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[R^2]

Oh well, that was fruitless. Back to living in Ma's basement I guess.

Lute: Not allowed? But I gotta get on.
Crew: This has been chartered by Trinity.
Lute: You've gotta have some room in a ship this huge. How about in a corner somewhere?
Crew: Stop buggin' us or we'll arrest you!
Lute: Arrest me? For what?


Hey, I recognize that scaled-down sprite!

Crew: Captain! No problem here, sir. Go on now, get out of here!
Mondo: You want to board ship? All right, we have room for you. Come on.
Lute: Your boss seems like a nice guy.






Mondo: I'm from Yorkland too, you know.
Lute: By the way, where is this ship goin'?
Mondo: Manhattan.




The ship really does remind me of a folding knife or multitool or something.

[R^2]

Guess we'll have a look around.


Oh Lute.


Lute: Wha? Do I know you? Are you with the police or something?
Fuse: Guess you're not as stupid as you look. My name is Fuse. I work for the patrol in IRPO. You rode Mondo's ship from Yorkland, right?
Lute: Yep. He gave me a ride. Seemed like a nice guy to me.
Fuse: A nice guy? That's the first time someone spoke of him that way. Trust me, Mondo is smart, but not nice.
Lute: I don't know. That's what I thought. By the way, my name is Lute. Guess you are the guy to talk to the next time I get a parking ticket, eh?

...cars basically don't exist, though. Yorkland specifically has horses. Lute, what are you talking about?

[R^2]

Lute is now free to wander around wherever he feels like going, but I head to Owmi to get his scenario, such as it is, underway.

Owmi


Restaurant Patron: You can eat a whole lot more here because they don't use crap like MSG.
Lute: Really? You're from Nelson, eh?

Lute how did you even

Lute: You look pretty decent to me, although Trinity says you are vicious pirates.
Restaurant Patron: That's nothing but propaganda. Come see my ship sometime. You'd be surprised.




Captain: Chef, the food was terrific as usual.


I know how to get a ride on that unique ship! Go to Nelson!


YouTube doesn't have the song for this ship anywhere. It wasn't on the OST, either, as far as I can tell.




She means the ship is the Victoria. The Captain, since apparently no one introduces her, is Captain Hamilton.

Captain Hamilton: Currently, the ship is assigned to monitor the activities of Mondo from Trinity's 2nd Intelligence Division. I assume you know him, too.
Lute: Mondo? Oh yeah, he gave me a ride on his ship. But I don't really know him.
Captain Hamilton: No, I'm talking about the guy who betrayed your father, and sold him out to Trinity.
Lute: What're you talking about? You mean dad and Mondo knew each other?
Captain Hamilton: You really don't know? I thought you approached me to avenge your father's death. Not to mention fulfilling his last wish.
Lute: Dad's last wish? What was he involved in?
Captain Hamilton: He was an anti-Trinity activist. He lost his first wife during his mission.
Lute: Hey, hold on a sec. Ma never told me none of this stuff. I don't even know your name. How do I know you're telling me the truth?
Captain Hamilton: Nelson is a tiny region. In order to resist an enormous power like Trinity, we need to collect all kinds of information. That's why we know many things which others don't.
Lute: Crammin' me with this stuff 'bout dad and Trinity all at once is only confusing me.
Captain Hamilton: I don't blame you. Maybe I should start over from the beginning. Like I said before, we are now assigned to watch over Mondo's activities. We discovered he is secretly building his own private army base. We are getting ready to attack the base when the time comes.
Lute: You're gonna start a war against Trinity?
Captain Hamilton: There won't be a war. Even Trinity doesn't know their own command is creating a private army.
Lute: Why does he need a private army?
Captain Hamilton: He's power-crazy and wants to completely rule Trinity.
Lute: Sounds a little far-fetched to me. I mean, why would anyone like Mondo need to crave for more power?
Captain Hamilton: Anyhow, we are ready to attack his base. Let us know when you decide to join us.
Lute: I don't really like violence. I'm really a pussy cat by nature.

That sentence is three words too long.


Are you ready to go to the final dungeon?

Yes, really. That's it. That's all the plot you get in Lute's scenario, dumped on you all at once by Captain Hamilton. If you go to the last dungeon right now you'll die horribly, so let's go... grind. Do sidequests. Make some money. You know. Stuff.

[R^2]

Captain Hamilton, like Lute, is kind of bad at everything -- but she's better than Lute at everything. Her biggest asset is that she starts with TwoGun, allowing her to fire off another shot whenever she uses a basic gun attack, drastically increasing her attack power. Her rating for learning other gun abilities is 3 (on the scale from 0 to 8).

Hamilton doesn't have talent for many sword or martial arts skills, but the talent she does have tends to be for the more advanced techniques. Like, she doesn't have talent for DoubleSlash, but can learn RisingNova, RosarioImpale, and LifeSprinkler -- some of the best sword techs in the game. She has talent for two of the four DSC component abilities, but not AirThrow, the basic "throw" skill that most easily unlocks them. Weird.

Her stat growth is the opposite of Lute's: even growth across the board, with a slight bias toward Will and Vitality, and no Charm whatsoever.


Lute's special skill is that he has no special skill. Lute's scenario is that he has no scenario. His ability to draw people to him like a special-needs Tenkai star was supposed to be his special skill, but most of his recruit list is the same characters that anyone can get, with the only unique being Captain Hamilton there. He doesn't even win by sheer numbers -- Red has more options than Lute does.

The only thing that makes him unique is that you can move him out of the first party's first slot, allowing an actual A-list character to take his place. Here I have Gen, Captain Hamilton, Rouge, Roufas, and T260G sitting in my first party, while Lute pulls second-string.

That wasn't a pun when I first thought of it.

Other human options include Fei-On, Fuse, Mei-Ling, Annie (ha!), or Emelia (double ha!). The only other Mec Lute can recruit is EngineerCar, but he has some options for Mystics. Of course, I could go get Thunder or Cotton or Slime or Riki (he's right over there), but I'm about sick of training monsters now.

[R^2]

Guess I'll cover the magic sidequests I haven't done yet, since that's about all there is to do.


Luminous also has Shadow magic available to purchase and Gift yourself in. It's harder to do than Light magic, though.




And there's a creepy red-eyed dude hanging out by the door.

2-02 Saga Frontier Soundtrack - Omble


As soon as you enter Omble (which is totally not a mistranslation of the French ombre, "shade", why would you even think that), your shadow stretches out, detaches itself from you, and runs away.




Other civilian shadows give you some advice.


Shadow of Silence here was pursuing a fugitive into Omble, but said fugitive isn't even here. Bad intel! So why is Silence hanging out by the front door while his shadow is still in Omble? Because shut up, that's why.

Silence's shadow joins us, warning us that when we talk to the real silence, he's as mute as his name implies.


In the dungeon proper, all of the monsters are themselves shadows, but they attack like normal enemies. Like the Luminous Labyrinth, monsters and mecs aren't allowed here in the first place, so it's hard to tell what happens if you download/feast on a shadow creature.

[R^2]

The last room has shadows of all the scenario leaders walking around. Well, mecs and monsters aren't allowed, so the shadows of Gen and Mei-Ling fill in for T260 and Riki. And Fuse's shadow is in here, too, a remnant of the IRPO-centric scenario that made him a protagonist.

Your goal is to find the shadow of your current player character.


In Lute's case this is super-easy, because he has that musical instrument of some sort (what is it called? Damn, tip of my tongue here) strapped to his back. The neck of it sticking out over his shoulder gives his shadow a distinctive silhouette. Also good for this quest: Blue's ponytail, Red's spiky hair. Emelia and Asellus have a tougher time with it.


Touching a shadow in the first room sends them to the second, a sort of filter to help you pick out the exact one you want. Touching a shadow in the second room sends them to the last room in Omble.


You must fight the shades, who take on the stats, movelist, and equipment of your current party. It's not a bad idea to fill out everyone's movelist with useless spells and weak techniques, since the AI will choose what to do at random while you hit them with reliable damaging and partywide attack moves.




GaleSlash, for instance, or VermillionSand, are good choices. In typical Squaresoft fashion, damage you do to enemies reaches into four- and five-digit numbers, but nobody in your party ever has more than 999 HP so enemies do a lot less than that to you. This battle is hard because the enemies don't scale down their attacks to PC level, this battle is easier because the enemies don't scale up their HP to enemy level. One VermillionSand did 1200+ damage to all enemies, and none of them could possibly have had more than 999 -- it was closer to 200 or 300 at this point.


If you chose your shadow correctly, you leave Omble. If you chose incorrectly, you have to pick again.


Silence joins your party if you talk to him after having collected his shadow. I say "talk to him", but of course, he's Silence, he doesn't have any dialog.

Silence is a member of IRPO. At some point in the past, he tried to use his Mystic equipment to absorb the power of Tanzer the interdimensional beast. I don't have any details other than that this idea ended disastrously for him. It's not how he lost his voice, though -- he's a natural mute.

Anyhow, Shadow Magic. It's one of those schools that's not terribly useful except for one awesome spell, like Mystic or Evil magic. HideBehind sends a shadow behind an enemy to tap it on the shoulder and make them turn the other way, making them slightly more vulnerable to attack, but it wears off as soon as the target moves. ShadowNet tries to paralyze all opponents, but hits so rarely it's not worth the bother. PowerGrab drains a little HP from a target, and ShadowSphere is just an attack spell.

The decent spell is ShadowServant, which summons a shadow double of the caster. The shadow can absorb one hit (like MirrorShade), but if it lasts until the caster's next turn, it will automatically perform the same action they do. Use a sword, martial arts, gun, or mystic weapon technique, and the shadow hits with it too. Cast an attack spell, and it's doubled. Cast a healing spell, and it's doubled. Cast a buff spell, and it probably doesn't stack with itself. Oh well.

In Asellus' game I had Mesarthim use LifeRain while ShadowServant was active. It restored double her maximum HP to everyone in the party and sapped two of her LP -- downsides are also doubled, so some caution is necessary. Some moves don't double at all, the same battle saw ShadowServant -> Tower hit only once.

[R^2]

I also did the Rune quest, but having covered all of that in Emelia's scenario I'm not going to go into more detail than that. Once you complete either Light/Shadow and either Arcane/Rune, you can ask Rei in Devin about Space magic or Virgil in Mosperiburg about Time magic.

And we've done the Space magic quest in Riki's scenario, so...






Teleport out!


We find ourselves in a realm with clock-and-hourglass decor, with giant zodiac symbols on the ground. Nothing moves, and there's no background music.


Not even the flames on the giant candles burn.






The way forward is blocked.

[R^2]

If I wanted to, I suppose I could buy some Mystic spells here, but meh. Nobody has the Gift for them, the ones for sale aren't all that useful, and my only dedicated spellcaster -- Rouge -- would have to give up his fully-developed Realm magic for it. Nope!




Since I'm counting on Lute never being used again, I actually take a gamble here: I buy the Asura, the Tao-TiehPattern, and the SandVessel from Gozarus. Lute's maximum LP is now... four. That'd be near-suicidal if he were in the active party, but...

Well, anyway. We escape Facinaturu via the guy in the bar who snuck in his ship, return to Mosperiburg, have Virgil send us back to Time Lord's realm...






As advertised, time starts flowing for everything when you restart the hourglass.

[R^2]

Melody of Time
Once you restart the hourglass, you can proceed straight to the end of the dungeon, but doing that means you miss out on the music.


The enemies previously frozen on the zodiac symbols are animate now. They're thematically appropriate for the symbol they're on, too!

Aries: StraySheep
Taurus: Minotaur
Gemini: 2x Rockbaboon
Cancer: Cancermec (duh)
Virgo: PrimaBronza
Libra: FireCrystal, IceCrystal
Scorpio: Scorpion
Aquarius: Genbu
Pisces: 3x Gunfish, Fishman
Saggittarius: MecDOBBY100, MecDOBBY x4
Capricorn: Demongoat
Leo: Sphinx

This has nothing to do with anything, but I thought it was a neat touch. DemonGoat and Minotaur have some semirare monster skills to absorb, if you're into that kind of thing, and Sphinx is still an okay midgame monster form. MecDOBBY100 can be hard to find but don't have any really fantastic downloads.


I'm convinced that the cuckoo in Kamina shades was added just to pop out and scare the bejeezus out of you as you walk by.


The drawbridge, no longer frozen in time, opens for us.

[R^2]

Somebody at Squaresoft in the late 90s had just found out about Ophiuchus and wanted to include a reference to it in as many games as possible. The zodiac is strange and mysterious, so an obscure thirteenth symbol must be even more strange and mysterious!


Whoa, buddy, how was I supposed to know you had a thing f-- oh, clock. With an L! Hahaha never mind.


You have the option of inviting him into your party with the full retinue of Time Magic, or just asking to buy some of the lower-level spells for anyone who wants them.


I replace Captain Hamilton with him.


Time Magic spells are expensive to cast, but make up some of the most useful spells in the game. DelayOrder lowers the target's Quickness, making it act later in the turn. This isn't as useless as it sounds, because TimeLeap stuns an enemy and never misses. You can use it on bosses! If TimeLord is faster than his target, he can effectively shut them down so they never move while everyone else pounds on them.

Zozma's SharpPain always goes first and hits all enemies but often misses, TimeLord's TimeLeap has no priority and hits one target but never misses. It's kind of a wash.

TimeTwister is a better version of the Shadow magic ShadowServant, doubling whatever it is the target does. I'm pretty sure it targets anyone in the party, too, not just the caster. TimeEclipse and ChaosStream are attack spells; the first tries to damage and petrify the target, the latter damages all enemies and inflicts random status ailments.

OverDrive is the pinnacle of Time Magic: the caster temporarily moves at "infinite" speed, giving them seven additional turns before anyone else can move. At the end of that state, their JP is set to 0. Still, not too shabby!

[R^2]

This is Kyo.


This is the Kyo doujou.


It's where you get Mind magic. I keep forgetting it's even here.




Mystics can't learn Mind magic for whatever reason, even though its opposite -- Evil magic -- is only practiced by one of them.




The test for Mind magic is for each party member to complete on their own. It's a one-on-one battle with a single monster. If you win, you get the gift. If you don't, you don't.

And hey, Rouge never got a chance to learn it! What a gyp.

Maybe he's not human! (We'll find out what the deal is later.)

LifeWave, MindHeal, and Spellbound are available for sale for anyone without the gift. LifeWave is a single-target attack spell, MindHeal restores the caster's HP to full, and Spellbound paralyzes a target. The Gift-only spells are Awakening, which increases your stats but doubles WP/JP cost of skills, and Evaporate, which makes the caster vanish so they can't be targeted by attacks. Like Invisibility in Dungeons and Dragons, it wears off when the caster attacks or is targeted by anything, but I guess it's a useful defensive spell if you plan on being party healer/buffer for a few turns.

[R^2]

Miscellaneous other:


If you take the trapped treasure in Owmi mansion while the DevilSquid is still there (by either coming out of Mesarthim's room to the left, or up from the basement depths), the DevilSquid will laugh at you as you fall.


When you do the Grail quest, Lute almost immediately forgets about what you're doing in favor of scoring free booze.


Hidden in Wakatu is the Blade Chamber, home of Wakatu's Blade God.


In most circumstances, that's all. But if Gen is strong enough, there's a flash, and treasure appears!






Attack power 55 katana. Has an innate skill called "MillionDollers", spelled like that in-game, that drops a bunch of meteors on the enemy party. I have no idea why it's called that, but I assume it's some hilarious translation mix-up.

It's possible to get multiple CometBlades, if you're into that kind of thing. Equip a CometBlade on Rouge and go to the Magic Kingdom. Rouge will leave the party, taking the sword with him. Return to Wakatu and the game will check to see if you have a CometBlade in your inventory. You don't! You get another one. Recruit Rouge in Devin, give him the second CometBlade too, go to the Magic Kingdom, return to Wakatu...

MillionDollers is an okay attack move but I still don't know why you'd go through all that trouble to get more than one mediocre katana.

[R^2]

I fought the EarthDragon. Two things: Fei-On sparked BabelCrumble here on a lucky hit, finishing the last skill he needed for the DSC. Also, EarthDragon never got to move, not even once.


See, TimeLord picked up a bunch of Suzaku here in the Bio Research Lab, because why wouldn't he? His base Quickness is now 88, so not much is going to be moving before him. If I'm fighting a single enemy and TimeLord has the 3 JP needed to cast TimeLeap, the enemy loses its turn.

It's not even remotely fair, honestly.


But EarthDragon was just a trial run.






Yep, Mondo led the raid on Wakatu that turned it into a literal ghost town so he could build his secret military base there.

[R^2]

The Victoria is awfully tiny compared to that Trinity ship.




W-we're broadsiding them.


Wow, what an amazing battle! I'm in awe! I mean, wow, think of how much time and money it would have spent to actually animate all of that!

[R^2]

And just like that, you're in Mondo's base.


As final dungeons go it's about as interesting as Emelia's. You take a freight elevator down, get off, explore until you find a treasure chest that quite unexplainedly lets the elevator go deeper into the base, and then... you take the elevator deeper into the base.


There's a miniboss near the bottom but you can quite literally walk around him.

[R^2]

You actually get Mondo to be the dick everyone says he is just before you fight him!

In the SaGa Frontier manga, Lute was the last to complete his quest, because he was too busy dicking around helping the seven other protagonists (seven because Fuse got his time to shine in the manga). But in return, everybody -- everybody -- helped Lute fight off Mondo's robot, the Spriggan.

Even Slime, that worthless protoplasm that automatically oozes his way into your party when you get the Vitality Rune, had a major role in the fight with Mondo. Slime sat on top of the cockpit and oozed acid, burning Mondo badly enough that it interfered with his control over the Spriggan.

[R^2]

In this version, not even Lute lifts a finger to help.

Last Battle ~ Lute






The Light magic spell LightSword equips the caster with... well, a LightSword. It's the most powerful sword in the game, at attack power 80. More importantly, it also gives the user +10 to all stats, raising TimeLord's Quickness to 98 (and his defenses a bit, whynot). Someone with an active LightSword gets a chance to use the sword skill Deflect, even if they don't know it, so that's nice too.


No matter how many times I watch it, having Fei-On toss around this giant robot with the DSC is always funny. The GiantSwing -> BabelCrumble finisher is particularly great, since he grabs it by the leg, swings it around in a circle a dozen times, flings it into the air, leaps after it, grabs on, flips the whole thing over, and smashes it into the ground.


The Spriggan has five forms. Once you do about 20,000 damage to it, some parts fall off and a crane carries the wreckage away, remodeling the functional parts into something else.

What's the difference between each phase?


I have no idea.








Think it looks like this battle is going fast because all you're seeing is screenshots? That has nothing to do with it! Each form lasts exactly one round. TimeLord uses TimeLeap to make sure the Spriggan never moves. Gen and T260 combo TripleThrust and CombatMastery/PluralSlash, Fei-On uses the DSC, and Rouge hits it with VermillionSand twice thanks to ShadowServant. 20,000 HP of damage output every turn is a lowball estimate.


Ha ha! Still funny.

[R^2]

IronPole is a high-priority move that triggers at the start of the turn, so TimeLord can't stop it with TimeLeap.


That'll slow me down a little, too.


Not much, though.




Even in its final form, TimeLord still moves faster and can shut it down.


The last form is super-tough, though! It lasted two turns.

[R^2]

Saga Frontier - Standard Yorkland Song
This isn't the song that plays here -- it actually never plays in the game at all. But it's on the OST, and since it's called "Standard Yorkland Song", it was probably supposed to either play now or as typical Yorkland background music instead of Dear My Country.


Ma: Sir? If you mean my stupid son, no he hasn't.
Trinity mook: Hmm... if he's not here, where might I find him?
Ma: If you don't mind, would you get out of my house?


Lute: Ma!




Ma: So you've finally become useful to society.
Lute: Are you going out, Ma?
Ma: I am going to the cemetary to tell your dad a friend of his just died. Although I'm pretty sure they're already talking to each other right now.
Lute: He was dad's best friend?
Ma: Yes. So much so that even I got jealous of them sometimes.

Yep. Lute's dad was one of the friends Mondo was talking about when he gave Emelia the Angel Broach.


Trinity mook: Sir, please return to our emergency meeting immediately. Trinity's future depends on you.
Lute: Yipes, they've found me!
Ma: Wha? Lute! If they're depending on you, this must be the end of the world.
Lute: You said it, Ma. Thanks for the advice.




You break Trinity, you buy it. Lute's in charge now, reluctant as he is. So the thousands of years Trinity ruled over the regions with an iron fist wallet are coming to an end.

Well, not explicitly. But would you trust that moron with the keys to a multiregional conglomerate so powerful they set the currency standard?

[R^2]

Also, since the game never tells you: the Spriggan robot was powered by the Cube reactor. It was never in Yorkland; that was a trap Mondo set for Joker, using Emelia as both the bait and the trap itself.

Anyway, now I've covered all the kinds of magic the game lets characters learn, including all of the single-user stuff. So what combination of schools would you like to see in the next scenario? Polling is open! (You can choose multiple options in this poll, if you feel strongly enough to do so. Voting for two opposing schools doesn't make much sense, though.)

A rundown:
Light: Useful spells include StarlightHeal, the only targeted healing spell in the game; FlashFlood, which is basically X-Zone from Final Fantasy; MegaWindblast, a powerful attack against all enemies; and LightSword, which turns even a dedicated spellcaster into a decent swordsman.

Shadow: Kind of dumb except for ShadowServant, which makes up for the rest.

Rune: Mostly buff spells, like VictoryRune's attack power increase, VitalityRune's regeneration, and FreedomRune's protection from ailments. Lacks any direct-damage spells.

Arcane: Notable spells include Saber, a cheap single-target attack; Grail, which removes all status ailments from a target; and Tower, which converts every JP the caster has into killin'.

Time: You really don't need anything to win the game beyond TimeLeap, adequate Quickness to make it work for you, and enough other party members to dedicate one caster to shutting down your enemy. OverDrive is pretty nice too. It's the most useful school of magic in the game, which is only fitting if you consider that you have to sacrifice an LP to get the SandVessel in order to learn it.

Space: The "don't break the game" option. ReverseGravity and VaporBlast do more damage than other spells of the JP cost, but setting/unsetting Photosynthesis and Deathsynthesis regeneration is only useful in niche circumstances (like I illustrated at the end of Riki's scenario) and I've never found I needed to cast Vortex. So eh.