I finished my second playthrough last night! This time I went for Rosetta’s ending. I don’t know whether I got the “good” ending or the “normal” ending, or even how to differentiate between the two, but I was satisfied when it was all over.

Bad budget game Tactical Guild may be, but I really like what they did with the three heroines. It’s not just about different endings; choosing another girl gives you a different story altogether. The final boss on Rosetta’s path was completely different, for one thing. Shiki had a different goal, Floy and Nora suffered different fates. On Lia’s path, Dahl and Natsu both disappeared until the end. Here they both showed up, and Dahl was in your party until the end (for all the good he did, haha), etc. etc.

I was expecting something more like Hector Mode in FE7, with the same story told through another person’s eyes. But here it’s more like picking a different girl changes the fate of the world itself. If you go through all three paths, you’ll get three different alternative histories. I love that, that’s what I call replay value. It’s almost enough to make up for the crappiness of the rest of the game. Almost, but not quite.

And now I really want to play Natsu’s route and see what happens to her. I got to do some different guild quests on my second playthrough, so maybe there’ll be even more the third time round? The Inna sidequest was Rosetta-specific, so Natsu will probably have at least once of her own. The nice thing about quests is that not only do most of them grow into mini-stories but also if you complete them all successfully, the requesters show up at the end of the game and give you nice weapons and armor. The most memorable quest for me was having to help a mad scientist named Franken create the ultimate golem. Instead, he kept creating evil clones of my main character, who tried to kill him and become the real ones. The golem he finally came up with was crazily sarcastic as well. It was hilarious!

So there’s a lot to like about this game if you can see past the horrible gameplay. But I can’t. Why? Why is it so bad? If it was just mediocre or even slightly below average, the branching story and the quests might make up for it, as it is, it’s just…awful. Ninja Studio put all the effort of the game in the wrong places. If they had cut down the story to just one route and made up for it by making Tactical Guild fun to play, that would have been way better. I still haven’t gotten over how they used the same generic sprites with the same colors for both allies and enemies. And the sad thing is, it didn’t have to be that way. On your menu screen when you equip characters, they change their looks depending on what they’re wearing. It’s like Tactics Layer (from the same developer) or Dragon Quest 9. You can customize the look of your characters from head to toe, but! When they appear on the battle field they’re the same old indistinguishable sprites. Work done = 0.

I wish I could say that was the worst thing about equipment in this game. Alas, it is not. The worst thing is buying equipment, because you have no way of telling whether a piece of equipment is good or not until you actually buy it and try to equip it. In most RPGs, when you shop for a new sword, it’s easy to tell what’s better than what. Either more expensive goods are always better, or the game lets you see at a glance what effect it will have on your character. It’s been done so often it’s practically common sense. Alas, common sense is not common to common games like Tactical Guild.

What makes things harder is that weapons/armor have unexpected effects and hidden stats that you aren’t told about. This King’s armor might give, say, 18 DEF and 20 MDF. You recall that your current armor is 15 DEF, 15 MDF. This has got to be better, right? Not so fast. You might take it home to find out that it raises those two stats and lowers every single other one. Or that it’s far too damaging to that all-important Magic Attack stat. What now? In the end I dealt with the problem by saving first, shopping, then reloading if I wasn’t happy with the results. Towards the end of the game I focused solely on magic-raising equipment, and that worked much better. Still a massive waste of time, though.

And I said I enjoyed getting a different story, but it’s not like it was perfect or anything. Rosetta’s story made a moderate amount of sense, and is the one I’d recommend if you’re doing only one playthrough. Lia’s route was downright nonsensical. You just go from place to place chasing Nora, the knight army disappears entirely (when they should be playing a big role), someone who seems to be a villain appears and dies in all of 2 minutes, Rosetta pops up and she’s like “Hi guys! I’m killing these monsters! Okay, done, bye guys!” and so on. Then there’s the fact that Rosetta’s route shows a group of people poised to take over the country, which means that ridding the world of Reti-Arts on Lia’s route (wait, did you even?) has merely delayed the inevitable. Though if fate has been changed then maybe they don’t want to take over anymore? Then where did they go? Hmm.

Oh, and I mustn’t forget the sudden love confession out of nowhere. Guin and Lia had something interesting going on, and it was clear from the second mission that she liked him, so it wasn’t that strange when he confessed to her. Guin and Rosetta on the other hand… ZERO chemistry. They barely coexist, she just mopes and gets in the way. All of a sudden she goes “Btw, I love you! Bye!” Where did that come from? Then Guin says he loves her too. If you had to ask him to explain why, I bet his empty little head would explode. After all that, the thought of Guin confessing his love to Natsu on the route gives me the dry heaves. She looks all of 12 years old! You know, I really will pass on the third playthrough. Yeah…

For my next game, I want to try a cooking game. I just came back from buying more groceries than I could safely carry, and I need to do something with them before they go bad. In particular I bought something called “pork belly”, which is the fattiest, most unhealthy-looking cut of meat I have ever seen in my life. I figure something that bad for you must be delicious, right?

I’ll also keep playing SaGa 3 You can save anywhere in it, so I just play a few minutes every night before I sleep. It’s kind of boring, so it’s perfect sleeping material.