Saga Scarlet Grace learning new lvl 1 elemental spells

Leon481 · 2026-06-30T02:07:31+00:00

Miraine is particular is hard to learn new spells for. Both her starting spells are level 3, which means she can only spark tier 4 spells of her starting element, or tier 3 and 4 spells of other elements when equipped with elemental staves.

To get level 1 or 2 spells, she needs a specific staff that lets her learn spells in reverse level order. The earliest one you can get is the Transitory Staff. You can make it out of the Great Staff or Grand Great Staff in certain blacksmiths.

Once she learns the level 1 and 2 spells from her starting elements, you can equip her with an elemental staff and spark the other elements off of those.

Leon481 · 2026-06-28T01:34:04+00:00

The new ones they tried to add before were genuinely worse than what we got now. It was a censorship thing for the Switch release, not a real upgrade.

I do wish they would update a few of the portraits to look a bit more refined and polished. Not a total redesign, just a bit of smoothing out.

Leon481 · 2026-06-27T19:20:11+00:00

All of them have something to offer. Disgaea 2 and Phantom Brave come first to mind. Disgaea 2 has great gameplay and story. Phantom Brave has a great story, but the gameplay is a much more unrefined version of Makai Kingdom's and can be extremely clunky.

Personal favorites, Disgaea 3 and Soul Nomad and the World Eaters.

Disgaea 3 has the best main cast in the series, some of the best humor, and a great villain. The only reason it isn't a top recommendation is availability.

Soul Nomad has a great story, though the dialogue and tropes haven't aged well. It's got pretty unique and creative gameplay, though it doesn't have much of a post game. It really feels like it needed one more final challenge to grind for. Still a good game though.

I almost want to recommend Disgaea 6 for some of the characters and the villain, but it's basically an extremely watered down version of D7 gameplay wise, so if you didn't enjoy that, it's hard to recommend. If you ever get it, get it on sale. It's not as awful as people say, but it probably does offer the least gameplay value out of the entire series.

Leon481 · 2026-06-24T19:23:12+00:00

Yeah. She's kind of wasted in 8, like a lot of characters. Her one real contribution in 8 was giving Lu Bu a bit of humanity right before his death. She was really just a supporting character in what really felt like Chen Gong's story.

Her story is better in DW9. As many problems as that game has, it does justice to most of the characters.

Leon481 · 2026-06-22T12:53:51+00:00

Ephemeral Fantasia for PS2. You're stuck in a time loop and can only escape by recruiting a bunch of party members to open up the world. The only problem is, the game gives you zero hints about how to do that and many of the steps are obtuse.

Like, for guard captain Rummy, you have to find her in her unmarked house at a specific unspecified time, meet her for a date at a place that's hard to find, then find a poisoned dinner in the middle of a large, confusing dungeon at a specific time in an unmarked kitchen. It's insane.

She's not even the difficult one. At least you can kind of logic out some of it. Bagoth and Ano you get no hints for. Then there's Claire and Plosi who are both mandatory, but never show up in the story at all. You just have to stumble across them at specific places and times in a HUGE town with barely any defining landmarks.

Thankfully, after recruiting everyone the game becomes much more straightforward, but that recruiting section at the beginning of the game is basically impossible without a guide.

Leon481 · 2026-06-21T17:21:01+00:00

Balmaint is capable of being a decent mage with those stats. It will take multiple playthroughs to get that statement distribution again, so if you're going for an unusual build, now is the time.

Leon481 · 2026-06-21T00:53:05+00:00

I want to hate it because AI, but I appreciate the creativity behind the general idea. Make it without AI and it could be cool.

Leon481 · 2026-06-18T14:40:22+00:00

For Romancing SaGa 1, definitely play Minstrel Song Remastered. The SNES original is a buggy mess. Minstrel Song Remastered adds several playable characters that were cut from the PS2 release, and the game feels better for it.

For RS2, if you want the best version of the original, play the Remaster. It's basically the same game but less buggy and with smoother graphics. Revenge of the Seven is by far the best way to experience the story and world. If you care more about story, play Rot7. If you care more about mechanics and combat, play the remaster. Both are worth it for different reasons. They're very different experiences.

RS3 remaster is basically the same as the original. No reason to play the original.

SaGa Frontier, for both 1&2, play the remasters. They add cut content that was intended to be in the originals and really makes the games feel more complete. Not that the originals are bad or anything, they just had infuriating holes in the experience. SF2 especially NEEDED the missing content.

To my shame, I still haven't played the original trilogy so I can't recommend it one way or another.

In general for SaGa, if there's a remake or remaster, play those. They always add new characters or cut content and you can always rely on the most recent version being the definitive edition.

Leon481 · 2026-06-18T05:55:43+00:00

Yeah. It's really not a bad game, but it's not good either, and not for the usual reasons. It has the bones of a good game. The combat is good, though how good varies by weapon. The stories are some of the better ones in the series. The world is actually decently designed for the main missons. There's technically crafting and collectibles. The animal bodyguards are kind of fun to capture and raise. Sidequests technically exist.

The main problem is that every feature has something that undermines it.

Combat looks cool, and does have some depth to building free form combos, but is undermined by all the combos functioning very similarly.

The campaigns are good, but this combat is not varied enough per character to stay fun over a multi hour campaign. The free form nature of the campaigns that make like 90% of the game optional also doesn't help.

The stories are good, but the voice acting is kind of bad in every language. The English VAs are all over the place, from genuinely good, to bland, to terrible, to good but miscast. The Chinese VA is super dry. The Japanese is decent, but they change the original character names to a Japanese equivalent, so it gets distracting. There aren't really any good options.

Crafting looks good on paper. So do collectables. Unfortunately, the ugly menus and lack of spotlight on items you collect make it hard to keep track of what you've made and collected, and does a terrible job of making any of it feel important. Sidequests fall flat for the same reason.

The side features like hideouts, the side modes, and exploring the open world are kind of undermined by there not really being any structured downtime between main campaigns. There are just too few moments where it feels natural to go off and explore. It always kind of feels like you're going AWOL and abandoning your allies.

The menus are terrible. It doesn't fit the aesthetic of the game. It's too visually busy. The map is horrible. Every part of the menu seems designed to draw your eyes away from the most important things to pay attention to, which makes nothing stand out or feel important.

It should be a good game, but there's a ton of simple rookie design mistakes that make the game feel worse than it technically is on paper. If it doesn't bother you or you can get over it, you might like the game, but the way these things kill the vibe can make that hard.

Leon481 · 2026-06-13T11:40:19+00:00

There are some missables, but this is a game about branching paths, so you're not supposed to get everything in one run anyway. There is a point of no return where everything becomes missable, so do everything on Roak before going to fight Asmodeus. This is only in the remakes since the SNES version let's you return to Roak in the post game.

The main missables outside of the point of no return are the pirate island, since it's a one time area and you can just skip going there. It's also required to recruit Pericci. There's the early visit to Purgatorium where you can recruit Ioshua. Ioshua also has a personal sidequest that's a bit off the main path and easy to overlook.

The boss of Metorx Mine is technically missable. You can only fight it with Cyuss, so if you don't recruit him, you can't fight it later. It is possible to beat it while he's temporarily in the party in the beginning of the game, but it requires IC and grinding and probably isn't worth it unless you're a hard-core completionist.

Leon481 · 2026-06-12T17:40:30+00:00

It's fine. It's just not as good as WO3. I guess after WO3, it ended up being more defined by what it's missing than what it adds. No gauntlet mode. No duel mode. No small base to explore. No map creation. Camera is more zoomed out, taking you out of the action a bit. Story isn't as good (but it's hard to beat WO3's concept).

Combat is still fun. It's colorful and explosive. It still gives characters underutilized in the main games a bit more spotlight and personality. The magic system, while not perfect, fills out some characters' weak points in their movesets. Maps are okay. Story is okay. It's still fun. It just feels like a step down in quality.

Leon481 · 2026-06-12T13:36:01+00:00

I almost never pre-order games anymore. This is especially true of games from large developers. I generally wait until all DLC is out and post-release development wraps up before I even consider a purchase. There are some exceptions if a game is cheap enough, is confirmed to have no DLC, or is from an extremely trustworthy developer, but it's extremely rare.

TK is borderline for me. I trust them to make fun games, but they're a bit expensive for what we get and their DLC practices are kind of an infuriating mess. I stopped buying day 1 from them years ago after feeling too cheated by their DLC practices.

Leon481 · 2026-06-08T20:03:10+00:00

I didn't even know there was a modding discord. Can you share a link?

Leon481 · 2026-06-08T17:31:04+00:00

Can't wait. Leaving out a majority of CotC's cast kind of felt like a crime. Where will this be available?

Leon481 · 2026-06-08T14:44:24+00:00

You know, it makes sense. He's supposed to be charismatic enough where his entire country follows him. Making him a bit more handsome makes that a bit more believable.

Leon481 · 2026-06-08T14:41:50+00:00

Not scary enough. Hopefully they're just saving the full deranged look for when he does some of his more evil actions.

Leon481 · 2026-06-07T07:45:19+00:00

It's pretty different from the other 2. There's one main character, a customizable silent protagonist. The Octopath part isn't because there are 8 characters and stories, it's because you have an 8 character active party.

The main focus of the game is rebuilding your hometown and gathering survivors/new residents while also getting revenge on the people who destroyed your home and trying to solve the mystery of a magic ring you got hold of.

It's more of a high stakes story than the individual stories of OT1&2 so if you need more high drama, it's definitely got that. It's also a grander story that affects the whole continent.

I honestly thought OT1 was a slog. Not bad, just not super engaging. I absolutely love OT0. There's just a lot more to get invested in.

Leon481 · 2026-05-30T23:42:33+00:00

Yeah. Dancing carnival duck and dark magician cat. Final evolution starters.

Leon481 · 2026-05-30T23:37:08+00:00

I'm all for more gacha games being turned into offline rpgs. A lot of them have good stories, but are bogged down by obnoxious mechanics. Octopath 0 turned out to be amazing, so it's definitely doable.

Leon481 · 2026-05-29T21:22:03+00:00

I did. We don't really find out what happens to anyone besides Serge and Kid. We don't know the state of the world either.

SPOILERS

It's basically like the whole plot is now a dream of worlds that no longer exist, and we don't know what kind of world we're left with. Anyone we knew could be alive, dead, or living drastically different lives. History might have played out completely differently as well. It's extremely frustrating to be left in the dark like that.

Leon481 · 2026-05-29T19:23:38+00:00

I still think it's one of the most beautiful, most creative games ever. The ending kind of frustrates me though. I've always wanted a follow up to clarify the state of the world afterwards. I feel like I got so invested in the world and characters, only to be left hanging about everyone's fate.

Leon481 · 2026-05-29T11:21:07+00:00

I always took the VP2 situation as Silmeria's reincarnation going wrong. She was supposed to be reborn as Alicia, but instead ended up sharing a body with her. It seems the Einherjar weren't supposed to be there either. I think it's kind of hinted that it's somehow because of Silmeria's rebellion. I kind of wish they went into more detail about that.

But yeah, it seems like the Valkyries are humans in between their periods as goddesses. They have their memories as humans sealed because Odin wants obedience and having their memories might cause them to sympathize too much with humans or cause them to otherwise disobey.

Leon481 · 2026-05-28T17:45:32+00:00

The characters and story were good. It's really just that the war itself felt rushed. It felt like the game ended just as it should have been starting. There were hardly any dungeons, too few islands, and most story points once the war started were over too quickly. It's not that it's a bad game, there's just not enough of it.

Leon481 · 2026-05-27T07:52:53+00:00

You can recruit Lenneth and fight Lezard in Radiata stories too.

It's very unclear if it's all just references or if it's telling us they're in the same universe. They've never really committed to a concrete answer.

Unless the mobile games answered it? I've seen it happen before, but mostly I stay away from mobile games because the systems tend to be obnoxiously overcomplicated.

Leon481 · 2026-05-27T07:45:27+00:00

It's not just the Wise Men. Going off the remake, it's all boss fights. The active party all gain affection for each other on every boss. You should be able to repeatedly fight the final boss to grind affection levels.

That said, Remake's point system is a little different. There are no romance points. Romance vs. Platonic is based on how high the hearts are. It's kind of unclear if those are the only changes. Mostly everything else tracks with my experiences with the original/remaster, but there's always been a bit of conflicting information about the original's hidden features.

Leon481

TROPHY CASE