[Click here to start from the first progress log]

The good news is that things have become quite a bit more entertaining since the maze. The bad news is that I’ve discovered so many reproducible, progress-annihilating bugs that Azure Saga: Pathfinder is still difficult to recommend. In its current state, at least; given some patching and the wholesale destruction of that maze, this has the potential to be every bit the game I was so enchanted by early on. I managed to stumble across three entirely separate bugs in the span of something like five minutes, though, and then several more after that.

Let’s get right into it, then

You don’t get many sidequests in this game, which I personally appreciate because of how it keeps the game focused. At this point, however, a bunch of areas were locked off, so I kept accumulating sidequests that I couldn’t complete until later. The only one that could be finished in this area tasked the party with defeating a certain number of mushroom-looking enemies. Once it was completed, two of my other sidequests automatically completed despite their conditions not being met. I assumed that this was merely a visual bug and that the quests wouldn’t allow me to finish them by returning to the quest-giver, but they really were completed.

These bugs go in a gradient from potentially helpful (sidequests completing on their own saves me some running around) to harmless to serious. This harmless menu bug happened shortly after the sidequests completion bug, and what’s basically happening here is that opening the menu somehow caused it to get stuck open. The only real downside here is not being able to open the menu, which means no healing, but running around and triggering a random encounter sorted things out.

Then there’s this bug, which is on the verge of being game-breaking. This one is reproducible—which I know because it happened to me twice—and it causes you to get teleported in the current level, sticking you in a wall or out of bounds. All it takes for this to occur is for a random battle to be triggered right as you go down some stairs. That’s all. Once the encounter is finished (it doesn’t matter whether you fight or run away), you stay on the same level, but your position is changed to reflect where you would end up on the higher/lower level. The first time this happened, I got stuck in a wall. Since saving records your exact position, the only way out of this is to reload an earlier save, inevitably losing a sizable chunk of dungeon progress.

For awhile, I made sure to save before every flight of stairs, but eventually figured that it was a rare enough bug that it wouldn’t strike again. Then I started recording because I wanted to show off how this dungeon had both random encounters and ones that you get after going through certain doors for the first time, only for the bug to happen again while I was recording (11:50). This time, I was teleported out of bounds. I tried touching an area transition to fix it, but that didn’t work. I tried getting into a random encounter to see if that did anything (random battles still happen out of bounds), but that led nowhere. Thankfully, there was an autosave crystal that I had brushed against earlier, so I only lost maybe a minute of progress.

The lesson here is this: always save before using stairs.

I even got a class change because of a bug

I’ve come across two quest-givers who promised to unlock the true potential of party members, and doing these short, seemingly uneventful quests unlocks a passive perk for them as well as some supposed stat gains. The first one I found was for Clery and required going into an earlier area to find a Philosopher Stone. In going back to this early area, though, I discovered yet another bug: beating level 1 enemies once you’re at a high enough level causes you to gain negative 1 point of experience (this is very likely caused by the math that reduces experience gains as characters level up). Since the experience counts down to 0 with a sound effect and it’s not possible to reach 0 by counting down from -1, this sound effect plays endlessly. The only thing I’ve found that fixes it is the sound effect of a pushed log.

Anyway, I made it through this area, found the Philosopher Stone, and returned with it to get Clery’s class change. Pretty uneventful, all things considered.

Stellaire (the awesome green-wearing archer/rogue character) is the second character whose class upgrade quest became available, and this is where things got pretty crazy. See, I accepted the quest and intended to complete it, but then I finished a minor sidequest and that bug from earlier struck again, completing all of my sidequests at once. That included Stellaire’s class change quest. When I went back to see if she’d get her class change without any work, the initial quest offer scene played instead, then gave her a class change immediately afterward.

What I suspect is happening here is that the dialogue you get depends on whether you have certain items. The first time you talk to him, he hasn’t given you the key yet, so you don’t have either it or the item he asks you to obtain. Once you obtain the key, this is likely to change his dialogue to reflect the fact that you’ve spoken to him. Of course, once you’ve obtained the correct item, the correct class change dialogue would trigger. I imagine that the sidequest randomly completing caused the key to be removed from my inventory, though, and since I didn’t have the item he sent me to obtain, the initial quest offer played instead. Or something like that.

Wolves can be dodgy

There are a lot of things that I like about the gameplay in Azure Saga: Pathfinder. For one thing, the maximum number of enemies you’ll ever face at once is three, so you’re never dealing with battles of attrition against groups of 4-6 enemies like in other games. This speeds things up quite a bit. Another thing I like is that enemies are given interesting skills that force you to adapt. Take this minor boss, for instance, who has a skill allowing it to “dodge all incoming attacks.” That may seem like a hugely unfair advantage, but you quickly figure out that guarding allows you to hit it with counterattacks. A small number of your party members also have attacks that can’t be dodged, and characters can be swapped in and out of combat at the beginning of your turn so long as they’re not knocked out or stunned (without penalty, too). All of this combines into something really unique and enjoyable.

Here’s a video of part of that encounter. One of the few things I don’t like about the combat is the existence of instant-death attacks. You can see Clery get hit with one of these at 5:05, and while such attacks don’t always land, their occasional use doesn’t mesh well with unite attacks that require all three members to be conscious and not stunned. Then again, this is more of an issue with groups of enemies, and I found myself taking out the ones with instant-death skills first once I knew who to watch out for, so this might actually circle back around to be good design.

What can be interacted with?

This is less of a problem than a minor irritation, but not all things that can be interacted with have little sparkles around them. All of the plot-crucial items have sparkled thus far, mind you, and a certain kind of container also seems to reliably sparkle, but then there are containers like the one in the video above that are completely identical to scenery objects that can’t be opened. Since the only way to know what can and can’t be interacted with is to hug walls and try to brush up against everything, discovering these hidden items means dealing with more random battles than you’d have to put up with otherwise. Adding in sparkles for everything that provides you with an item would go a long way toward making dungeons easier to explore, and it would also make them appear less empty; right now it’s possible to miss huge numbers of item-dispensing plants and chests while assuming that they’re background objects, and that leaves certain areas looking bereft of content.

[Click here to go to Azure Saga – Pathfinder log #4]

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