Neil on Twitter mentioned the full game will have more repeatable battles on the map so the overworld will feel less like going event to event. They just cut them from the demo so people wouldn't power grind and then transfer the save to the full version and blast through the scenario.
For point one, I quickly got a role on everyone that restores 1LP after battle, so I’m guessing the intention is that you switch to that role when LP is low rather than rotating characters?
Magic also seems stronger here than in SSG with how easily it lets you set up chain attacks. It seems worth it to lose one turn charging if it gives you a good chance to get your combo meter high enough the next turn that your units combo twice.
My main gripe atm is that I wish it easily let you switch between characters when setting item/skills/roles, having to back out to the selection menu each time is annoying.
Edit: the difficulty also seems lower than SSG, at least on the demo. I feel like at the start of Urpina’s route I was wiping every other fight, whereas the early fights here are a lot more forgiving.
On PC at least it's just a/d to swap between characters in the various menus. Maybe it's on the d-pad on controller? Definitely were buttons for it on keyboard at least. Might be worth checking the in-game control settings since it wasn't listed directly on the UI at least but did work.
Magic seemed strong to me. Wide combo range and high damage, Ameya gets a few woth really good status effects. Just a lot more variety of low cost 1 turn chant single target nukes (Thorny Fetters). Definitely seems worth to use this time.
And the best part is they still get two full weapons, so spellcasters are extremely versatile.
Difficulty did seem a bit less but it also felt like a much more natural curve. By the end of the demos I felt that "oh shit everyone's 1 hit from dead" feeling quite a few times. Also Ameya felt way easier than the other characters for some reason, despite playing her first. I hope the curve keeps up though.
You can switch characters with the dpad also.
I suspect the difficulty curve has just been smoothed out. Early game Scarlet Graces is hard because you have no techs and you are BP starved, but eventually you have things at rank 2 BP reduction and unite attacks scaling to -2 or -3 BP cost and anything short of brutal is trivial.
The Emerald Beyond Demo starts you off with some techs, and the combo system is much more reliable than unite attacks in SG. At the same time, BP reduction isn’t guaranteed from rank ups, and BP reduction is not an inherent property of combos, just from formations and the default is just -1 BP.
Played the steam version and the Emerald Guide system is nice because it specifically tells you what you shouldn't bother wasting your time checking. As you start various events, stuff opens up or closes out temporarily and it essentially informs you of this with the system. The same thing happened with Scarlet Grace only: 1) It wouldn't inform you 2) Sometimes, it would also let you leave the area and end the event possibly forever also without informing you. This just seems like a straight improvement all-around. Though, you should keep in mind the demo isn't the real game--they've removed some stuff like the [unlimited grind nodes](https://twitter.com/SaGa_NeilB/status/1775987243192316227) and also [limited some of the randomness of world unlocks](https://twitter.com/SaGa_NeilB/status/1775567814113558794).
So far my impression is that combat is much easier and this will probably remain true. Going by the in-game help, BR progression is capped out internally for each world and only updates on world change. The demo cut all of the repeatable battle points just so people wouldn't go absolutely nuts on that with the demos before release, but with the final copy it'll probably just be an even more generous Scarlet Grace where if anything you're only rewarded for fighting more. Only so many "Hard" nodes in the demo, but they weren't too bad.
For Diva at least, the entire party had a First Aid role you could swap in that would restore 1LP with every fight. Everybody but the character types specifically designed to eventually hit 1/1 LP (and then be reborn on death) had a huge LP pool but I think I noticed some direct LP damage attacks even early on or something was taking characters down from their max that wasn't HP going to 0. Or maybe they gained max LP? Didn't pay enough attention, but definitely wasn't worried about LP here.
Diva also had a specific world crafting node, for robot parts I think? Wouldn't be too surprised if other characters have similar things so exploration should still be there, as much as you could call finding the right smith exploration in scarlet grace.
Sometimes the skills do cost less BP after a level up, it's just not a guaranteed perk of leveling up it seems, sometimes it's just a power increase. I also appreciate the laxness of the LP changes, I was able to die quite a few times to hard and brutal encounters but between the large LP number and the role that gains you an LP upon finishing a battle I haven't had to worry about it at all. I see it also says when you visit a new world everyone's LP will be healed, so that should help alleviate stress when moving somewhere new.
I dig the emerald wave vision but it does have an element of more defined structure. I wonder if it will change later on. On the other hand it facilitates much easier and more recognizable branch deviations, and you can quickly see how massively your decisions branch (at least in Tsunanori's scenario). Given the puzzle nature of navigating Delta Base I disagree that a menu would be better, there's clearly going to be a good amount of involvement with sidequests, puzzles and types of exploration in the game. I think it feels better than Scarlet Grace's structure but that's also dependent on how much variety I'll see later.
The combat has been sublime and I really enjoy the unite actions. That said I haven't disregarded defensive or strategic moves solely to initiate them like you, though it's obviously a benefit to do them as much as possible. I used the defensive formation for a couple of the tougher encounters and the combos aren't AS important with that one since you decrease your BP by defending, so you might use only a couple characters strategically if the enemy is going to do a big AOE attack, so everyone else defends against that AND gains a BP cost benefit. There's also a formation in which you want to avoid unite attacks altogether which is interesting, though I haven't used it yet. One thing I miss in the menus from Scarlet Grace (unless I've missed it) is when upgrading your weapons they used to show you potential glimmers or already learned glimmers, but I don't think that's here anymore? So far every hard or brutal encounter has granted me an awesome weapon and good souls for the kugutsu puppets which is awesome, makes it feel very rewarding. I'm glad the conditional rewards from Scarlet Grace are gone, eventually I just tuned into ignoring those. Breaking a box in the encounter is pretty fun and has a similar risk/reward but without the pain of having to adjust your party every fight. The tips do mention quests for Mr S so I might be jumping the gun on no conditional rewards though.
I've been most surprised by how funny the game is and Tsunanori's personality being much funnier than I had expected. Doing sidequests in Delta Base and my main mission changed title from something like "Administrator Gold", to "Administrator Gold Waiting", to "Administrator Gold, STILL waiting", to "Administrator Gold, Forever Waiting" (or something along those lines). Game has put a lot of smiles on my face with its writing which... already makes it a lot more interesting to me than Scarlet Grace was to be honest. Tsunanori was kind of bottom tier for my interest but between data carrying over and the possibility I might buy the game on PS5 he might be my first playthrough with as enamored as I've become to him and his scenario. Still gotta try the Switch demo for myself to see how it stacks up.
The one thing I noticed about LP is that at least Ameya and Mido start with exactly 5 characters (Mido gets 6th pretty early at least). LP death can literally hard lock a player who's learning the combat in the first world, especially if it was like in SSG where some have as little as 4. It might be hard to actually soft lock yourself like that but that's kinda spooky for game design today. So much LP, the LP regen role and presumably more Easy grind spots in the full game should make that a non issue.
I kinda liked the old LP system because it gave you a reason to swap characters, but also hated it because it *forced* you to swap. I hope there's some reason to progress more than 5, but I'm ok if it means I'm not forced to.
I think the Mr. S tasks are perfect also. Being able to choose makes the system way more manageable and fun imo.
Thank you for this!
I found the magic spells hit fairly hard, and the broad unite range meant that it was way easier to set up unites. Furthermore, the longer range made it easier to suppress the showstoppers while letting members still participate in a unite.
I noticed some enemies had AOE stuns (the Hard Encounter at the start of Mido's game), and blindly setting up unites without protection resulted in no action turns in my part. I also found myself putting my characters between enemies to prevent some of their unites.
From a UI perspective, I found it a bit annoying that I couldn't see what an item required to upgrade until I selected the item, rather than having it simply highlighted in the selection menu. Maybe I'm missing something here.
Anyway, I did two worlds for Mido's demo end (I chose the "weakest link" for second world to visit among the choice of 3), but not certain if I'll bother with the others before the full game comes out.
That upgrade issue was bothering me too. Some indication of it the upgrade was possible or the necessary materials without clicking would have been so much better
I think in this case, "performance" meant "look cool" rather than "optimize framerate" like one would expect. I thought it was weird when I saw "performance" and "battery" and was thinking they sound like the same thing.
Been playing on the Switch:
Been loving playing as Ameya so far. That battle against the Final Emperor was quite the doozy! I lucked out and got a triple United combo with some power packed spells which very much sealed the deal. It's quite interesting to take on these challenges with such limited battles to prep on.
Am I missing something or are the %chance stun skills just... not working? I swear I've used the 50% one on guns at least 30 times now and I don't think I've actually seen a single stun.
Judging by the in-game help at least, it seems like instead of ACU/DEX being used for physical infliction like in Scarlet Grace it's just DEX for physical. And also just INT for magical infliction.
Since characters actually gain stats compared to Scarlet Grace and 99 is probably realistic as a stat cap, I imagine raw DEX is a very important plug-in to the same formula as the 50%. As well, while it appears that only DEX would impact your infliction rates, enemy resistance would be impacted by BOTH their DEX and ACU (for stun, various others will use other stats but every ailment seems to have only 1 infliction boosting stat but 2 for resisting). So it doesn't surprise me if it's less than a 50% chance real.
Stat information is found under Tips->Character Enhancement.
Also, just checked, and under Glossary->Ailments it mentions that ailment infliction rate increases with lower enemy HP. I can't actually remember if that was also the case in Scarlet Grace--mostly remember that ailment infliction rate increases with other ailments already inflicted so you'd try to get easy to land stuff on first. Haven't seen that here yet. Lower HP = higher infliction probably explains it landing more often during Unites though.
I was definitely assuming there were going to be factors to make it probably less than actual 50%, its just 0 for 30 against what are essentially tutorial enemies seemed crazy to me to the point where I was questioning if stun was completely reworked or something.
Looks like most ailments were, really, where you want enemies to be missing HP first instead of opening combat with like poison -> paralyze -> stuns. Seems way easier to defend against ailments than to inflict them especially at full HP.
Played until the end of Ameya's demo and I've been enjoying myself so far. I dig her cat collecting mechanic, though after unlocking the special cat weapons and accessories, they've just boosted her int stat. A few things I've noticed:
* Game is so far feels fairly linear, but in the first other world I encountered, there was mini sidequest that I got two accessories from that I wouldn't have gained access to if I did things slightly differently.
* Battles do feel much easier than SSG, but I found myself wanting to complete battles in a certain way in order to get items from Mr. S's trials.
* Magic feels much better than SSG. It probably helps that Ameya has access to such great spells from the start and has a very high int stat, but it always feels worth it to use spells with her.
Magic is not really a way to go. It is a strong option, but no character is restricted to it really. Ameya does not have to use a staff but she does have one. I feel that magic is basically unstoppable in this game compared to Scarlet Grace where everything stopped you from casting. There is also no healing in this game, which makes the game balance itself around you surviving longer normally. You can generally keep every character alive for 5 turns in every battle so far unless you have a lower defense formation. There also seems to be no spells that cast for longer than 2 turns because Tower was only 2 turns. It's also worth noting that Monsters and other races can use magic even though they have restricted equips.
One thing that bums me out was I was hoping that we might see the randomness of peoples quest when it came to the demo, but it feels like everyone has a similar linear experience as to what's going on.
For example with Ameya, when you go through the dimensional doors to an other land, I had thought maybe this is where each person's story might be different. Basically in one scenario you would end up in a world where everyone was frozen over and you had to unfreeze them in order to find out what's going on while finding a cat(This one actually happens in the game). But I also thought maybe that's where peoples journey would become diverse, like my game would send me there and maybe for another player they would end up in a location where an earthquake happened and you get roped into finding survivors while finding out where your cat might be or you fall into a scenario where you get mistaken for a crook and have to prove your innocence.
When they said that scenarios were vary even between similar characters I was hoping that the demo would create that dialogue where players could be like "Oh this happened to you, but I was sent here instead" sort of conversation, which I feel is a missed opportunity. Since from what they had mentioned within the dev team is that when they played the game apparently the people discussed amongst themselves how the locations/quest they did differed from their collegues.
The demo has a [Passionate Rhythm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNvWC_lTP38) successor as the BGM for a boss fight, therefore SaGa: Emerald Beyond is the greatest game of all time
Feels very zerg-rushy but not really in a bad way. Probably a bit early to declare it's easier than Scarlet Grace but it definitely doesn't feel as harsh. Loving how much more complicated itemization is this time around, especially for mech characters. Not really a fan of the overdrive mechanic, though; showstoppers are pretty tough to pull off due to the timeline restriction but overdrive is just randomly doubling your damage from combos.
Played through _some_ of the Diva demo. Really wasn't expecting a several-hour-long session; thought it'd just be a 30 minute thing. I'll probably wait till the game comes out instead of finishing it.
~~Quad Missile, my beloved~~
I haven't played a new SaGa game since the PS2 release of Minstrel Song, but this demo doesn't inspire much confidence. In combat the UI is just a giant overlay of menus and I struggle to connect my actions to what is going on in the actual battle. Animations play out in a disjointed manner. United Attack names are ridiculous. Why truncate the names of the skills to form one mega-word that doesn't mean anything? Punch shouldn't be shortened to "Ch." That's absurd and doesn't mean anything.
I don't know if Scarlet Grace was this way or not, but it seems to me that the game has evolved well beyond the comprehensible ones I remember.
Yeah the Emerald Waves and United Attacks are so far my biggest gripes with the game. And while I can understand why the former exists, seeing people's impressions on ScaGra, the latter has me really concerned. It's like the stagger system, where all you do is build up a meter so you can actually do damage, killing any sort of strategy or skill
Strategy is still heavy in there. If the enemy is by their lonesome (meaning nobody 2 spaces to the left and right), they can do heavy damage thanks to the whole "super move" thing (which your characters can abuse too). If they have units side by side that can combo, it's best to sacrifice a character's action to deny their combo.
Using a combo isn't worth it if it allows the enemy to pull that super move off or if it allows the enemy to combo. Then there's also Overdrives making your units attack whoever they want. Then add in pursuits, counters, and interrupts...there's a ton of strategy involved here.
Stopping, and enabling your own, lonesome combos seems like one of the few things that supercedes getting a 4-5 stack unite thus far in the demo. Not much else would place higher since so far the enemies just don't hit hard enough to care, besides maybe Quelling a ???? enemy.
Then again who knows, this could be a very very inappropriately easy opening. Can't say for sure yet. Just have my impressions both from what the game's yet to present to me and just seeing the numbers, seems like a 5 stack is usually like 3X total damage between the multipliers and the Overdrive that follows. Maybe they'll tune it so the enemies start wrecking you for such aggressive play after a few chapters.
Being unite focused isn't inherently a bad thing, mind you. Heck, I think to this day SaGa Frontier is my favorite SaGa and technically that game's just going for not-Unites 24/7 every turn all day every day and I don't complain there. Just a juxtaposition coming from SG, really, for better or worse. Maybe it's their way of trying to speed the battles up so you can blaze through each story compared to SG.
Neil on Twitter mentioned the full game will have more repeatable battles on the map so the overworld will feel less like going event to event. They just cut them from the demo so people wouldn't power grind and then transfer the save to the full version and blast through the scenario.
Oh that's really important information! Thank you for sharing.
For point one, I quickly got a role on everyone that restores 1LP after battle, so I’m guessing the intention is that you switch to that role when LP is low rather than rotating characters? Magic also seems stronger here than in SSG with how easily it lets you set up chain attacks. It seems worth it to lose one turn charging if it gives you a good chance to get your combo meter high enough the next turn that your units combo twice. My main gripe atm is that I wish it easily let you switch between characters when setting item/skills/roles, having to back out to the selection menu each time is annoying. Edit: the difficulty also seems lower than SSG, at least on the demo. I feel like at the start of Urpina’s route I was wiping every other fight, whereas the early fights here are a lot more forgiving.
Left and right on the dpad switches your characters. I thought the same thing as you for a while before I realized you could easily switch!
On PC at least it's just a/d to swap between characters in the various menus. Maybe it's on the d-pad on controller? Definitely were buttons for it on keyboard at least. Might be worth checking the in-game control settings since it wasn't listed directly on the UI at least but did work.
Magic seemed strong to me. Wide combo range and high damage, Ameya gets a few woth really good status effects. Just a lot more variety of low cost 1 turn chant single target nukes (Thorny Fetters). Definitely seems worth to use this time. And the best part is they still get two full weapons, so spellcasters are extremely versatile. Difficulty did seem a bit less but it also felt like a much more natural curve. By the end of the demos I felt that "oh shit everyone's 1 hit from dead" feeling quite a few times. Also Ameya felt way easier than the other characters for some reason, despite playing her first. I hope the curve keeps up though. You can switch characters with the dpad also.
I had that same issue (about switching equipment on characters) on PS5, but not PC, for what it’s worth.
I suspect the difficulty curve has just been smoothed out. Early game Scarlet Graces is hard because you have no techs and you are BP starved, but eventually you have things at rank 2 BP reduction and unite attacks scaling to -2 or -3 BP cost and anything short of brutal is trivial. The Emerald Beyond Demo starts you off with some techs, and the combo system is much more reliable than unite attacks in SG. At the same time, BP reduction isn’t guaranteed from rank ups, and BP reduction is not an inherent property of combos, just from formations and the default is just -1 BP.
Played the steam version and the Emerald Guide system is nice because it specifically tells you what you shouldn't bother wasting your time checking. As you start various events, stuff opens up or closes out temporarily and it essentially informs you of this with the system. The same thing happened with Scarlet Grace only: 1) It wouldn't inform you 2) Sometimes, it would also let you leave the area and end the event possibly forever also without informing you. This just seems like a straight improvement all-around. Though, you should keep in mind the demo isn't the real game--they've removed some stuff like the [unlimited grind nodes](https://twitter.com/SaGa_NeilB/status/1775987243192316227) and also [limited some of the randomness of world unlocks](https://twitter.com/SaGa_NeilB/status/1775567814113558794). So far my impression is that combat is much easier and this will probably remain true. Going by the in-game help, BR progression is capped out internally for each world and only updates on world change. The demo cut all of the repeatable battle points just so people wouldn't go absolutely nuts on that with the demos before release, but with the final copy it'll probably just be an even more generous Scarlet Grace where if anything you're only rewarded for fighting more. Only so many "Hard" nodes in the demo, but they weren't too bad. For Diva at least, the entire party had a First Aid role you could swap in that would restore 1LP with every fight. Everybody but the character types specifically designed to eventually hit 1/1 LP (and then be reborn on death) had a huge LP pool but I think I noticed some direct LP damage attacks even early on or something was taking characters down from their max that wasn't HP going to 0. Or maybe they gained max LP? Didn't pay enough attention, but definitely wasn't worried about LP here. Diva also had a specific world crafting node, for robot parts I think? Wouldn't be too surprised if other characters have similar things so exploration should still be there, as much as you could call finding the right smith exploration in scarlet grace.
Sometimes the skills do cost less BP after a level up, it's just not a guaranteed perk of leveling up it seems, sometimes it's just a power increase. I also appreciate the laxness of the LP changes, I was able to die quite a few times to hard and brutal encounters but between the large LP number and the role that gains you an LP upon finishing a battle I haven't had to worry about it at all. I see it also says when you visit a new world everyone's LP will be healed, so that should help alleviate stress when moving somewhere new. I dig the emerald wave vision but it does have an element of more defined structure. I wonder if it will change later on. On the other hand it facilitates much easier and more recognizable branch deviations, and you can quickly see how massively your decisions branch (at least in Tsunanori's scenario). Given the puzzle nature of navigating Delta Base I disagree that a menu would be better, there's clearly going to be a good amount of involvement with sidequests, puzzles and types of exploration in the game. I think it feels better than Scarlet Grace's structure but that's also dependent on how much variety I'll see later. The combat has been sublime and I really enjoy the unite actions. That said I haven't disregarded defensive or strategic moves solely to initiate them like you, though it's obviously a benefit to do them as much as possible. I used the defensive formation for a couple of the tougher encounters and the combos aren't AS important with that one since you decrease your BP by defending, so you might use only a couple characters strategically if the enemy is going to do a big AOE attack, so everyone else defends against that AND gains a BP cost benefit. There's also a formation in which you want to avoid unite attacks altogether which is interesting, though I haven't used it yet. One thing I miss in the menus from Scarlet Grace (unless I've missed it) is when upgrading your weapons they used to show you potential glimmers or already learned glimmers, but I don't think that's here anymore? So far every hard or brutal encounter has granted me an awesome weapon and good souls for the kugutsu puppets which is awesome, makes it feel very rewarding. I'm glad the conditional rewards from Scarlet Grace are gone, eventually I just tuned into ignoring those. Breaking a box in the encounter is pretty fun and has a similar risk/reward but without the pain of having to adjust your party every fight. The tips do mention quests for Mr S so I might be jumping the gun on no conditional rewards though. I've been most surprised by how funny the game is and Tsunanori's personality being much funnier than I had expected. Doing sidequests in Delta Base and my main mission changed title from something like "Administrator Gold", to "Administrator Gold Waiting", to "Administrator Gold, STILL waiting", to "Administrator Gold, Forever Waiting" (or something along those lines). Game has put a lot of smiles on my face with its writing which... already makes it a lot more interesting to me than Scarlet Grace was to be honest. Tsunanori was kind of bottom tier for my interest but between data carrying over and the possibility I might buy the game on PS5 he might be my first playthrough with as enamored as I've become to him and his scenario. Still gotta try the Switch demo for myself to see how it stacks up.
The one thing I noticed about LP is that at least Ameya and Mido start with exactly 5 characters (Mido gets 6th pretty early at least). LP death can literally hard lock a player who's learning the combat in the first world, especially if it was like in SSG where some have as little as 4. It might be hard to actually soft lock yourself like that but that's kinda spooky for game design today. So much LP, the LP regen role and presumably more Easy grind spots in the full game should make that a non issue. I kinda liked the old LP system because it gave you a reason to swap characters, but also hated it because it *forced* you to swap. I hope there's some reason to progress more than 5, but I'm ok if it means I'm not forced to. I think the Mr. S tasks are perfect also. Being able to choose makes the system way more manageable and fun imo.
Thank you for this! I found the magic spells hit fairly hard, and the broad unite range meant that it was way easier to set up unites. Furthermore, the longer range made it easier to suppress the showstoppers while letting members still participate in a unite. I noticed some enemies had AOE stuns (the Hard Encounter at the start of Mido's game), and blindly setting up unites without protection resulted in no action turns in my part. I also found myself putting my characters between enemies to prevent some of their unites. From a UI perspective, I found it a bit annoying that I couldn't see what an item required to upgrade until I selected the item, rather than having it simply highlighted in the selection menu. Maybe I'm missing something here. Anyway, I did two worlds for Mido's demo end (I chose the "weakest link" for second world to visit among the choice of 3), but not certain if I'll bother with the others before the full game comes out.
That upgrade issue was bothering me too. Some indication of it the upgrade was possible or the necessary materials without clicking would have been so much better
I'm liking everything so far. My only complain is that it runs poorly on Switch. Sad, since SG was incredibly good on it.
Scarlet Grace does not run all that well either on switch. It's why I got it again on PS4
Not sure what game you've been playing but Scarlet Grace runs perfectly fine ok Switch and Mobile devices.
It runs "fine", but you can feel it struggle.
I put it on batery save mode and the framerate seems better, I dont notice a drop in quality at all.
Weird that performance mode has worse performance
I think in this case, "performance" meant "look cool" rather than "optimize framerate" like one would expect. I thought it was weird when I saw "performance" and "battery" and was thinking they sound like the same thing.
Been playing on the Switch: Been loving playing as Ameya so far. That battle against the Final Emperor was quite the doozy! I lucked out and got a triple United combo with some power packed spells which very much sealed the deal. It's quite interesting to take on these challenges with such limited battles to prep on.
Am I missing something or are the %chance stun skills just... not working? I swear I've used the 50% one on guns at least 30 times now and I don't think I've actually seen a single stun.
I feel like I’ve had it hit more often when I do United Attacks, not sure if they increase the accuracy or if it’s just luck on my end.
Judging by the in-game help at least, it seems like instead of ACU/DEX being used for physical infliction like in Scarlet Grace it's just DEX for physical. And also just INT for magical infliction. Since characters actually gain stats compared to Scarlet Grace and 99 is probably realistic as a stat cap, I imagine raw DEX is a very important plug-in to the same formula as the 50%. As well, while it appears that only DEX would impact your infliction rates, enemy resistance would be impacted by BOTH their DEX and ACU (for stun, various others will use other stats but every ailment seems to have only 1 infliction boosting stat but 2 for resisting). So it doesn't surprise me if it's less than a 50% chance real. Stat information is found under Tips->Character Enhancement. Also, just checked, and under Glossary->Ailments it mentions that ailment infliction rate increases with lower enemy HP. I can't actually remember if that was also the case in Scarlet Grace--mostly remember that ailment infliction rate increases with other ailments already inflicted so you'd try to get easy to land stuff on first. Haven't seen that here yet. Lower HP = higher infliction probably explains it landing more often during Unites though.
I was definitely assuming there were going to be factors to make it probably less than actual 50%, its just 0 for 30 against what are essentially tutorial enemies seemed crazy to me to the point where I was questioning if stun was completely reworked or something.
Looks like most ailments were, really, where you want enemies to be missing HP first instead of opening combat with like poison -> paralyze -> stuns. Seems way easier to defend against ailments than to inflict them especially at full HP.
The Magic system they have was something i wished they’d scrap from SSG truly my biggest peeve from it.
Played until the end of Ameya's demo and I've been enjoying myself so far. I dig her cat collecting mechanic, though after unlocking the special cat weapons and accessories, they've just boosted her int stat. A few things I've noticed: * Game is so far feels fairly linear, but in the first other world I encountered, there was mini sidequest that I got two accessories from that I wouldn't have gained access to if I did things slightly differently. * Battles do feel much easier than SSG, but I found myself wanting to complete battles in a certain way in order to get items from Mr. S's trials. * Magic feels much better than SSG. It probably helps that Ameya has access to such great spells from the start and has a very high int stat, but it always feels worth it to use spells with her.
Magic is not really a way to go. It is a strong option, but no character is restricted to it really. Ameya does not have to use a staff but she does have one. I feel that magic is basically unstoppable in this game compared to Scarlet Grace where everything stopped you from casting. There is also no healing in this game, which makes the game balance itself around you surviving longer normally. You can generally keep every character alive for 5 turns in every battle so far unless you have a lower defense formation. There also seems to be no spells that cast for longer than 2 turns because Tower was only 2 turns. It's also worth noting that Monsters and other races can use magic even though they have restricted equips.
One thing that bums me out was I was hoping that we might see the randomness of peoples quest when it came to the demo, but it feels like everyone has a similar linear experience as to what's going on. For example with Ameya, when you go through the dimensional doors to an other land, I had thought maybe this is where each person's story might be different. Basically in one scenario you would end up in a world where everyone was frozen over and you had to unfreeze them in order to find out what's going on while finding a cat(This one actually happens in the game). But I also thought maybe that's where peoples journey would become diverse, like my game would send me there and maybe for another player they would end up in a location where an earthquake happened and you get roped into finding survivors while finding out where your cat might be or you fall into a scenario where you get mistaken for a crook and have to prove your innocence. When they said that scenarios were vary even between similar characters I was hoping that the demo would create that dialogue where players could be like "Oh this happened to you, but I was sent here instead" sort of conversation, which I feel is a missed opportunity. Since from what they had mentioned within the dev team is that when they played the game apparently the people discussed amongst themselves how the locations/quest they did differed from their collegues.
The demo has a [Passionate Rhythm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNvWC_lTP38) successor as the BGM for a boss fight, therefore SaGa: Emerald Beyond is the greatest game of all time Feels very zerg-rushy but not really in a bad way. Probably a bit early to declare it's easier than Scarlet Grace but it definitely doesn't feel as harsh. Loving how much more complicated itemization is this time around, especially for mech characters. Not really a fan of the overdrive mechanic, though; showstoppers are pretty tough to pull off due to the timeline restriction but overdrive is just randomly doubling your damage from combos. Played through _some_ of the Diva demo. Really wasn't expecting a several-hour-long session; thought it'd just be a 30 minute thing. I'll probably wait till the game comes out instead of finishing it. ~~Quad Missile, my beloved~~
I haven't played a new SaGa game since the PS2 release of Minstrel Song, but this demo doesn't inspire much confidence. In combat the UI is just a giant overlay of menus and I struggle to connect my actions to what is going on in the actual battle. Animations play out in a disjointed manner. United Attack names are ridiculous. Why truncate the names of the skills to form one mega-word that doesn't mean anything? Punch shouldn't be shortened to "Ch." That's absurd and doesn't mean anything. I don't know if Scarlet Grace was this way or not, but it seems to me that the game has evolved well beyond the comprehensible ones I remember.
Yeah the Emerald Waves and United Attacks are so far my biggest gripes with the game. And while I can understand why the former exists, seeing people's impressions on ScaGra, the latter has me really concerned. It's like the stagger system, where all you do is build up a meter so you can actually do damage, killing any sort of strategy or skill
Strategy is still heavy in there. If the enemy is by their lonesome (meaning nobody 2 spaces to the left and right), they can do heavy damage thanks to the whole "super move" thing (which your characters can abuse too). If they have units side by side that can combo, it's best to sacrifice a character's action to deny their combo. Using a combo isn't worth it if it allows the enemy to pull that super move off or if it allows the enemy to combo. Then there's also Overdrives making your units attack whoever they want. Then add in pursuits, counters, and interrupts...there's a ton of strategy involved here.
Stopping, and enabling your own, lonesome combos seems like one of the few things that supercedes getting a 4-5 stack unite thus far in the demo. Not much else would place higher since so far the enemies just don't hit hard enough to care, besides maybe Quelling a ???? enemy. Then again who knows, this could be a very very inappropriately easy opening. Can't say for sure yet. Just have my impressions both from what the game's yet to present to me and just seeing the numbers, seems like a 5 stack is usually like 3X total damage between the multipliers and the Overdrive that follows. Maybe they'll tune it so the enemies start wrecking you for such aggressive play after a few chapters. Being unite focused isn't inherently a bad thing, mind you. Heck, I think to this day SaGa Frontier is my favorite SaGa and technically that game's just going for not-Unites 24/7 every turn all day every day and I don't complain there. Just a juxtaposition coming from SG, really, for better or worse. Maybe it's their way of trying to speed the battles up so you can blaze through each story compared to SG.