A freaking awesome game that goes out of its way to discourage you from playing it.
As you get stronger so do your enemies no matter where you go. If you dont know exactly where to go or what to do you can quickly find yourself out classed by the monsters and every battle will be a fight for survival. When that happens its just a roll of the dice if your entire party gets slaughtered or not. What makes it so hard is the lack of gold at the beginning to be able to upgrade your equipment so that you can have a fighting chance in the following battles but you only get gold by doing quests which are just laying around waiting to be discovered. Meanwhile there are all these new places to discover and monsters to fight and the next thing you know the monsters are out of hand.
I love these Saga games otherwise. They have these cool mechanics that are like a pen and paper rpg. You have lots of different weapons skills that you get to choose from for each character, there are lots of different magics, as you fight and use skills you unlock arts which are special attacks, you have non combat skills that you have to choose from that you can use out in dungeons and fields which let you do things like find hidden chests or mine or harvest plants.
Perhaps the hardest part of the game to wrap your brain around is the fact that you have Hit points, Life points, and your weapons have Durability Points. Your hitpoints regenerate completely after every battle and if you lose them all in battle your not really dead. Life points measure how dead you are. Different Characters have different amount of Life Points but whenever you lose all your hitpoints you usually lose a life point also but as long as you still have 1 life point left you can be healed in battle or be totally healed afterwards. If you lose all your Life points though the character will drop out of your party or the game will be over if its your main character.
Durablity points are for your weapons. Depending on your characters weapon skills their arts(special attacks) and even normal attacks can cost durability points. If your weapon runs out of DP's then it breaks..dont know if its permanet or if you can get it fixed. As your weapon skills grow, only by training them back in town, arts will cost less DP. For example a sword might hae 30 DP and to do an art may cost 3 DP so then you would be down to 27. The more expensive arts usually do more damage but you will have to make it through tons of battles before you can get to a place where you can fix your weapons so you have to use low DP moves or ones that dont cost anything. There are some arts that without a doubt lower your weapons DP which are in red. But there are also arts where the DP number is in yellow. This means that its a 50/50 chance that it will lower your weapons DP by that value. Using art's with yellow values will make your weapons last alot longer than just using all red moves. Of course using arts with 0DP is the best because your weapon will never break.
You also have action points or AP's. These will control your actions more than anything in battle. Each character has a maximum amount but you only start a battle with 2 plus your characters bonus. Characters build up or regen AP's at different rates. Some characters get +2 AP's every turn, others get +3 and who knows. Everything takes AP's to do, and like I said you only regen a certain amount. If you have 6 AP's at the start of battle, and your character does some attack that takes 6 AP's then the next round he will only have as many as he can regen or build up which is 2 or 3 AP's.
That might not be enough to do any arts the next turn so then you just have to do some crappy attack or nothing until the next turn when you have enough AP's to unleash another big art. So you have to balace AP usage with DP usage and the tons of battles you will have to go through. Some attacks will take 5 AP's and 1 DP while others may only take 3 AP's and 0 DP. As your weapon skills go up arts also cost less AP's. But like I said you can only raise your weapon skills back at a town and it cost these special gems which are rare.
The game is pretty cool and lets you go wherever you want to go, you learn about new locations and dungeons by talking to people. Usually there is atleast one quest in each place but trying to figure them out without a guide is rough. Somebody may mention a nearby cave or dungeon and something going on there and thats it. You are left to blunder around and run into the boss monster or find another clue all by yourself.
It wouldnt be so bad if the monsters weren't constantly kicking the crap out of you. You have to choose a main character at the beginning of the game from like 7 different people. As you go through the game you will run into those other 6 people you didnt choose but you can also run into generic characters. Generic characters can be helpful but they also suck because they have extremely low LP's and once they lose them all they will leave your group which may be in the middle of a dungeon with no way to get back out except by fighting and possably losing more people lol.
Anyways this game is like a freaking Tractor Pull. The farther you go the harder it gets. I havent come to a dead stop yet but Its really bogging down on me. I lost a character deep in this dungeon and I just want get the hell out of there and back to town but I have to fight my way out. Technically you can save the game whenever you want and I did save before i lost my guy but I got some stuff I thought made up for it.
I know some people love difficult games and they would probably love this game, but if you have an aversion to overly difficult games do not buy this game. I should probably play this game till critical failure but im pretty discouraged right now. I almost have enough money to buy A PIECE of armor for my main character but that wont help everyone else. Another crappy thing about generic characters is that they have some of their equipment slots locked.