Romancing SaGa 2, Part 4 - Glistening Mermaids

Next is some sort of cliff-based dungeon. I don't even know what this is for, and just kinda wandered into it. They should call this game "Wandering SaGa"

This is apparently useful later, but I don't know. In the meantime we're just like, robbing birds of their houses.

...sexually?

Yeah, definitely sexually.

The hell kind of town is this?

I hop a boat to Atlanticus ASAP. Looks like this is the land of the mermaids.

All anyone talks about here are mermaids. Mermaids and their glistening breasts. Gee I wonder what that old guy on the left is going to talk about.

She makes a point. Where are the mermen? Working in the mines, probably.

Keep your excitement in ya rat bastard!

Between mermaids, dancers, and love potion making witches, this is definitely the "hot" portion of Romancing SaGa 2.

I like how the women in the town are all jealous of the mermaids and the dancer (and probably the witch).

I find the witch. You can only get one potion at a time (due to the game having an inexplicable 10k limit on how much money you can carry). LP is definitely the answer. It might even be worth it to trek back and forth to Avalon replenishing money and buying more LP potions. They'll probably be super-useful in the final chapter when you have an ultimate party and don't want to lose anyone.

Next up is a town with a trio of towers. Each one is a mini-dungeon. The tallest one has this boss at the end, a minion of noted Seven Heroes member Noel.

"I am an important man!" he barks.

This isn't much of a boss fight, thing keels over in like two hits. After that, the fight with Noel himself is unlocked. Where is he though?

Out in the desert, this lake can randomly appear in a bunch of places. Just have to roam around until it does. This is where Noel hangs out.

A bunch of people are trapped here forever. Not sure why they don't just walk out, that's never clear. Unless...

...so this means the characters here can't leave because their life will be cut short?

Weird thing is, it doesn't have this effect on the party. So they basically scare you over nothing. Whole thing is weird.

Another lame thing about this area. This makes it easy to actually lose a few LP in this damn desert.

In the oasis building is Noel. I don't think you're supposed to fight this guy until a little later. He's currently in the middle of a fight with someone from the nearby town. Is he really holding people captive here? WHO KNOWS

The Seven Heroes are supposed to all be really tough, but I gotta say, this fight isn't. He wastes a LOT of turns just like "sizing up the situation" or whatnot and only really gets serious towards the end.

No casualties, for a fight I wasn't even sure would be winnable. Two down, five to go.

"Make love to me, Emperor!" squeak the various bellydancing desert maidens in this zone.

I don't know what's goin' on.

Next mission: Find a kid and a mu calf. The only problem is...they're in the lair of one of the Seven Heroes.

Wait, why don't you guys go rescue the kid? "CAN'T WE GOTTA MIGRATE SRY"

Next up is a cave dungeon where chipmunk and zombie can co-exist in harmony with serpents.

The enemy groupings in SaGa games are completely bizarre

At the end of the dungeon is the next of the Seven Heroes. Usually this is the second one people encounter, but he's also one of the tougher ones. It's very much a "come back later" situation.

He's out defeating other bosses and taking their power. If you leave him up, every couple of generations he slays another dungeon boss and gets more powerful, up to five iterations. You can go around and defeat all of the bosses before he does to deprive him of the powerup, or try to defeat him before he powers up. His first powerup is at generation 6. Which means you only have until the end of the 5th generation, and we're on the 4th.

Now this is more like it for a boss design, guy is an absolute beast.

...and he trounces our heroes handily. Well, this is a problem. Gonna go do other things with the sole purpose of getting tough enough to take him on. He has a 200-300 point AOE which is a problem when everyone has like 250 HP. Need to get over 300 HP and maybe some defense to bring the numbers down.

This guy builds bridges and whatnot, and every time passage he'll be replaced with another ancestor in the same room. It's kinda funny how they do that in this game, NPCs will be in the same spot doing the same things, but it'll be their "descendants" as time goes on.

Bar-people: "Coward!"

Chris Jericho and Owen Hart's Stunt Doubles: "Coward!"

If things seem discombobulated with this game, it's because they pretty much are. It whisks you from one area to the next and each has its own self-contained problems, with little to no connective threads most of the time. There's no real storyline to follow here outside of "find the Seven Heroes and stop them from whatever they're doing" and you don't really have party members to seek out like you do in RS3. Everyone's just recruited from the central hub at Avalon, and you're gonna end up with the same class archetypes over and over.

All of that said, it's a great episodic type of RPG and a lot of fun so far. It's just...discombobulated, and expecting any sort of sweeping story out of this one is barking up the wrong tree. Which is pretty standard for SaGa.

More later.