romasaga3 in 3 days!

three days til three!!

Time to plan a party again!

Actually I might just look up my last post about this and use the party I planned then, since I didn't get very far in my last playthrough.

But I've done the fuzzy-face harem party so many times now that I'm thinking I might want to try another party. A BAMF Ladies party seems pretty enticing.

Then the question is who to include...

For the main character I feel it would have to be Ellen. Katarina is a tough competitor for that spot, but I feel like I'd like to do something different with her.

Possible party members:

Bai Meinyan
Muse
Nora
Tatyana
Undine
Zhi Ling
Fairy (can't remember what they renamed her for the English version)

Nora is a must, as probably the biggest BAMF of them all.

Zhi Ling is a favorite, so she gets in.

So we still need two more. Tatyana isn't really a good candidate IMO, nor is the fairy.

Oh, Undine is an obvious choice. That's three. So we need one more.

So I guess it's between Bai and Muse. Bai I want to save for a 'magey mages' type party, so Muse it is. Plus Muse is an interesting character, so that's a pretty cool party.

Ellen, Nora, Zhi Ling, Undine, Muse.

Sounds like a pretty badass party.

Undine is definitely a Genbu type, but I don't know about everyone else.

Just realized they're probably going to change the names of the jutsu schools :( I'll be okay if they name them with the conventional "Hydrology" and stuff like that, but if they just call them "Water Magic" I will be sad. It would be awesome if they kept them as Genbu, Seiryu, etc.

Jutsu growth rates:

Ellen - 1 Byakko, 1 Lunar
Nora - 2 Byakko
Zhi - 1 Lunar
Undine - 5 Genbu, 2 Lunar
Muse - 2 Seiryu, 1 Suzaku, 2 Byakko, 1 Genbu, 4 Lunar

Lots of Byakko in there. Maybe a whole Byakko party, with Undine on the Genbu just because that's her thing. Zhi Ling isn't great at any magic so I could go for a waza crown on her. Ellen could go for the waza crown too, honestly. This could be a not-very-jutsu focused play, and even have Nora take the crown. Undine and Muse could be the only ones that do jutsu.

Physical Growth Rates:

Ellen - 3 Bludgeon, 1 Pierce, 3 Martial
Nora - 3 Bludgeon, 2 Pierce, 1 Martial
Zhi - 1 Bludgeon, 1 Pierce, 4 Project
Undine -
Muse -

Undine and Muse have literally no physical growth, so it makes more sense to use them as pure mages I guess. Across Ellen, Nora, and Zhi Ling, we have decent growth in all the different physical types except for slashing type, which NO ONE has at all.

Ellen's glimmer type can be type 11 if she chooses Foil as her starting weapon, so we'll go with that for her.

Nora is mace type.
Zhi is bow type.
Undine and Muse are none type.

Not a lot of chance to glimmer the big stuff in a variety of categories, so it seems like we're mostly going to rely on Ellen to glimmer rare stuff. No growth or glimmer type for any slashing weapons, so I guess we'll just completely ignore them.

Another option is to give Ellen karate as her main weapon, which will give her great stats, plus actually enable her to learn all the karate waza (type 11 isn't great for this). But it limits her ability as a learn-everything-for-everyone type. Type 11 is still ok for learning SOME karate, so it's probably not a terrible idea if we're also throwing her on Axe.

Ellen - Axe, Martial, Foil
Nora - Mace, Spear
Zhi - Bow

Seems decent. We'll be completely missing out on swords of any kind.

This will prove to be an interesting run. Not having swords means not having access to a lot of useful waza.

Everyone's speed is kind of meh. It's not bad, but everyone hovers around the medium speed range (15-16).

Ellen's starting stuff:

I want to say that I hate that all the information surrounding this game in English uses the TERRIBLE fan translation terms. I get that that's most people's outlet to playing the game, but as someone who has barely ever touched it, it makes NO SENSE. They changed the names of stuff unnecessarily (starsigns are now "classes" so like instead of Saturn it's like "Hunter" or something, and I have no idea what is supposed to be what; magic schools are now 'elemental' so the flower-growing Seiryu is now "Wind" despite almost none of the jutsu having anything to do with wind, etc.) or the translations are just really bad where things make no sense, especially when the words were English to start with, it seems like they just made up their own words (bullet = "Ballet", thumbing = "Saming", ward = "Wod")

ANYWAY I'm having to use an English-language guide for this right now because my guide that I made is broken and won't connect to the database. And it's really confusing and poorly put together so you have to click like 30 links to see information that really should be stored together.

SO THIS IS REALLY ANNOYING BUT

Ellen's starsign should be whatever the hell "Trader" is supposed to be, probably, because this will raise her speed and we desperately need a speedy person. "Hunter" (????) raises speed more but lowers strength, which is bad.

The starting weapon needs to be Foil to get the Type 11, which is going to raise speed as well, but also drop Strength (just by 1 though). Both things raise Skill, so she'll have decent Skill level in addition to Strength. Basically she'll become faster and a bit of an all-rounder, which is nice.

Well, I think that's planned enough for now. I still don't know if I'm going to go this route or make my first playthrough the fuzzy harem after all.

no subject

Was just looking through the trophy list for Romancing SaGa 3 again to double check the English names and spellings of the characters for The Strelitzia Inn and just noticed...

The trophy for recruiting Bai Meiniang is called "The Old Mistress of Soryu Magic" ...

SORYU!

Hopefully this means they're keeping the magic school names the same and Soryu is going to be the name for Seiryu (they're alternate names for the same Chinese god).

It makes me more hopeful that they'll keep the starsigns as starsigns, too. I'm all for localization changing things, like calling jutsu "magic" and waza "techs" or something like that (though I still prefer 'Arts' a la Unlimited Saga).

But I feel like renaming the schools to generic (and sometimes unfitting) words like "fire" and "wind" takes away a certain charm from the game when the schools are supposed to be named after the ancient Chinese gods. Similarly the characters being born under starsigns is part of the lore, whereas renaming starsigns to "classes" and fitting everyone into a vague five classes for no reason takes away from that lore, IMO.

Furthest Island is being renamed to World's End. That's a good change.

I also like that Fairy, Snowman, and Elephant are getting names. Boston had a name (the lobster) so it's weird that the other non-human characters just had generic names. Especially when there are other fairies, snowmen, and elephants in the world! The three of them are being renamed Peony, Flurry, and Rukh, respectively. Flurry is a little silly sounding but overall I like this change. Boy is still just called "Young Boy" which is super weird. I guess he refuses to tell anyone his name...? I guess it's not that big of a deal since he only can be recruited by Sarah so a lot of people will just completely miss out on him.

Ah, some name changes btw. Not really changes, but localization choices. A lot of them they actually went with the names I translated them to as well, which makes me feel like I'm doing good.

Here's the names I chose with the new names used in the official localization:

Harid -> Khalid (I think this one was just more me having no idea what the name was supposed to be. Khalid is a much nicer name)
Monica -> Monika
Katalina -> Katarina
Ci/Qi/Zhi Ling -> Zhi Ling (I couldn't decide on how to spell this, and gathered that "ci" seemed to match the approximate sound made by the Japanese characters in Chinese)
Bai Mei Niang -> Bai Meiniang (It's just making it into one word but from what I gathered learning about Chinese names it seems more 'proper' to make it two words? I don't think it matters)
Young Fang -> Yang Fan (another one that was just Chinese and I had to guess. Yang Fan doesn't look as much like English as mine so I think that's a lot better XD)

Also the trophy titles use "Xuan" in one so hopefully all the stuff named in Chinese is actually still named in Chinese (the game explicitly uses Chinese writing for the names of Chinese stuff, and katakana writing for the names of all other cities and places).

I guess all of these things are more like... natural/obvious localization choices, I was just terrified that the horrible choices from the fan translation would crop up in the game.

I've already heard people complaining that the localization "ruins" the game when we've had like literally 4 lines of dialogue shown.

Oh, another nice localization choice is that they're calling the Holy Emperor and Devil Emperor as "Matriarch" and "Archfiend." Since they were named by people it makes more sense this way, and I only chose "Emperor" because it sounds better than "King" (Matriarch is a woman, so "King" seemed off -- I realize 'Empress' is a word, but 'Emperor' sounds more neutral to me than 'King,' and in Romancing SaGa 2, all emperors are called "Emperor" regardless of their gender).

I can't find the video that shows the little introductory part in the English version anymore (I think it was taken down), but the Japanese was basically like this:

"There is a storm."
"Now monsters will not be here."
"Why?"
"Monsters are afraid of lightning."
"Sarah too."
"Hahahaha."

But the localization is something like:

"Looks like a storm's a-brewin'"
"At least we'll have refuge from monsters for a while."
"How come monsters are scared of lightning?"
"Probably for the same reason little puppies are."
"There's a reason I call Sarah cute as a puppy!"
"Hahahaha!"

It's very liberal, but it takes what was originally a very dry script (seriously the original game was VERY DRY) and gives it some personality. IMO the boring script was a flaw of the original game, a giving it a facelift like this is a welcome change. There are PARTS of the original script that are funny or have some personality (like the stuff with The Professor), so I'm looking forward to see how those were handled.

I'm going to be sad if they change the "Dolphins." thing to say anything more than just "Dolphins." because that's the funniest part of the entire game.

Sadly it doesn't seem they added any new playable characters. Would have been nice if you could recruit The Professor and Volcano. I'd also like the Duke of Zweig but that would make next to no sense. But I still want him. Actually Leonid makes about as much sense, as he's a marquis that just leaves his place for no reason to join the party. So why not a duke? And you could make it so he can't be in the party with Monika or Mikhail.

Romancing SaGa 2 added new playable characters (I think two new 'classes,' meaning 20 characters total). So it's a bit sad we're not seeing that here.

For a long time, I've heard that there's a "true Tatyana" hidden in the game's code. But I recently learned exactly what that means -- Tatyana uses different nicknames when she joins the party, and each one will give her slightly different stats (actually it only affects her solar and lunar growth rates; everything else is the same). Then there's a coded "Tatyana" which has the same stats one of the nickname choices. This one actually has the name "Tatyana," which is her real name (learned from talking to other characters in the game, though she'll never have that name in the party).

My guess is that this is a placeholder data chunk to be used for all the Tatyana variations, and then upon joining, she is replaced with the specific variation. (Fun note: "Candy" is the best nickname to get, unless you're wanting Solar magic on her, then go with Éclair, Millefueille, Crepe, or Souffle. All other nicknames are like weakened versions of Candy, as is the "true" Tatyana.)

But people theorize that there's a "true" Tatyana and there was a dropped storyline that would "unlock" her as a playable character. I used to think this was probably true after learning there was a 'true Tatyana' without knowing the nature of it, but now I think it's probably just a ridiculous fan speculation. It would be silly if your character changed arbitrarily or even downgraded simply because their name changed in the story.