#Vestaria Saga I

[loopingpyre]

I think an SRPG game should take advantage of Full Metal Demon Muramasa's route system and implement an event where a character performs a heroic sacrifice and it's based on (out of a select number) whoever has the highest support points with the main lord.

And then on repeats it should randomise the number so you don't know who it'll be.

[fortune-maiden]

After being good all week it’s back to making up prompts xD

Word goal: 1000 words

Ideas: 0

[silent-partner-412]

sometimes i’m reminded that the kaga saga games exist and goddamn i’m glad i chose not to add those to the scope of “fire emblem” games to get to during my marathon of them bc that would’ve been way too overwhelming

[regallibellbright]

Bro's playing Vestaria Saga

Bro, after establishing a few plot things including how a character is 14 during an earlier event and how she's needed on this map: A year has passed, she's 15 now. *Beat* They're all child soldiers, by the way.

Me: Well, of course! What self-respecting Fire Emblem-esque turn-based tactical game DOESN'T have child soldiers?

Bro: *A lengthy pause as he is visibly in thought* Gaiden only has one.

Me: Two, Genny's fifteen.

[sukimas]

oh yeah one more reason to play vestaria saga: it has a dragon that is significantly larger than grima, and you are allowed to fight this dragon without using a proxy. it's fun

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

I wish people would remember FE3 AKA Mystery of the Emblem featured Male Pegasus Knights as enemies, they're even labeled as male in the game data.

In fact the whole concept of Male Pegasus Knights being impossible, as opposed to just being something that doesn't happen often. Karin saying Pegasus Knights are usually women doesn't mean a man riding a pegasus is totally impossible.

In Vestaria Saga 2, Eagle/Gryphon riders are usually women, but there's still a male one that shows up as a boss.

In-fact the entire concept that a Pegasus can only be ridden by a woman and that a male Pegasus Knight is outright impossible was introduced in The Blazing Blade, a game Kaga had no involvement in.

.

[kunosoura]

honestly though I think it's really sweet that every game Kaga has tried to make after his stint in IS, he approached the Thracia illustrator to collaborate with him and do the character designs. and it was one thing that she said yes for Tear Ring Saga, where he had a decent amount of capital and a full studio behind the game's production.. but to say yes again later for Vestaria saga which was basically an indie project hacked together in an RPG maker engine like it's honestly touching !!

[nightzap]

My thoughts on Vestaria Saga: FE Fans, please try this game!

I've finished my first playthrough of Vestaria Saga 1 a few days ago and I wanted to share my thoughts on it, because I overall really loved it and think that Fire Emblem fans should definitely try it out. It pretty much *is* a Fire Emblem game in all but name, being made by the creator of FE and playing like FE after all.

The way I would describe the maps of the game is with a vague feeling of "realness" of the battles. I don't mean a realistic combat simulation, but rather the feeling that the battles are happening as part of the story, and you are fighting a war. Something that I begrudge in Conquest's and Engage's otherwise wonderfully designed maps is that they often feel static, and seperate from what's going on. It's something that annoys me in many video games, when a level feels like it was designed to be a video game level first and something that organically fits into the world and was built by the people within it second, instead of having both of these work in tandem. In VS maps things are constantly happening. Cutscenes happen over the course of a battle, often changing the situation because some characters decide to join the fighting or retreat from the battlefield, unrelated parties get caught up in the struggle and need to be protected, and some of your own units even have sidequests that start in the middle of a chapter, giving you an additional objective to clear if you want to see everything. Sieges on castles and towns are just as focused on finding a way inside the walls as on fighting the soldiers protecting them, if not more.

Besides these events making the maps feel more alive, there's also the simple fact that most of the enemy soldiers are people too, simply fighting for their side without being evil. There are many minibosses with their own portrait and a few lines, enough to make them feel like people. They emphasize that, even if the enemy leaders you are fighting are genuinely evil, the war is still horrible and many people who have done nothing wrong suffer from it. One of the best examples of this is in one chapter where you are laying siege to a city, where the boss (himself a cruel man, but also kinda an anti-villain who took power in a rebellion against an even worse ruler) has conscripted many civilians to fight you, and I obviously didn't want to slaughter these innocent people who could barely hold a weapon. A villager told me that the conscripts receive barely any food, and could surely be made to lay down their weapons if you seize the granaries surrounding the city. Sounds like the perfect solution, right? But the problem is, the minibosses guarding these granaries have names, faces, and little blurbs showing you that they aren't evil at all, they just happen to be soldiers of a ruler whom they trust in, and two of the minibosses are even in love with each other! So I decided to take the hardest route, neither raiding the granaries nor engaging the conscripts (who luckily aren't willing to pick a fight if you stay out of their movement range).

The maps also have many side objectives, from visitable villages, to treasures found in caves, to more involved activities like raiding a money convoy so the villain can't pay his expensive mercenaries anymore and they abandom him. Side objectives like that have been disappearing in FE games more and more over the years, and it's something I found lacking. Besides aiding the "realness" I've talked about, it also mixes up the gameplay from just fighting the enemies that stand in your way. Some sidequests are more than a little obtuse, and I frequently checked guides so I wouldn't miss anything. The worst moment was definitely in a chapter where it's strongly hinted that the person accompanying one of one of your main characters is the long lost sibling of the enemy commander, and having them speak to each other could resolve the battle nonviolently, especially since the actual leader of the enemy army has already been killed in the previous chapter. Said commander is holed up at the end of the map, however, and you would have to pretty much slaughter your way through the enemy army to reach them, including the commander's retainer who's riding towards you to fight you. What do you have to do to avoid unnessary slaughter and leave the retainer alive? Well, a few turns in two other characters appear in a corner of the map, running from brigands, you have to spend several turns walking them to a house where they meet another character, you have to visit that house with your lord to recruit the three of them, then your lord must start a conversation with the third character who then uses the closeness between the siblings to warp the commander closer to you so you can talk to them. You can only find this out yourself through trial and error, spending multiple turns camping out in the lower part of the map without fighting.

In most FE games, side characters dissappear from the story entirely once their introduction is over, but Vestaria Saga often has minor characters get a speaking roles later on if they are still alive, some of them even get full on events during the map that turn into additional sidequests you have to complete in order to keep them. However, the game doesn't treat them all equally, quite a few slip through the crags and never get mentioned again, getting no development. Characters also pretty much don't talk to anyone outside their circle; someone who doesn't have or make any friends during their introduction is pretty much alone. I have my issues with the support system in FE, but at least it lets everyone have more than four lines.

The cast of units is quite balanced in gameplay and everyone feels distinct. Almost everyone is at least usable, and most maps have a pretty high deployment limit, so rarely do you have to truly bench someone. In the lategame, when your army gets truly big, it even splits in two halves going on different missions, allowing you to use everyone without your army feeling bloated. Everyone has one or more skills, so even units of the same class have distinct roles. For Example, Bonacel and Prody are both Guardians (Armor Knights) who join you in the prologue, but the former has Shield (Dex% chance to block an attack) and Wrath (25 % chance to crit on counterattacks), making him better at straight up fighting and tanking, while the latter has Good Neighbor (adjacent units take less damage) and Diligence (gains more EXP), making him someone who helps the rest of your armies and doesn't need as many direct kills as others to keep up in levels.

Many units also have their own personal weapons as their ace in the hole, and these often turn a mediocre unit good (and a good one great), by giving them statbuffs and additional skills, effective damage, or double hits, on top of having good stats. Furthermore, you get a steady supply of Siurian Thaumite, an item that repairs weapons, throughout the campaign, so you don't have to go out of your way to preserve them for special occasions. Hoarding is a pitfall, y'all! For example, Zade, the protagonist, has the Edelstern, which may have only decent might and it's effectiveness against Knights doesn't come up much until a bit into the game, but it attacks twice in a row, has 15 crit, and most importantly, an insane 120 hit, making Zade a secret weapon against evasive foes. Over the course of my playthrough, I gave Zade a full three doses of Siurian Thaumite so he could keep using the Rapier that makes all other Rapiers feel inadequate. Even with his middling stats, he was a very capable fighter throughout the game.

Something I found interesting is how the game balances swords. Historically, swords in the FE series have had a big disadvantage because they don't have an easily available ranged option. Vestaria Saga also lacks ranged swords, even magical swords are melee only, but instead swords get a different speciality: Easily available brave weapons. You get a Cutlass, a double-hitting sword, in prologue, and can buy additional copies at a reasonable price as early as chapter 5. Lategame, you can even buy Knight's Brands, which have even more might. This gives sword users a lot more reliable killing power than axe and lance users, allowing you to one-round tough enemies with a flurry of hits or double fast targets whom you normally could only get a single attack off against.

The gameplay isn't perfect, however, and there are quite a few boring and unfun moments. For one, the maps are often too big, and sometimes you will spend several turns doing nothing but moving units forward, especially if you need to move over rough terrain, funnel your army through a one tile wide corridor, or even worse, a one tile wide corridor with rough terrain. A frequent annoyance are enemies mages with 7 range tomes that inflict damage and status effects. These would be much more bearable if you had more options to fight them, but the only thing you can really do is to position a unit with a good movement range at the edge of the mages' range, then swoop in on the following turn. Just tanking the statuses isn't viable since status healing items are rare (their are a handful doses of herbs, which all have one use each, and one somewhat hidden status healing staff with 10 uses) and in case of the berserk-inflicting Immania tome can't tank it at all, as the berserked unit will immediately attack their allies at the start of your turn. You do get a ballista user eventually who can hit the mages at 7 range, but he can't always get 1-hit-kills and thus gets hit by the counter attack, and you also never get any status staves to disable the mages.

Following from that, staff users are quite boring. There are only two staves in the game that do something over than heal, one of them is it's user's personal "weapon" and the other is optained in the penultimate chapter. Staff user can only walk around and heal for the most part.

There is also little customization of units, this game is really retro in that regard. There are only three skill-granting books, no branched promotions, and no reclass system. There is one event that two characters can use to reclass, but one of them is too low level to benefit from the stat boosts and loses a useful non combat skill, while the other has more options, but most of them are horrible (Mage for someone with 5 base magic and only a 1 percent growth? Laugable), so the only real option here is to get that character's promotion (and she can't even promote without the event, for some reason, so if you do choose the former character, the latter, who is already undertuned, will truly fall off).

One last annoyance is the afromentioned lategame party split. Out of the two teams, only one of them gets access to the convoy, while the other one has to settle for the items they had on hand. Furthermore, the second army doesn't even get a preparation screen, making it much more annoying to manage the additonal items you pick up. At least units the second army can still send items to the convoy if their inventory is full, leading to a funny moment when one of my mages in the first army could make good use of a tome that someone hundreds of kilometers away had bought in the previous chapter, despite both taking place about simultanously.

In terms of presentation, the character portraits are very nice looking, but most of the graphics are standart SRP maker assets. Animations are very choppy, many characters use the same animation with only redrawn sprites, with pretty much every melee horse unit having the same sword strikes and lance thrusts. The music is fantastic and varied.

My final thoughts: Vestaria Saga is very, very rough around a lot of edges, but at the same time it also gave me an experience I haven't had with modern, more polished Fire Emblem games didn't. All these little quirks make an incredibly solid and memorable game, like a piece of Incan masonry: Many weird shapes producing an earthquake-proof wall. I really think the Fire Emblem series can learn a bit from this one. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these "Modern FE suxx, muh Kaga Emblem better" people. Vestaria Saga is a game that has given me something that I have been misssing in modern games, and it made me really interested in checking out the SNES FE games, which I haven't played before.

[fioras-resolve]

i don't play fire emblem heroes because fuck gacha but i think they should make more deep cuts with what characters they bring in. we do not need a 16th camilla, what the world really needs is:

-Fire Emblem Cipher OC's -Characters from the canceled Wii game -Tear Ring Saga rep -Fuck it, Vestaria Saga rep -Wait apparently the Binding Blade manga had some original characters? fuckin, Al, put him in there

[shalmonsgamedev]

I should probably also start playing more RPGmaker games for homework.  I'm sure there'll be plenty of things I want to jot down, like "how did they do that & how can I do something similar?"  I'm already aware of a few games that really made me go "wait, RPGmaker can do that?", so, should be exciting?

Owned:

The Amber Throne (Tbh, I did play a chunk of this one & got softlocked?  Worth a revisit though, very impressive presentation despite its flaws.)

Ara Fell (Actually played through this one in its entirety, so probably just a quick revisit to remind myself what all it could do)

Arelite Core

Asdivine Hearts

Aveyond 3-1/3-2

Benjamin of Blackstone Edge

Brave Hero Yuusha EX

Corinne Cross's Dead & Breakfast

Danger Zone Friends

Deadly Sin 2

Disc Creatures

Echoes of Aetheria

Finding Light

Hello Charlotte EP2: Requiem Aeternam Deo

Hylics

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass

LiEat

Moonstone Deep

Mutiny Island

Nepenthe

Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Chapter II: "Broken Wings"

No Delivery

OneShot

Path Out

Rakuen

The Sacred Tears TRUE

Skyborn

Soma Spirits: Rebalance

Sweet Lily Dreams

To the Moon

Wishlisted:

8-Bit Adventures

The Great Gaias

Holidays

Omori

Pegasus-5: Gone Astray

Stray Cat Crossing

Toymaker

Unraveled: Tale of the Shipbreaker's Daughter

Vestaria Saga I  (wait, really??  This was RPGmaker?  Dang EDIT: i am getting mixed answers as to whether or not that steam store tag is accurate, so idk)

The World is Your Weapon

I realize there are plenty of free ones out there as well, but my inclination is to play what I paid for first.

Also WOW.  Itch.io desperately needs a sort-by-tag thing for your library.  I am very much questioning the amount of time I spent figuring out what all in my sizable purchases section was RPGmaker-related. 🙃

[yanderefairyangel]

Oh and if you wanna hear a strange bit of trivia about Vestaria Saga is that Armored units are split into Armor(Knight in translation) plus Heavy Armor(Heavy Knight in translation). Most armored classes are just in "Knight", but a small few are in Heavy Knight.

This affects almost nothing, Knight & Heavy Knight have the same movement type & have similar sprites, but there's like one anti armor weapon that affects knights, but not heavy knights.

The playable heavy knight being Armored Knight(Grand Guard in translation), which is a promoted class like in Gaiden, playable members starting from guardian.

Its also separate from General, which is only playable in the second Vestaria Saga. Armored Knight has higher base stats, but General has one more base MOV, though in VSII, the playable armor has one extra base mov as said before.

I feel Kaga goes for alot of redundant classes & typings for flavor, personally.

¨

[loopingpyre]

Found out my Favourite Vestaria Saga character, who goes unplayable in 2, is actually playable for a chapter provided I kill off another unit.

Sorry Drake, but #CezarSweep

Modern Fire Emblem could never

[fortune-maiden]

I am so torn on Fire Emblem Engage

some aspects of it look really cool but it just doesn’t feel like the Fire Emblem series I fell in love with

[myturtlegotjacked]

Shouzou Kaga is alright, I think. He did include a transgeneder character in his latest indie game, which is pretty progressive for a 70 year old game developer!

Oh man I didn't know that! Had to look it up but Emilia Vestaria Saga is a pretty straightforward transgirl! Huh! Take that Nintendo! I guess I was making assumptions based on things I was reading about Tearring Saga, but that's pretty unfair. Maybe bigender King Goddess Naga truly is canon...

[regallibellbright]

My brother’s been playing Vestaria Saga, so I keep seeing his Steam profile come up every few minutes as he restarts the game to reload the chapter/save.

Bro, coming in: This game uses a single roll for RNG. *Explains how he determined this, ie, the RNG is in fact screwing him over in ways that are consistent with single-roll RNG.*

Me: I am SORRY.

Bro, whose favorite Fire Emblem games are for the GBA: No I’m having a blast. The difficulty modes are called “Orthodox” and “Clemency.”

... Yeah, I laughed at that. I can respect that one.

[sukimas]

Opinions on Kaga’s non-FE games?

I like them! Definitely a bit less polished; the man needs an editor (or at least a second set of eyes looking at certain mechanics and lines.) However, they do some really interesting and unique things, and I'd recommend them to fans of Kaga's FE games.

That is, I'd recommend Tear Ring and Vestaria Saga I and II. Berwick is a special sort of beast that I'd almost call a completely different genre.