RS3: Decided to see if I could spare myself some grinding and just blast through the rest of the game. This illusion was quickly dispelled when the next mandatory boss (Red Dragon Ruler) demolished the party with two rounds of multitarget attacks. What happened game. We used to be be friends. So I resigned myself to smashing Ancient Ruins randoms to build up a backup healer and what the hell, let's see if we can nab all those top-tier techs while I'm at it. Cue grinding. A lot of grinding. This is what I do during dinner for a week grinding.
Eventually people just stop learning things and I say to hell with it, this is probably enough, sure Ellen absolutely refused to learn any axe techs better than Blade Roll, but at least I've got Dragon Inferno and Split Body, that'll probably be enough. So then we set out to avenge old wrongs: Yami dies in two turns. Red Dragon Ruler dies in two turns (didn't even use his breath attack this time). Abyss Naga dies in two turns.
I may have gone a little overboard with the grinding.
The final four posed relatively little threat after all that (except for Aunas, who is still a cheap bastard) though they did at least live a decent while. I like how their true forms are all somehow less monstrous. Their old battle theme was better, though. Also why does the wind fiend only cast earth spells, I don't understand. Final boss was tremendously sad until Eclipse mode when he/she/it goes all you know what I'm gonna spam MT damage multiple times a turn now, just because I can. I actually had to break out a life cane the last turn! Man, not even full healing on those things? Glad I took the time to train up a second healer.
The victory dance the party sprites do just before the credits is honestly very cute (except for you, you stupid kid. Get off my boat, dammit!)
Good game. SaGa, so obviously a strange mix of fun and complete nonsense, but it's very easy to just sit down and play for a variety of reasons:
-Visible random encounters.
-100% effective escape rate (even for boss fights).
-Fast travel anywhere outside dungeons (hit button, warp to world map).
-Reserve PCs level up alongside active PCs, new recruits scale up to party averages.
-Cursor memory, auto-healing after battles.
These are mostly things I think should be standard in an RPG, a little surprised to find them all in one place on a SNES game. I found this made it surprisingly user-friendly despite the complete lack of any kind of direction and the occasional dick move (dammit, Sara! Man, what happens if she's your MC?) I'm still not sure how I even got involved in the plot in the first place. I don't recall anyone genuinely asking or even suggesting that maybe it would be a good idea to embark on a trip to the Abyss to save the world. Maybe one random NPC in this hick town in Scandinavia mentioned it? It's like Katrina didn't have any leads on getting the sword back and figured let's save the world just for something to do.
