I am guessing that I will soon be at the point where I can recruit people and gain access to the castle as I am being asked to find people who are dissatisfied with the empire and to go get a castle. Doubt I have the patience to recruit all 108 characters, but we will see how it goes.
On a side-note, something very weird happened when I started playing this game. It is my first attempt at playing a PS1 game on a PS2 in many years. For some reason, the PS2 could not read the ps1 card in memory slot 1, but it could read it in slot 2. However, the game requires it to be in slot 1. Turns out that the culprit was the ps2 controller, for some reason the ps2 cannot read PS1 memory cards if a PS2 controller is plugged into the port beneath it. Wild!
I guess many here are already familiar with this. Luckily, I had my old PS1 controller that I never threw away and even brought to Japan lying around so it didn’t delay me for too long.