Blue also gets the scary as fuck mystic doctor in the Koorong sewers. Pretty sure he's exclusive... or if not, maybe just Blue and Asellus?

Even if he had joined, it would have just been for that one segment on the Cygnus... Asellus leaves... if she had joined up with Red permanently it would have been no question that he would have been the guy to play if you wanted the team with the most OPness.

Ah, but Romancing SaGa before it was just as open-world as SaGa Frontier. And Legend of Mana was no slouch in that department either (granted, it came more towards the end of the Playstation era).

talks-ick

Bronies are still a thing eh? I thought it had started dying down a little by now...

And that's why they created the quick-save feature.

Not everyone can appreciate SaGa Frontier's greatness. It's a gem buried under a considerable amount of muck, not unlike Legend of Mana.

Well, the hidden score you are referring to raises the encounter difficulty when makes you fight stronger monsters than normal, but the bosses are unchanged. Upon completing all of the quests (a separate mechanic), you get to go to a developer's ending area which has a whole bunch of boss fights you can do which…

Nothing beats that moment when a giant monster is about to murder one of your dudes when all of a sudden a lightbulb pops up over someone's head and then they slap the enemy attack away from them.

It's one of the best JRPGs ever for precisely the reason that some people hate it... it was an experimental game that focused more on creating a unique experience and less on polish.

Use a guide. The cues are too cryptic to really know where to go and you'll enjoy it more with a little direction. But just use the guide for the story. 90% of the game is side-questing.

Final Fantasy Legends III is SaGa 3, not SaGa Frontier 3. SaGa 3 came out prior to SaGa Frontier... and Romancing SaGa.

I say Saga as in... like... you know, an epic story. And.. well... Frontier is pretty self-explanatory too. I don't see what the problem is here.

EDIT: Oh wait you are talking about Grandia

Oh yeah, getting through the stories is pretty much guide-dangit material. But you don't really hate this game, you just got snagged and frustrated by it.

Heh, it wasn't ahead of its time, it came at exactly the time that games were doing weird stuff like that. Then the next generation came along and RPGs got a whole lot simpler for some reason and never really started to branch out and get crazy again.

• What's your favorite character storyline? I'm partial to T260G, because his quest feels much different than all of the others, and I love watching him evolve as a badass robot.

That's largely because their last couple films were kind of toned down isn't it? I mean... when I think of recent Ghibli stuff, I think of The Wind Rises and their adaptatin of the Borrowers, and in both of those cases those movies just plain lack the moxie of earlier Ghibli releases.

Holy shit it's like Gummy Bears had a baby with Flubber.

I'm fine with Miyazaki retiring, but I'm slightly less welcoming towards his feelings of the studio's inevitable demise. It strikes me as an awkward mix of egotism (without me and the other handful of masters who are all dying out, the studio will fall) and that cultural Japanese fixation on the concept of evanescence.