it now.
I picked it up at launch and just haven't had the time yet to actually dig into it. It's probably the main thing that I want to play right now.
I bought the game at launch but haven't had a chance to dive in yet. That should change next week.
Etrian Odyssey isn't an unfair comparison, it's just sort of like a version of Etrian Odyssey that removes the map making aspects and dramatically increases the number of weird little events you can come across. Will you pet the squirrel?
(Also I guess there's basically no resource management in Scarlet Grace so)
I feel utterly lost, so if someone can explain it like I'm 5 years old...
Is the story, plot, and writing in this worth someone's time if that's what they primarily approach RPGs, not just JRPGs, for? I enjoy a good combat system but if there isn't a compelling reason to continue forward that isn't just me wanting to experience more battles, I'm significantly less interested.
So basically, is this Octopath-tier writing or are the character interactions more than half-assed and is the plot anything other than an excuse to fight new things?
Is the story, plot, and writing in this worth someone's time if that's what they primarily approach RPGs, not just JRPGs, for? I enjoy a good combat system but if there isn't a compelling reason to continue forward that isn't just me wanting to experience more battles, I'm significantly less interested.
So basically, is this Octopath-tier writing or are the character interactions more than half-assed and is the plot anything other than an excuse to fight new things?
If you're the type who wants a strong overarching plot where you sit through reams of dialogue, then this probably isn't going to be for you. There is a massive amount of text, but it comes primarily in the form of incidental events. Depending on the character you start as, there may not be much of a core throughline at all (for instance, Leonard's story is extremely lean). Some characters, like Urpina, have a pretty strong throughline. But it's definitely more like a Dragon Quest than a Final Fantasy in terms of the narrative focus.
It's currently tied with Sekiro as my GotY, and I'm about 40 hours into Urpina's quest with no end in sight, so we'll see if it overtakes Sekiro for me. I think it's an absolute achievement.
And I understand fans of more traditional designs trepidation about this. If you go into this with the expectation of a linear story, developed characters, and a small scale explorable world, it's not going to be there. But you will find a world of extremely open events, a mass of characters for party building that the game will encourage you to play with, and exploration on a macro level unlike what you'd find with any traditional JRPG.
Thanks for doing more to spread the word OP, this game really needs all the love it can get, especially as Square Enix didn't bother marketing it at all. And if course thanks to duckroll's old crazy posts that had so many of us willing to jump in lol
And I understand fans of more traditional designs trepidation about this. If you go into this with the expectation of a linear story, developed characters, and a small scale explorable world, it's not going to be there. But you will find a world of extremely open events, a mass of characters for party building that the game will encourage you to play with, and exploration on a macro level unlike what you'd find with any traditional JRPG.
Thanks for doing more to spread the word OP, this game really needs all the love it can get, especially as Square Enix didn't bother marketing it at all. And if course thanks to duckroll's old crazy posts that had so many of us willing to jump in lol
Yeah, I agree with all of this. IMO there's a lot more to appeal to fans of almost every other turn-based RPG sub-genre other than there is for fans of the traditional story-based JRPG games, which is ironic because people really seem dead-set on viewing this from the JRPG angle.
I think imagining a mashup of New Horizons, Into the Breach, and Sunless Skies is a decent way to conceptualize the game (with a SaGa coat of mechanical paint).
It's like a tabletop RPG in some ways. You wander around on the world map interacting with different locations in each zone. The entire world map is split into a dozen or so zones, each of which is a major region of the world. Each of these zones have places which have combat, places which have characters and scenario events, and as you encounter such events you start sidequests that often lead into combat but also into discovering more about the world, the people in it, the different cultures, histories, and myths, and also how the political landscape of the world is. There are four main story scenarios that comprise of the critical path in the game, each of these are linked to one of the four characters you can choose to start with, but regardless who you play as, you can see the other scenarios play out, just in different orders. You can also opt to skip or choose between some of these scenarios depending on who you are playing as. There are also branching endings for the four main characters. The regions in the game offer tons of optional side scenarios, recruitable characters, and secrets. It's very story heavy even though the battle system is the highlight in terms of mechanic design.
However, the game offers two UI options, and the Classic option is made for mobile, with substantially bigger text.
Put simply: If you couldn't appreciate what Octopath was doing, you won't be able to appreciate what SSG is doing. It's probably not for you. It isn't a game that's about a strong overarching narrative with lots of expository dialogue and a heavily interactive ensemble.
The two games are not really similar in any way, other than being Japanese RPGs that have good implementation of turn based combat mechanics. Scarlet Grace blows Octopath away completely in terms of strategic variations, balance, and combat feel. Also in scenario design and freedom. Octopath has really cool boss sprites, and both are on par with top-tier soundtracks though. Octopath is also easier to get into and less scary for "regular" RPG fans.
Wouldn't your mindset here prevent you from ever running into a JRPG that could be propped up on the gameplay alone?
Sure, but you're not going to break a mindset formed and reinforced since middle school that easily.