Romancing SaGa 2, Part 3 - Southern Lands

 

RS2 continues with more Emperors! More roaming around the discombobulated landscape! And the party battles the second of the Seven Heroes.

Next scenario I tackle is the Canal Fortress, an important Imperial outpost that has been taken over by monsters. There are like 3 different ways to infiltrate this place:

-Talk to a thief lady and get the Thieves Guild to sneak you into the fortress.

-Pay some dude a bunch of gold to unlock the fortress' side door.

-JUST START BLASTIN

I choose the third option and fight my way in because I can't be arsed with all that. This is actually a really hard boss fight. You have to defeat the gate, which summons unlimited enemies. The thing is, the Gargoyles are front row, so when they're up they block attacks from reaching the gate. So you need to have solid enough DPS to take the Gargoyles out AND get a couple hits on the gate every round.

Winning is pretty rough at this point in the game, if not impossible, unless you've sparked a few higher-level attacks.

Got a random drop from an enemy in here, a shield that's like 3x as good as the best shield you can buy from stores at this point. That's gonna be really useful, considering I usually have a tank upfront taking most of the hits.

After a fairly uneventful dungeon, we arrive at the Idura of RS2. This guy isn't a Seven Hero, but he's a minion of one.

He makes sure to let us know that Gades was the weakest Sinistral. Crazy how the weakest is always the first one to run into the good guys.

No clue who Bokhohn is but I'm sure we'll battle eventually.

A boss fight that is way easier than the gate follows, and that's it for the Canal Fortress.

Most of the game seems to be bite-sized chapters, almost like a mission or scenario system, where you arrive at a new locale and it has some problem to solve. There's no set order to do stuff, so you just kinda wander around and find dungeons/fights to do.

That gets us a time jump. Time for the Third Emperor!

Yeah, unfortunately Beloved Children's Bear Gerard is now a thing of the past.

Walrus?? That sounds like his Frat nickname. My boy Walrus is a LEGEND at shotgunning beers!

I decide to keep the mage theme of the Emperors going and pick the court mage. At this point Light Magic is by far my highest skill on the Emperor.

Each generation-change is like a fresh start, where you get to recruit a new party. Generally your previous party's stats will carry over as a "global" starting point for all new characters. The only downside is that eventually it can get a little obnoxious having to recruit a new party and get them equipped after every generation change.

I immediately go and recruit M'BOY Walrus, seen here tapping a keg and playing beer pong.

Seems that whoever you don't pick on the Emperor changeover, they're available for recruitment regardless.

So what happens if your Emperor runs out of LP and dies? You choose another party member to be the Emperor. There's no time jump from that. Have to finish a certain amount of scenarios for each time jump, and eventually you end up at the Final Emperor and the endgame.

The next place I tackle is a dungeon full of slimes. There's a boss fight in here:

This big slime, which only really takes damage from casters. Good thing I have a caster-focused party. Here's a shot from the Super Famicom version, which is VERY similar to the port visuals. Just a good few years behind on graphical power.

There are a few ways to go about this section as well. These monk mercenaries want you to defeat the big slime for them and then back off. So you defeat the slime, and then you can:

A) Leave the dungeon and let the monk mercs finish the rest, which causes them to join the Empire

B) Continue in the dungeon and beat the boss yourself, prompting the monk mercs to go hostile. Defeat their leader and the Empire conquers this area.

Either way you end up with more land added to the Empire (available for fast-travel), but if you befriend the monk mercs, you can recruit them as party members when rounding up a new lineup. I like the variety of approaches in all of these scenarios. At the same time, it can make things a little more confusing.

Looks like I'm about 1/8th done conquering the world.

The most important building is finished being constructed, which means...

...now I can train in spells on any character. This makes casters INSTANTLY way more useful and viable than they were before this, and I can give Light Ball to characters besides the Emperor.

Then there's the upgrade, Sunlight, which is one big light attack against a single foe. This seems like the strongest magic attack for most of the early game and maybe the mid game too. Get Light Ball on casters, spam it to level it up, then unleash Sunlight on bosses.

Here we go, a nice simple scenario: Go to the mines and clear them of enemies.

The Gemstone Mines are another dungeon, no big whoop. There's nothing really interesting or standout about a lot of these dungeons so far, they're just kinda all there.

This random guy sells a super-important item: A seashell that lets you speak to fish. I'll need this later to avoid a very tough unnecessary boss fight.

Next up are the frosty southern lands of Nazelle.

This place is full of oxes, called Mu, and some aboriginal tribes. The areas in this game continue to be really distinct from each other, like little pocket universes that have nothing to do with each other. Yep, this is definitely SaGa. At least the Empire is kind of an overarching connective element for this world.

Soon after that, we get another time jump outta nowhere! Here's Taurus, the 4th Emperor. Still going with casters.

This means no more of m'boy WALRUS. Legend has it that he was crushed by a falling stack of kegs shortly after the last we saw him.

Taurus runs around recruiting a party, then I equip them just like the previous party and go learn the same spells/skills (skills carry over and can be learned from the dojo). These changeovers are fun when trying something different, but when I like the party I'm rolling with, I end up just copying it with the next one.

Case in point, getting a new caster equipped with Light magic.

Here's what might be the most crucial defensive ability in the game, or at least the first half. TONS of enemies use Hypnosis, which puts the whole party to sleep and rarely misses. Some enemy groups can borderline stunlock you with this. Eventually someone will spark Hypnosis resistance. After you finish a chapter and get a time jump, any abilities you learned in that chapter will be moved to the dojo for anyone to learn, and that's your opportunity to equip Hypnosis resist on everyone. Any time you recruit new characters? That's right, dojo, Hypnosis resist.

Next is the Gelid Ruins, a purely optional area with a very rough boss fight.

This is the Giant (unfortunately, no Battle 2 music from SaGa Frontier) and the fight is a doozy. He can pretty much one-shot anyone at this point. Luckily, reviving characters is easy in this game since heals also function as revives. Most importantly, the Sword Barrier spell (Light) negates pretty much all of his attacks, so if you put it on every character (since it's self-only) the fight is nearly un-loseable. Need to reach a certain level of growth for Sword Barrier to be available, though.

The reward for that fight, which took me a bunch of tries: ...an axe. It's a very good axe, with a higher damage amount than any of my other weapons (50 vs 20-30). Unfortunately, axes in this game are kind of terrible. They miss a LOT, so the damage would have to be like 100 for it to be worth using.

Next Time: Hot Mermaids.