Farland Saga: Toki no Michishirube (ファーランドサーガ 時の道標), released 12/3/1998, developed by TGL

This is the followup to the first Farland Saga game. It was released for computers in 1997, then a Saturn port followed in 1998 and a Playstation port in 1999. As usual I am playing the Playstation port. The game is a direct sequel to the first game, although there are not many plot connections. The main character is Karin, who was an 8 year old child in the first game, and is now 16. Most of the other characters are new, and the main plot of the new game is unconnected to the first one.

The gameplay is mostly the same, so I thought I would look back at the criticisms I had of the first game and see if they also applied to the sequel.

My biggest complaint there was how slowly the game played. This is not as much of an issue in the sequel. Of course now that I am using the playstation emulator instead I can speed up the game, but even if you don’t do this, the game is still much smoother and does not pause so long on the enemy turns. You can turn off all the moving and attack animations to make it even faster.

My second issue was about the 3/4 map, and how you can’t rotate the view. This also was not quite as much of an issue. They got rid of the overhead map for some reason, but on the whole it is much easier to see where your characters are, and you can press a button to enable “transparent mode” where the characters who are behind obstacles will be highlighted.

You still can’t move through your own allies.

The shop interface was another huge problem with the first game. They have a totally different, but still bad, interface here.

At least this time, the main action takes place in one city (or environs), so you can often choose to go to the weapon and item shop, rather than having to only do it after certain battles. However, the interface is still extremely frustrating. All you can see in the shop is who can equip the item; you can’t see how it compares to what you have. You then have to go to the equip menu, but the only way to see how the new equipment compares is to look at the data for both items, and every time you look at one item it then kicks you back out to the character select screen. I just don’t see how companies are still unable to make something as basic as a functional shop/equip interface — I suspect that the computer version was probably easier to deal with because of the use of point and click mouse, and when they ported it over to the consoles they just didn’t spend much time retooling it to work better with a controller.

My comments here still apply:

The system involves height and facing this time. The height part is a little bit half-assed though because it doesn’t affect missile weapons or spells at all. The obstacles also don’t block them at all — the sticks and spears that hit multiple targets can go through walls and trees.

Spellcasters recover a bit of MP per round so this allows for more spellcasting, although the most expensive spells will require some MP restore items to be able to use them well. They also grow in effectiveness as you level, which is nice

My next big complaint about FS1 was about the way that a small difference in levels between enemy and character makes a huge difference in how effective they are. This is basically the same in FS2; if you are just 2 or 3 levels below the enemy you can expect to deal 1 damage with each attack and take huge damage from the enemies. At first I thought this was not as big an issue because of the guild mission system.

The game generally progresses by taking missions from the guild in town. When you finish the mission, you get gold and bonus XP that you can distribute among your characters, and they have some default options — the “balance” option tries to give XP to your weaker characters to catch them up to the stronger ones.

Because of this, I was ready to say that the level difference thing wasn’t as much of an issue, but I was wrong.

As with the last game you just play the stages in order, with no free battles or any optional content. The only way to do any sort of grinding is to purposely prolong battles so you can cast buff or heal spells to build XP. I didn’t do this, and I reached a point near the endgame where I was not able to proceed.

In this map, all of the enemies rush you at the beginning, and all of them have large AoE spells. The worst is the boss, who uses Vanish (very wide range) and my guys were taking 60-80% of their HP in damage from those. I tried the battle seven times and was not able to survive past the 4th turn.

I watched two videos of people playing the game, and they were doing exactly the same things I was doing in terms of battle strategy, but their characters were 3-4 levels ahead of mine and they were taking far less damage from the enemies, and doing more than 1 damage to the boss. I also saw several reviews that warned players to do some grinding in the battles or they would end up unable to win the battles near the end.

I was hoping there would be a cheat code that could allow me to move up just a few levels, but I didn’t see one, so I decided to stop playing there. I could have gone back to a previous save and done some more “grinding” but I didn’t think it was worth it.

The story is decent. Karin has decided to leave the island that the first game took place on, and go to the main continent. There she runs into Arl, a swordsman who has completely lost his memory. The first 2/3 of the game is mostly character development, as Karin builds her reputation in the guild and meets the various characters that join the party:

• Alice, the daughter of a rich man in the city; she’s a healer
• Sara, a fist fighter who wants to marry Arl
• Radish, a winged cleric
• Sophia, a thief who had a prior relationship with T.T. (the only other returning character from the first game)
• Lulu, her child (mage)

I’m not entirely sure how the story turns out in the end, but eventually we learn that Arl is the avatar of some kind of god-like figure who watches to protect the timeline, and opposes the party (we get sent back 8 years into the past, but it’s not clear why).

As with all the other Farland games, this isn’t really worth playing. I would say that of the ones I’ve played, this is probably the best one provided that you can do enough levelling to set yourselves up for the final stages. This game has the least awkward interface of the series, the story is decent, and it’s not as slow moving as all the other games. There are so many other good SRPGs out there, though.

Fortunately this is the end of the Farland series for me; the Farland Odyssey games were never ported to console.