What are you playing?

[rabidtictac]

From the description I assume it's the NES one.

Somebody at Square really loves SaGa. The SaGa ports have all universally been better than the actual FF ports.

It's amazing looking at the love and care they put into these ports.
Meanwhile, before those Pixel remasters for FF they thought they could get away with shoddy ports of shoddy handheld/mobile ports.
Heck, the Steam version of Chrono Trigger might still be a shoddy port of a mobile port.

But hey, why even give a fuck with your flagship titles? As FFVIIR shows their fans will clap like seals even if the game is incomplete.

They still refuse to make the PSP versions of FF4, FF1 and FF2 (the best versions of those games) available more widely.

Notice how the Saga games weren't sold under some gay name like "pixel remaster." Even though most of those games are pixelated. Nah, they just made straight hd remasters with modern features and called it good. I've probably played 100 hours of Minstrel Song and not encountered a single bug or crash, and the only slowdown is when you run the game at 2 or 3x speed and deliberately spawn shit faster than the game ever intended.

Compare that to the garbage-ass Chrono Cross port, which can't even hold 30fps in battle on modern systems, and the lame FF9 port, which had fucking cheat engine-tier cheating built into the game. There's a (thick) line between quality-of-life and straight-up cheat engine shit. FF9's port had the latter.

https://www.destructoid.com/guide-here- ... x-for-ps4/

The first set of cheats is accessible from the pause menu and won’t deactivate trophies. You’ll see the four cheats at the bottom right of the pause screen and you can simply press the corresponding button to toggle them on and off.

The cheats accessible from the pause screen are as follows:

Battle Assistance: 

Battle Assistance can be activated by pressing L1 from the pause screen. It simply makes battle incredibly easy. It makes the ATB gauge of all of your party members fill instantly. It also keeps your health and magic points filled, as well as letting you enter trance mode at will.

9999:

This one is pretty self-explanatory. You can activate it by pressing L2 on the pause screen and all the characters in your party will deal 9999 damage and all healing magic and items will restore 9999 health points.

High Speed Mode:

This next one has become something of a standard in re-releases of old RPGs. By pressing R1 in the pause screen you’ll be able to play the game in fast forward, speeding up everything from dialogue to gameplay. 

Safe Travel:

The final pause screen cheat can be toggled from the pause screen with R2 and will disable all random battles.

Disabling random battles, dealing 9999 damage, and battle assistance?!? Why the fuck even play? High speed is the only feature among these that should have been included. And it doesn't disable trophies! So you can cheat trophies and then say you "mastered" the game. BTW DSP used the cheats when he played this game. I bet he considers that he "beat" the game too. Square are enabling this awful mentality of cheating and then being smug about "beating" games.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I think this started in their most underwhelming Steam port of FF7 where they introduce a "press X to level-up" button - so even the most retarded players can enjoy this epic tale :3

I'm almost shocked they haven't yet made an animu about the actual events in the actual original game if they consider le epic story to be so much more important than the gameplay. But then again a video game sells for more than some DVD / Blu-Ray.

[AdorableOtter]

New SaGaMS looks like the best remaster SqEni has ever released so far. x3 game speed is a godsend. They should have included the original 16-bit soundtrack too though.

I always wanted to play that game, but couldn't because it had a horribly slow everything and playing on turbo mode on emulator really didn't feel right. It felt borderline broken.

At this rate, maybe we finally see the remaster of DS Saga 2,3 or even entirely new SaGa 4 (or not, converting 2 screens to 1 could be too much work). I personally want an SFC RomaSAGA 1 remaster but it probably won't happen considering they have to do more than just fixing shit because SFC RomaSaGa was released unfinished.

glorious DS SaGaShow

But nothing will beat the high school life of the protagonist of 1, which consisted into watching people being killed by demons, his mother eaten alive and replaced by a demon, being framed for murder by demons disguised as cops, being imprisoned in a hospital to be experimented on, and watching Tokyo being nuked by angels disguised as American military.

You forgot to mention he being a computer nerd, treated like shit by a girl next door because he such a nerd (she dies anyway but still), still totally virgin (probably with rage), being unable to use magic or special attacks because nerd, frens (law/chaos heroes) are both fucked up in their own ways part.

Persona's success really changed the mainline, it doesn't help Persona fans eventually love nuSMTs. Strange Journey's protag was rather bland but he was still better than Persona-like normie kids who just wanna have fun, that was probably the last main character who felt like real megaten lead character.

[rabidtictac]

New SaGaMS looks like the best remaster SqEni has ever released so far. x3 game speed is a godsend. They should have included the original 16-bit soundtrack too though.

I always wanted to play that game, but couldn't because it had a horribly slow everything and playing on turbo mode on emulator really didn't feel right. It felt borderline broken.

Same. I heard about invisible Event Rank, saw how slow the movement was and how clunky the interface, and I decided not to play it (when it was limited to ps2 only). But now I'm playing the new version and loving it.

Turbo makes a massive difference and the extra characters are nice too. ER is visible, so you always know what your Event Rank is, and what quests are available or not. The game starts you with 10 smoke bombs and these refill whenever you spend 150 gold to rest at a deluxe inn. 10 smoke bombs means 10 free runs with 100% success. So you can easily combine this with LP running to manipulate your Event Rank exactly as you wish. It doesn't break the game though, because you have to win battles to beat the game. This isn't one of those SaGa games where you can skip 99% of the content on the first play if you know what to do. ER only increments from combat you win and quests primarily unlock from ER. Running from battles is more useful for maintaining your Event Rank at a particular level until you finish a series of quests. It only delays combat without removing the challenge entirely (unlike FF9's cheat menu.)

Oh, and smoke bombs do not work when enemies chain! It's this kind of thoughtful design that shows the people pushing the remaster cared deeply about Minstrel Song. If you can't LP run, then you can't use a smoke bomb either. No running from bosses, minibosses, scripted encounters or enemy chains. Git gud scrub!

The game remains brutally difficult in places. Plebbit and other forums are full of newbs crying rivers of tears about the difficulty or how opaque the game remains. It's Saga-ness is untouched. You can wear the best gear available at shops and still get OHKO by a boss.

There are 4 new characters and a couple of the secret characters have supposedly been changed to make them easier to get on a first play. The four new characters are named questgivers who were probably always intended to be playable, such as Monica and Marina.

I've heard Kawazu is a big boss at Square now, so I'm guessing the extreme amount of effort expended on these SaGa remasters is his doing.

[Le Redditeur]

Maybe that means they could remaster SaGa Frontier 2 and not fuck up? It's one of my favorite games ever.

[rabidtictac]

Saga Frontier 2 and Unlimited Saga are about all they have left, without delving into the realms of japanese-only releases.

[Kugelfisch]

NES Castlevania.
I've played a lot of Castlevania titles but all of them the Metroidvania ones. All the ones on the DS, Symphony and the GBA ones.

The Medusa heads are cunts but they've always been cunts. They aren't all that bad on their own. They travel in the typical sine wave and spawn exclusively with Simon's current location as a median.
It works out that on flat ground you can just keep walking and those spawning from in front of you will miss you.

The problem is rather that platforming makes them often spawn mid-jump and thus be able to hit you at their low apex, if you keep moving.
Coupled with some spawning from behind and other creatures, they are perfectly predictable but not at all easily avoidable.

At least they don't stone you like the yellow ones in later games.

[Gendo's Ocular Dickhole]

Playing Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee again. Easily shits all over the modernized remake from 8 years ago. Doesn't hold your hand (except for the scrolling LED messages), you get killed in one hit, and the pre-rendered atmospheric environments are gorgeous to go through. Still holds up 25 years later.

• the rundown, bloody factory of Rupturefarms

• the shadowy darkness of the Stockyards + Free Fire Zone

• the dry expanse of Scrabania

• the viridescent depths of Paramonia

Sweet memories that can't be reproduced these days.

[Complicity]

In Good Game news, however, I've been playing Romancing Saga Minstrel Song Remastered and it's great.

You may know this already, but if you want to play the game in English with Jap voices, go to the StreamingAssets/Sound directory, throw the 2 cancerous US voice files in the trash, create copies of the Jap voice files, and rename them as the US files.

[ebin namefag]

>English dubs in the current year
True evil never dies.