SaGa: Scarlet Grace - Ambitions

• The game opens with a personality quiz and will suggest a starting character based on that, but if you'd rather decide for yourself the four characters are on a sliding scale of linearity. Balmaint's story is almost entirely linear, with very few opportunities to branch out from the main story. Urpina's story is linear in the first half, but opens up towards the end. Taria's story is a lot more open at the start, and Leonard's story is almost completely non-linear - the entire world map will open up right away, and his only mandatory quests can be finished in under an hour.

• Like most SaGa games there's a hidden monster rank that determines how strong the enemies are, which goes up as you fight. It increases a lot slower when you're repeating fights you've already beaten, so grinding is fairly safe. That said, there's rubberbanding in both directions, with your characters growing faster when they're behind the monsters and slower when they're ahead, so grinding is mostly good for catching up a new character, or helping someone switch to a new weapon.

• A character's base stats are fixed and will never grow.

• The ingame tutorials are very thorough and have pretty much all the info you need about combat mechanics and character growth, including exactly what each stat does and what various monster types are weak to. You can check them at any time, including mid-battle.