Also, here's a little update on some Imperial SaGa stuff, since I've been getting a lot done there recently, it seems XD
There's a "combat" event going on right now, which is kinda like a PvP thing, but not really. You register a party for the event, and then you fight other players' parties, but it's AI-controlled. I mean, you control your own party, but the other players are AI. But the setups are what other people have, and this is the only way to fight other characters in the game, so it's pretty interesting.
Anyway, I ran into this team that was just six Aisha (the commander was Aisha, too). I said this on Facebook, but in the current event, all Romancing SaGa (including Minstrel Song) characters get +10 to every stat (which is a LOT).
My battle party has a character each from Romancing SaGa 2, Romancing SaGa 3, SaGa Frontier, SaGa Frontier 2, Emperors SaGa, and SaGa Scarlet Grace. Every game represented in Imperial SaGa
except Romancing SaGa or its remake lmao. The few 'alternates' I have seem to mostly be from RSG2 (there's more RSG2 than anything in this game, it seems), though I do have a Hawke (SFC version), but he's not even fully trained, and I screwed him up so I need to redo him anyway. And he kinda sucks in general. Which is sad because I love Hawke XD Though PS2 Hawke is a thousand times better so it's NBD.
I also saw someone with a Baldy!Galahad with
76 speed, which is ridiculous. You can even see how the little yellow bar has that huge lighter-colored area -- those are all the points given from modifiers, the darker part is his normal speed. His speed is almost doubled, which is ridiculous. How do they even do it?!
Speed is important in combat events. There are some battle formations that will give you a fixed turn order, and your entire party will move at the speed of the character in a certain position. Once that 'anchor' character acts, the rest of the party will act immediately in the order of the formation.
So normally you only need one character with a good speed, and everyone else's speed can be ignored (as long as you're using one of those formations). But in combat events, those fixed turn order effects don't work, so every character's speed is important.
I got three more gold characters (Bear, Rose, and Ivan) to hit crown. I guess Ivan doesn't really count since he's a story character and will die as soon as I move on.
Rose's stats actually grew pretty well, but I'm really disappointed in Bear. I'm disappointed in Ivan, too, but I don't actually plan on using him unless I have to for some reason.
I've probably explained this like a million times before, but I'll explain again anyway :P
In this game, your characters get stronger by random stat-ups at the end of battle. The entire game is composed of "quests" which are series of battles (they're a little more interesting than just that, but the point is that you have a limited number of battles per quest, and that's the only way to fight battles and train characters).
Each character has a 'crown point,' a limit to the number of quests they can do before they stop getting stat-ups. Once they've participated in that many quests (even if you give up or die on the very first battle of each, so they get 0 stat-ups lol) they will get a crown on their status page, and will never be able to raise stats again. They can still glimmer weapon arts, equip new items, etc., but their base stats will never raise again.
The rate at which your stats grow is highly based on the difficulty ranking of the quests the character embarks on. So you want to try to complete the highest-level quests you can, or else your character will not grow very much before they crown.
Each character also has a set maximum to each of their stats, indicated by the little bars above. If you fill up the whole bar, it means you got the maximum available for that stat. It's not very common, unless you use the growth crystal things, which cost real money (well, you can get them in the game normally, just not very frequently).
Bear is special in that he seems to have a HUGE potential base defense, but I'm really sad that he only reached 70, with all that empty space in his bar...
I did screw up training this crew, though. I was doing rank 10 quests to raise them, but once I accidentally did a rank 9 that I didn't mean to select, and instead of just finishing it, I just ran, without thinking much (I was tired lol) and so they lost out on an entire quest's worth of battles to grow. And then another time, I picked that same rank 9 on accident again, but I competed it that time. And the very first time I took them out, they both died because I was not prepared properly, but they only died on the last battle. But that's about 15 missed opportunities for growth. Granted, they don't grow so rapidly that that would make a HUGE difference, but they'd probably have 3 or 4 extra points across the board each.
You can get 'reset' items in the game, too, which will set your number of battles completed back to 0, but also revert your stats back to their starting positions (which is about halfway of each bar filled up).
What's also annoying is that Rose's most important stat is magic... but that stat is hidden, and I have no idea how it works. It's very clearly a part of the game, because you can boost the stat with equipment, buff spells, formations, but you can't actually see what your current magic stat is. And I have no idea if it grows like the other stats do while you're training or what??? And so it's hard to really know if your mages are any good or not, except through teaching them jutsu and trying to compare them to each other.
A nice thing about magic, though, is that it has 100% accuracy all the time. Weapon arts have an accuracy rating and can miss. You can boost the accuracy to 100, but there's still stuff like the darkness status effect or enemies with some kind of evasion boost. Magic tends to be weaker in general, but you can pretty much unlimitedly boost the power of any art in the game (it just takes a very long time), and you don't have to worry about boosting accuracy (with weapon arts, when you boost power, accuracy drops a bit, and when you boost accuracy, power drops a bit...) so you just have to worry about balancing SP cost (which is not hard).
So anyway, I'm wanting to get more 'mage' characters (one way to tell if a character may have a good magic stat, though, is that characters each have various 'tags' or I guess like classes, stuff like 'male' or 'female,' 'non-human,' 'imperial guard,' stuff like that -- and one of those tags can be 'mage,' so...) to utilize this, but it's annoying because I have no idea how good they'll actually be.
I'm getting closer and closer to upgrading the jutsu facility to rank 10 (the highest rank), which will give me access to the final set of magic arts. I think that will really make mage characters worth using at that point.
Anyway, I also got my first 7-win streak in a combat event :D So that's yay.
Right now I don't have too much to do... I'm just training a bunch of characters I'm going to throw away. To upgrade the facilities, you have to sacrifice characters to them, and they seem to give the facilities much more 'exp' or whatever toward upgrading if they're fully trained when you dump them. So I just have been running through the current low-rank event quest with a party of Leon and a bunch of randos that I can dump. I probably won't have enough to upgrade to rank 10 when I finish all of the characters I have currently, but I'll be very close. Considering I've been playing for like a year now, being close means I'm REALLY CLOSE but also very far lmao. And my blacksmith is still rank 8 lol.
Characters come in a few 'rarity' levels, and the higher this is, the higher starting stats and potential final stats they have, as well as the more quests they can do before they crown. Where I am now, only gold (the rarest-- well, for over a year the rarest) characters are worth adding to my party anymore, in addition to the new 'rainbow' rarity which seems almost impossible to get.
Gold characters are hard enough to get -- there's only a 2% chance of getting a gold character when you get a new character, and you have to save up the premium currency to try for a new character. During certain events, there will be a 50% chance of getting a certain character as your gold character if you get a gold character, and then I think that character has a small chance of being rainbow only during that event period. So it'd be less than 1% chance and only for a specific character at a specific time. Though there's pretty much ALWAYS some rainbow character on promotion at any given moment. Right now it's Ginny.
So basically I wait until I have 3600kr (which is enough to buy 10 new characters, and you get a free 11th if you spend all 3600 at once) and there's an event for a rainbow I want going on at the same time. I went for a rainbow Leon recently (I would easily put two Leons in my party, no questions hahaha) but I did get Bear instead. But he's one of my most useless golds. I may even consider dumping him into a facility or trading him in for gold medals. You can trade charaters in for medals, and only gold and purple characters give you gold medals, and these can be used to buy items from the shop that are only available through gold medals. One of these is a gold character ticket, which lets you hire a character, but it's guaranteed to be gold.
I really wish they'd make an English version of this game because I want other people to be able to play it, plus I'd be able to make another account and play on there XD I mean, I could make a second account on this one but I don't want to manage two accounts lol.
