Now that Sardonica has turned into a squid thingy and Teacher has left us behind, we're on our own to venture forward in search of Mustache Dad.

It's only a few steps out of the mountain pass that we come across a town. This is fortunate since despite it only being like 9 tiles away, we probably got into like 7 random battles and already need to stay at the inn.

And as soon as we step into the town... we find Dad! That was easy. The game is done now! Thank you Teacher, for allowing us to get this far... and thanks everyone for reading. Stay tuned for SaGa 3!

Just kidding, of course. Dad runs off as soon as we see him, so we don't actually get to interact with him.

The town is pretty small with just a few buildings and some people wandering around. Talking to them, we learn that to the west of the town is the Temple of Isis where apparently there is a priestess named Ky who is very cute. Someone also mentions that the guys who recently appeared are underlings of Asura.

And in the northeast corner of town, we find dad! Okay, now the game is really done. I got you before, hahaha.

Just kidding again. It's this guy with a weird puffy face who talks strangely who for some reason is dressed exactly like Dad. This guy doesn't even have a mustache so we are definitely NOT interested. He seems startled that we just approached him from behind in this little alley (what the heck was he even doing back there anyway?!) and we apologize for the mix-up and go along on our way.

In the pub, we learn more about these Asura underling fellows, who seem to be holed up deep in the mountains in the north and are in search of Relics. There's also a tower in the north called the Sky Pillar which is said to be so tall it reaches the heavens. The story of the first SaGa title revolved around such a tower, and by traversing the tower, people were able to travel between different worlds.

We can talk to the bartender who offers us a drink for 10Kr, but if we accept the offer, he'll yell at us for trying to drink while underage and order us to scram. There's also a jukebox in the pub that we can put a 1Kr coin into and it will let us listen to any music track from the entire game! Cute little feature.

The shop has a few weapons and stuff for sale, like Whips and Bows and stuff. The Uyghurs that we fight outside of town also drop Longswords pretty readily, so we're able to grab a few good equips for IceLaic. Giving her a Bronze Shield, a Bow, and a Longsword, we're able to increase her Defense, Strength, and Speed all at once to 12, 12, and 7 respectively.

There's also a really nice weapon called the Psycho Dagger here, which is a knife that deals damage based on the user's Magic stat. This is very useful for Espers, so it would be great to get one for X, but it costs a whopping 1,400Kr, so we have to hold off for now. Even with the money we made from the tons of random battles leading up to this point, we only had about 600Kr total upon arrival in town.

Staying at the inn costs Kr equal to the amount of HP lost among the party. It's only HP that's taken into account, not the amount of uses left on Mechs' parts or Espers' and Monsters' Arts, so as long as our HP is full, we could completely restore the durability and uses of our Mechs, Espers, and Monsters for free! Thanks to Teacher's protection through the mountain pass and IceLaic's amazing defenses on the trek from there to town, we only lost a total of 14 HP across the entire party, making our stay only cost 14Kr. And since our party has no humans, the only durability we ever have to worry about permanently depleting is X's weapons, which are more just backups for her powerful Magic Arts.

There isn't much to do in town, but now we have some clues on where to look next. Since Dad is in search of the Relics, we need to go where the Relics are. And these Asura peeps seem to be interested in Relics, too, so maybe we'll learn more if we go find them. We head north to the mountains, but there seems to be no pass through them from here. So we're going to have to wander around and try to find a way through to where Asura's gang is hiding out.

After fighting a few Jaguars, X happened to glimmer Blizzard, a Magic Art that targets an entire stack of enemies with Cold damage. Added to her innate Flame, which attacks all front-line enemies, X is already a versatile powerhouse. If for some reason we just need to pick off a little HP from a single enemy, she also has her Bow to turn to, and hopefully soon, the much more powerful Psycho Dagger.

The only direction we can really go seems to be to the west, where we happen across a large building, which must be the Temple of Isis we heard about before.

Inside the Temple of Isis, we find a bunch more people we can talk to. I think it's interesting that so many of the NPCs have Monster sprites, though I guess that's probably because there are only four non-Monster sprites available and it would be weird if all the NPCs used the same Human and Esper sprites. But I guess other games do that... I do like the diversity in all the Monster sprites for NPCs, though. It's pretty cool. It also makes it seem like the world is populated largely by Monsters, with humanoids being the minority.

Anyway, here we learn that there are many Worlds that exist beyond ours, such as the next world, which is the Desert World that Asura and his lackeys came from. And beyond the Desert World is the Giant World. We get the idea that Asura and his goons are really not good guys, because people seem to be happy that as long as Ky is around, Asura nor his underlings dare draw near the Temple. So it seems like Ky protects the Temple. We also learn that she has the power to heal people.

In the back of the Temple, we find Ky. We ask her if she knows anything about the Relics. She seems bothered that we'd ask such a question and wants to know if we're planning to try to collect the relics to try to become gods. We tell her that she's mistaken, and that we're in search of X's father, who is also looking for the Relics.

Ky stops us and asks if this "Dad" we're looking for is a gentleman wearing a hat who is kinda hot. I'm not even kidding, that's how she describes him. X immediately recognizes that a hot older guy in a hat couldn't be anyone other than Dad, and asks where he went. Ky is sad to inform us that he suddenly appeared asking about Relics and then just as suddenly ran off, and she has no idea of his whereabouts now.

Disappointed in not learning too much new, we start to walk out of the Temple, but Ky calls after us and offers a little bit more information. She says we should check the Ruins of the Ancient Gods, and tells us to go to the hill in the middle of the southern forest and go "east 4 and south 3."

We thank Ky for her advice (well, I assume we do, the conversation just kind of ... ends) and head out of the temple to head south and see if we can't find these ruins.

Along the way, we start running into these Highwaymen enemies which look hilarious with their tight leather pants or whatever they are supposed to be wearing, and their owl-like head-turning ability. These are actually Human enemies, which means they won't drop meat.

X's max HP rises by 11 and her Magic rises to 7! A few battles later, and she also learns the "Alert" ability, which is a passive ability that makes it so enemies can't get pre-emptive strikes against the party. Very useful.

We have to head west because there's no immediate way to go south, and we notice a little town to the north, so we stop by. This seems to be a town settled at the entrance to the passage into the mountains, so we can keep going north behind this town if we want to try to find Asura's hideout.

The town has very little in it. There aren't even that many people hanging around, and they don't give us particularly useful information. Asura's gang doesn't have any normal people in it, and the way to the Sky Pillar is blocked by Asura's blockade.

The shopping here is quite expensive, too. There's some items that would be awesome to have like the Sub-machine Gun, but it costs 6,800Kr! Way more than we can afford at this point.

While we do have the option to try to head north and find Asura's gang, I feel like we should listen to Ky first, so after stopping by the town, we head south to find a small opening in the southern mountain range that leads to a large forest. There's a hill in the middle like Ky mentioned, so we walk to the space that is three tiles douth of the hill and four to the east. I guess if you hadn't guessed by now, the game's movement takes place on a grid where you can move one tile at a time, as was very common for this era of RPG's.

Stepping on the space transports us to the ancient ruins. I'm guessing they're supposed to just be so hidden by the woods that they're not visible from the world map, but it's similar to stepping on a town tile and then going inside the town. We're not like... teleporting or something. Anyway, time to search for some Relics! The opening area is huge, but it's mostly just a lot of open space.

The ruins are crawling with these Salamander enemies, who appear in pretty big stacks sometimes, even as many as eight at a time! But they're weak to Cold damage, and X's newly-acquired Blizzard can wipe out any size of stack with a single hit. The Arts that Espers learn are random, so we were really lucky to get Blizzard so early on.

The ruins are pretty vast, and we find a lot of treasures. But some of the chests we run into are already emptied! While realistically it makes sense that if treasure chests were littered all over the world, our little group of friends wouldn't be the first people to open every last one of them and take what's inside, but in a game world like this, finding empty boxes is usually an ominous occurrence, usually implying someone else was just here, and may still be nearby.

Going by that logic, perhaps are game treasure chests somehow magical and refill themselves every few hours or every couple of days? That can't be, though, because in a lot of games, once you open a treasure, the contents will become empty forever no matter how much time passes in the game. Is there maybe some kind of treasure faerie that fills the chests specifically for the heroes, and leaves ones like this empty as a clue that someone was nearby, filling up all others before the heroes get to them so they can have goodies throughout their quest? If the faerie really wanted to help out, they could just put a bunch of chests full of the best equipment all throughout our hometown...

But maybe there is some kind of treasure faerie law that doesn't allow the faeries to fill chests with items deemed too strong for the party. It's okay if they're too weak, though. And a lot of times they don't know what to put so they just fill the chests with junk.

But, uh, anyway.

It seems our treasure omen foretold an accurate prophecy, because we run into some weird people digging into some treasure chests in the deepest part of the ruins. So far, we've only found stuff like a Whip or a Potion here or there, so who knows why these people are bothering digging up treasures in a place with lousy treasures. Or maybe they didn't even bother to pick up the boring treasures and only took the good ones, leaving the junk behind for us.

It's probably the latter, because upon spotting us, one of the guys says to the others that they better grab the Relics and run.

Ah, Relics! We need those! Time to chase these guys down. Looks like Asura's minions got here before we did. Maybe that's why Ky wanted us to go here first? But it looks like we were a little too late.

We catch up to them at the back of the ruins where they open a back door in a fluster, closing it behind them. It seems we can't get through it ourselves. We head into a nearby room and find three treasure chests containing each a Relic: the Strength Magi, the Speed Magi, and the Magic Magi.

When we open the Relics menu, we actually have the ability to equip Relics to our characters! Equipping the Mirror doesn't do anything, and we need to keep it unequipped if we want to use its ability to see how many Relics are left in the world. But we can equip the Magi Relics to get little boosts in their respective stats.

IceLaic's stats are already high all around, so we give the Magic Magi to X to boost the power of her Esper Arts even more, the Strength Magi to Sardonica to beef up the power of her Tentacle attack, and the Speed Magi to Farel to make him more nimble overall.

Something about holding onto more Relics at once allows us to open up the back door to the ruins. We're ready to give chase to the guys who took the other Relics from the Ruins, but they're just lying around on the ground. Talking to one of them, he tells us that they were guardians that came to protect the Relics from Asura. But while running from us, they were blindsided by Asura's goons and the Relics were stolen. This was all he can say to us before he dies. The other treasure hunter that was with this one seems to already be died, too.

So it looks like we both mistook the other for Asura's underlings trying to nab the Relics.

We head back to the Temple of Isis and report to Ky what happened when we went to the Ruins. She seems worried that the Relics are in Asura's hands now, and we tell her our next destination is Asura's keep. Determined to protect this world from Asura, Ky asks to join up with us, and we've gotten another guest ally!

The artwork above is her card from the SaGa trading card game; it's the best quality artwork for this game I can find.

Before heading into the mountains, we head back to the town we first came to after passing through the mountains with Teacher and buy the Psycho Dagger, which we can now afford, and equip it to X.

The mountain paths are sort of maze-like, but it's mostly just a bunch of short dead-ends. It doesn't take long to find Asura's base. It's almost like it's just waiting there to be found. But at the same time, it doesn't even belong in this world in the first place, so I guess it just kinda has to go wherever. And it is indeed blocking the path to the Sky Pillar.

Inside, we find a lot of barrels, tables, chairs, and countertops. There are a few places with a bunch of TV monitors lined up as if it were some kind of surveillance camera setup. We can't really interact with anything other than the zombie-looking things roaming around, which just make us get into a random encounter if we try to talk to them. We also get into regular random encounters, as if the high encounter rate wasn't enough already...

Ky is a human, so she doesn't know any Magic Arts innately like Espers do. But humans have the ability to use Tomes to cast Magic Arts, which are very expensive and have limited durability. Ky comes with a Thunder Tome and a Cure Tome, as well as a Battle Hammer even though her strength is pretty low.

Asura's base is huge, but there's really... not much here. No events and most of the rooms look very similar. More barrels, more chairs, more monitors...

We do happen to find a Gold Gauntlet, which we equip to IceLaic to boost her Defense up to a massive 16. We also find a Speed Root -- these are the items that you can feed to humans to boost their stats. At least, I thought they were only for Humans. I tried feeding one to X, and her Speed increased! So I guess you can use them on Espers, too. I think maybe in the first game, the Root items were only available to Humans...? Or maybe I've just been wrong about them all this time...

We reach the highest point in the base and find this... creature waiting for us. It's not Asura! But it says it's convenient that we brought Ky along, so it can kill us all at once.

The Rhinoceros is not a very difficult fight. Ky's high Speed and Magic allows her to go first and use her Thunder Tome to deal around 150 damage to the thing. And then X gets to go, probably partially thanks to the Speed Root we fed her, and uses Blizzard, which the Rhino is weak to. It deals around 140 damage, and the battle is over. Yup, just two actions in one round of combat and we're done.

And, uh, if you're wondering why there are very few screencaps of battle animations, it's because the battle is mostly text-based. Enemies don't have any animations at all, and party attack animations are limited to a few little special effects like the lightning bolt in the above screencap.

Rhinoceros says it's a shame that we won, since it would have been able to deliver all of this world's Relics to Asura. It disappears, and the entire base starts shaking violently. Ky warns us that the place is about to explode and we should escape through the back exit.

Of course, we take our time collecting treasures in the back of the room first. And it's important, too -- the remaining Relics from this world were stored in here, probably after Rhinoceros or its underlings killed the guardians and stole them back at the Ruins.

We find three more Magi Relics here: the Defense Magi, the Flame Magi, and the Ice Magi. The Defense Magi is like the others we found, giving a small boost to the Defense stat. The Flame and Ice Magi boost Hot and Cold damage respectively. We swap out X's Magic Magi for the Ice Magi since Blizzard is her most powerful Art right now. I don't really know what would be better, the small boost to Magic or the boost to Cold damage. But I'd rather use the new thing because it's shiny and new! Our overpowered tank IceLaic takes the Defense Magi to become just that more powerful, and we swap out Farel's Speed Magi for the Flame Magi since he has a flame breath attack.

We jump out the exit as Asura's base explodes, making it disappear from the world map. Which means the path to Sky Pillar has now opened! It seems Asura wasn't even in this world to begin with, but was using his minions to collect the Relics here. If you remember what one of the townies said before, the next world over is the Desert World where Asura comes from. So if we climb Sky Pillar, we should be able to traverse worlds. We didn't find Dad here, and the Spirit Mirror tells us there are no more Relics remaining in this world that we don't already possess, so our only path forward seems to be to go to the Desert World and confront Asura...

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