I own Nocturne already, yet another of my PS2 collection I bought and never put any/enough time into. But hopefully I have time enough to get to it eventually. Loved Digital Devil Saga and Nocturne looks similar (browsing my "games owned" stats, I own 124 US released PS2 titles and 20 Japanese games with only a fraction of these finished haha - though a bunch of them are "never ending" 2-d fighters I played with my brother). I should probably get rid of some of them, but I don't really know which ones I enjoy the best since I need to play them first haha (PS2 was the beginning of my "gaming dark age" where I stopped having as much free time so I ended up stockpiling for the future, etc).
I will keep that in mind about King's Field, thanks! Maybe the store has the PS2 one. Currently I do own the longbox PS1 game, so I thought about starting with it.
Ah, I messed up this post trying to put game video footage, I will edit in the rest now.
Do you agree with this assessment? Is
Unlimited Saga truly that difficult? Or is it that people simply don't know how to play the game?
Here's the top 10 for those interested:
Has anyone played the Druaga game here? I wonder what it is like. Baroque looks really good.
In the case of Unlimited Saga, I think it is mostly people just not grasping how to play, but there are some legitimately tough parts as well (the end bosses of most scenarios). It is not a game the player can typically "brute force".
Here is an example I tried to record, but I have no clue if these videos will even show up for anyone reading this. Also, I think my rambling will reveal me to be very weird, but I really like thinking about the way games are designed.
In a lot of console RPG games, you see a treasure chest, you hit one button and open it, collect what is inside and that is that. It is just something a player does without thinking of it, an ingrained thing from playing the genre. Sure, sometimes the chest is locked, but that generally amounts to little more extra interaction than "use a key".
The next common way to interact with a chest in a console video game like this would be "well, I landed on the chest, so it just collected it for me, right?" ala an adventure game where you kill an enemy and it drops loot and you run over the loot and "auto" pick it up. This also does not happen in Unlimited Saga.
In Unlimited Saga, it is best to approach a chest with a fresh start and no preconceived notions of what this particular video game is supposed to be (Exhibit A in what went wrong: In the US at least, the game came with a FFX-2 demo disc, and people wanting to play that demo were already probably pretty big Final Fantasy fans or at least FFX fans, which Unlimited Saga is definitely - and maybe defiantly haha - not). Otherwise you are going to be in for a bad time haha.
So, we land on a square with a chest. First, it is good to keep in mind how many "turns" we have left in our adventure. Each action we perform uses up a "turn", like time ticking down. Collecting items and gold from chests is fun and all, but do we really have time to waste? It depends on the particular quest.
I am playing a side quest adventure that is about finding a missing husband:
So, while it is important to complete this task, I have about 400 plus turns to do it (you do just press one button to see this at least haha), and it isn't like finding him is the end of the world (as far as a monster destroying the game world I mean, it is important to find him for his wife and such) haha. So, sure, I want to collect some treasure.
This treasure box is pretty fancy, seems like it was important to someone (in this case, the husband who was a collector), so let us just try opening it...
...well, most likely it is going to blow up in the player's face and deal some heavy damage as well as destroy the chest, because there is a high chance it is booby trapped in this particular game. Items are in chests because whoever put them there does not want other people to have them haha. And beyond that, the chest is most likely locked. So first what I do in Unlimited Saga is use the "Sharpeye" skill I have acquired for my thief-build character to determine if there are any traps on the chest (which is optional of course, you can just try to defuse traps without knowing exactly what kind, sharpeye just gives you the chance to see what kind of traps which is important for a couple reasons which I can explain if anyone cares haha):
And yes, there are indeed traps. Many traps in fact - a poison gas trap, a needle trap, an explosive trap, and even a treasure slime trap (sorry for breaking it into videos, I wanted to get it all in one but I got attacked by a Demon monster who snuck up on my thief while he was sharpeyeing the chest and not eyeing the rest of his surroundings haha, so I just filmed another chest video a bit later).
Well, anyway, really this particular chest is probably not worth dealing with haha (there are exceptions, especially regarding the treasure slime though). You weigh the risks and rewards, do you really want to contend with so many traps going off on you, etc. The player can do whatever of course. I went ahead and defused it (as you can see via the reel screen, basically a form of die rolling that gives the player more control over the outcome, the reel system I actually enjoy a lot and feel the complaints about it are overblown), but if I failed it would have blown up on my party and thief in particular and cause massive damage. Then for good measure I used "Fortuneteller" to see what would be in the chest (and if I don't like what I see, I can do it again and hope for something else, or in this case, more gold the more reel successes I get via Fortuneteller - but if my fortuneteller fails to divine properly via the reel, we will get less gold).
Now, this does not even take into actually lockpicking the chest (in fact there are a few methods to get to the contents haha).
Now, whether all of this is good or bad design, a person can only answer that for themselves haha. Sometimes, a simple "press A to open chest" is all you need! But due to the nature of this particular game, I think it suits it well and helps the immersion.
Sorry to ramble again, I will try to clean this post up later. I know your question was a simple one and I went into a tangent, but I am just trying to show why the game is so different from a lot of the other PS2 rpg games, hence why people may rate it so tough.
Well, it is not easy to sell a person on this game. My group of adventurers are really only good at saving the world, not reconciling estranged spouses (the husband ran away) or getting people to enjoy SaGa haha.
The main reason for my tangent is I got excited at the end of this mission because I received:
A level 4 Magic Blender panel which is a rare and very impressive skill haha, so I feel pretty happy about that and can't wait to get blending. I think it is safe to say: I still love Unlimited Saga (even if sometimes it does not love me haha).