Unlimited Saga worth palying ?

It's not that hard, and you never don't know what to do. Each town has a finite number of quests, and you pick them from a single convenient centralized location in each town. Story quests are also generally prefixed as such, and a fair number of story quests can be started from any town. It's not like the other Saga games where you have to find some secret, nondescript NPC to tell you where to go.

The dungeons are also quite large and fully explorable. You move in a boardgame manner, yes, but and there are various places where you can, like, swim or climb over rubble, but beyond that, the dungeons are pretty normal RPG dungeons in layout.

The difficulty of the battle system is also really exagerated. Armic and Judy are really difficult because the starting characters are awful, but the rest aren't. The manual has this huge flaw, though, where it fails to mention something really important about how damage works. Sort of like how FFXII's manual doesn't mention how the different weapons work.

There are three basic kinds of attacks -- Hit, Slash, and Pierce. They all do slightly different things, but the exact differences aren't important. What IS important is that you need a fair compliment of armor to block against all of them. Each piece of armor has, like, up to four different "skills" on it like in FFX. The main skills are things like "Hit Protection" or "Slash Protection". What happens if you don't have all of your ... protection bases covered? Well, if you're completely lacking any sort of Pierce Protection/Pierce Evasion armor, and the enemy uses a pierce attack, you're probably going to be taking a lot of damage. There's also this thing called Life Protection, which appears on certain armors after you've had them for awhile, which makes it so it's really hard to lose LP while you still have HP (And some Pierce attacks can target LP directly).

As for the HP/LP thing, your character passes out when they run out of LP. HP prevernts LP from dropping after attacks. In the previous Saga games, you didn't lose LP till your HP hit zero. In USaga, it's more like the odds of not losing LP are roughly equal to the current percentage of your max HP you're at. And as previously stated, the life protection skill on armor might as well add an additional 30% to that "Not losing LP" factor.

In general, if you have a decent variety of armor and some amount of life protection equipment, you're not going to lose LP that fast. A lot of people complain about random and unexplainable LP loss, but the system's actually pretty regular, and you can cut down a lot of the rapid LP loss problems early on by just getting armor with better skills instead of better numbers.

Also, if your LP is getting low, try to avoid enemies. If not, the individual quests are short -- most are in the 20 minute range. There are larger ones later on but you should be dying... well, you shouldn't be dying at that point -- and if you fail them replaying them doesn't really take long, and you should be able to blow through theme pretty quickly since you should know where everything is by that point.

The actual gameplay hours is probably closer to maybe 100 hours if you do everything, and that's a really rough average. Each character is only around 12-17 hours to complete. If you do every single quest with every character, it'd take longer, but there's no reason to do that, and that would get really damn repetitive anyway.

Oh, and, weapon breakage isn't a huge issue. Weapons don't break in the middle of a fight, and you can get some sort of "Field repair" skill pretty early on if you use weapons frequently. Weapons also get relatively cheap later on, so keeping a large stock of things on hand is easy to do. If it still bugs you, martial arts are incredibly powerful, and the tech tree for martial arts is, uh, really, really massive, so it's not like you'll have any shortage of things to do by completely ignoring the other weapons.

Er, also, the more you kill a specific class of enemy (Insect, Zombie, Whatever their specfic name is prefixed by) the less common that enemy is. Also, each enemy has a predator type. like, Bird-type enemies are predators to Insect type enemies. the more you leave the predator alone, the less common the thing it preys on gets. Anyway, insects tend to have a lot of LP-damaging attacks. In other words, kill as many insects as you can early on, and leave birds alone.

Also, something else the manual doesn't mention, the order in which you give people commands affects what row they're in, not the order they attack in. First command = leader, next two are middle row, and the final two given commands are in the back row. So basically, if you're lacking a lot of armor, put all the really good stuff on one or two guys, and pick them go first, and keep the poorly armored people in the back.

The actual attack order is selected once the real starts spinning. Press the right or left dpad thingies to pick who you want to go.