[Click here to start from the first progress log]

As expected, I made quite a bit of progress last night and was able to get through several boss fights. An interesting new character joined up, more plot stuff happened, and the translation really started to drop the ball. It’s not that it’s bad, because the dialogue tends to be comfortably concise rather than falling into the trap of overexplaining everything, but there are a litany of errors that are just wrong enough to undercut the emotion and drama in several scenes. The writing’s intent is always obvious, so it’s easy to pick up on what’s trying to be said, but it’s still frustrating because this is the closest the game has to a deal-breaking flaw at the moment; with a more polished script, it could be said that Azure Saga: Pathfinder is every bit the equal of (and very possibly superior to) jRPGs from bigger studios.

Some random observations

Health and mana potions have tiers, with better versions obviously healing more. Something I’ve noticed is that the lowest-tier versions of both are less expensive per point of HP/MP restored, though, which means that you’re best off buying a bunch of lower quality potions to bring characters to 100% between random encounters. The only obvious advantage that the more powerful variants have is healing more per turn when used in combat, but boss fights are the only time you actually need them. It’s interesting the way this keeps lower-tier items relevant even once more powerful versions become available, though it’s hard to say if that was the intention.

I don’t know why modern jRPGs always include a fishing minigame (it was actually fairly rare in classic jRPGs outside of the Breath of Fire series), but I’m starting to feel like a bit of an expert on them. Lost Sphear’s fishing was mindless and ultimately served little point. Battle Chasers: Nightwar’s fishing required watching the fish’s movement to know which direction to hold and allowed you to gain a couple non-fish items. Then there’s Azure Saga: Pathfinder’s fishing, which plays out as a timing minigame that’s actually surprisingly challenging. Not only do you have to stop a fast-moving cursor within a small blue target area, but the target shrinks over time and you sometimes have to hit multiple targets in a row (:53). I imagine that successfully doing so would provide a greater reward—I received mostly health potions and money for my few successes at the one-shot variant—but each attempt uses up consumable bait, and I ran out of it before I could figure all of that out. This might be a mechanic that requires some save scumming to explore in depth.

This dungeon wasn’t my favorite, all things considered, though it was over quickly enough thanks to the fact that dungeons consist of a small number of rooms. This keeps the random battles from becoming a burden, but this dungeon in particular gave enemies all kinds of arguably cheap moves. These cubes in particular are the devil because taking out some of their health can cause them to suicide attack your entire party. It isn’t likely to knock anyone out, but still does enough damage that you have to go into the menu and either use up MP or items to heal everyone and avoid starting the next random battle at a disadvantage. This slows everything down.

That dungeon also has some strangeness

If you told me that this dungeon has an encounter rate twice as high as all the others, I’d believe it, but that’s most likely my frustration playing tricks on me. Here’s something that’s legitimately confusing, though: early in this area, you get into a fight with someone and they do a truly stunning amount of damage. It turns out that you’re supposed to lose this fight, which is fine, but it’s easy to see how someone could burn through a lot of their valuable items desperately trying to win.

Then the real boss fight came around, and this is where things got weird. I spent a lot of time doing various attacks before realizing that fury attacks did 1 point of damage per hit and beating his helpers caused him to spawn in even worse ones. Toward the end, I suspected that this was another fight that I was supposed to lose, so I basically threw in the towel and let him finish my party off. Nope; that was a game over. My problem with this is that this fight looks even more unwinnable than the one minutes earlier that was unwinnable, so it’s easy to get confused by whether you should waste time and items trying to win or roll over to progress the story.

You know how I beat him? By knocking out one helper, then doing a bunch of normal attacks that did slightly more damage than he healed with his occasional healing moves. Once he was dead, the helper could be quickly taken out to finish off the encounter. This fight was obnoxiously Sisyphean, and to be perfectly honest, it risked ruining my perception of the game. Things get pretty interesting afterward, though, and subsequent areas avoid this dungeon’s pitfalls, so it was forgivable.

A minor bug-type thing

Here’s an interesting little thing I’ve discovered: if you go into the save screen and then exit without saving, the cursor will disappear. This isn’t actually a problem since you can still exit out of the menu and reopen it without any issues, but it’s strange.

Lost in a maze

This is where I am right now. It’s one of those RPG mazes where failing to exit in the correct direction can teleport you back to the beginning, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to be following. I’ve tried going in the mist effect’s direction as well as in the opposite direction, but it doesn’t move in a clear direction toward one exit. I tried exiting next to the trees with apples on them, but not all screens have such a tree. Same with a different kind of tree. I tried going through the exits near bones, avoiding exits with bones, and various other things. Nothing worked. Whatever the gimmick is here, it’s completely lost on me. As a result, I’ve started save scumming to try and get through this thing. That’s still not a perfect solution since it’s not always obvious that your progress is forward progress, but hopefully it’ll get me through.

On the bright side, the metric ton of random battles I’ve gone through trying to figure this maze out have made my party quite a bit more powerful, so they should be more than a match for whatever boss encounter lies at the end of all of this.

[Click here to go to Azure Saga – Pathfinder log #2]

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