Why Romancing SaGa 2 Is Worth Playing
SaGa is one of Square Enix’s longest-established series, but it has had a tough time outside of Japan. If you play a random SaGa game, you’ll likely understand why. SaGa games are JRPGs that don’t have the kind of overseas appeal most games in this genre enjoy. They offer something that often feels like an anti-RPG, where the suggested path through the experience feels laughably disjointed. The SaGa series has faced challenges due to the notoriously confusing translation of its systems into English, and even into French or German, as well as stories that appear to have been “localized for Western audiences”.
While roaming aimlessly and figuring out what to do and how to make things work in a SaGa game can be captivating, some games in the series can be incredibly frustrating. Romancing SaGa 2 is not frustrating; it’s captivating. But it is something of an acquired taste. Earlier versions of the game weren’t necessarily “bad,” but they did lean hard into that whole “you have to work for your fun” philosophy that some RPGs espouse.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is not just a remake; it’s a complete overhaul of a game many fans contend is the zenith of the entire SaGa series—if not one of the greatest RPGs ever made. This title could reach out and resonate with a new audience for the series.
What Romancing SaGa 2 Leaves for Future Generations: Timeless Storytelling in Games.
The tale of Romancing SaGa 2 starts long before the present day, when seven champions fought to free the world from evil. The people of the land have taken up their stories of magic and misguided promises, yearning for the return of these long-lost figures. Rumors suggest that these once-proud heroes have become traitors, now serving the forces of darkness. Even the Imperial family faces their malevolence, as they decimate the already diminished Leon and his valiant son Victor. However, this time, we must maintain hope, as a distinct kind of magic is in operation. The villainics of the seven have served their time in the light; now, we must remain vigilant against Imperial magic and potential missed opportunities for heroism.
One of the most unique features of Romancing SaGa 2’s gameplay is its inheritance system. You won’t defeat the seven dastardly heroes in just one game; instead, you must conquer them over the span of many generations and hundreds of years, in-game, of course. When your character dies (often toward the end of the game, if you’re doing things right), you choose a new Emperor to take up the quest and lead a new party of heroes to conquer the wicked seven. If you’re really bad at the game and your party gets wiped out (again, not a Game Over condition you see very often), you have the excuse of having made a weak, late-empire team and get to try again with a new character at a new place and time.
You have the commendable freedom to approach your centuries-long quest to defeat heroes in a variety of ways. This is one of the best features of the remake—it now essentially tells you where quests and points of interest are, alleviating the aforementioned issue that SaGa is known for. Explore a given area, engage in dialogue with an NPC, or make certain decisions in a questline to unlock most locations in the game. Beyond some basic events that define the beginning and end of your quest, you’re not required to follow a set path of quests. You can even run out of time and miss some opportunities. Of course, completing quests does have some noticeable rewards. They’ll open up some remarkable new locations for you, and they’ll even allow you to add some territory to your Avalon Empire, meaning more cash for Imperial coffers.
Transforming Warfare: The Improved Systems of Romancing SaGa 2
Combat will occupy a significant amount of your gameplay time in Romancing SaGa 2. This is one area where the remake has seen a huge shift from the original. Fights remain turn-based, but now you have a timeline to see when enemies will act relative to your party. All your characters now take turns more like a well-ordered assembly line, with one action executing before the next character’s turn, rather than, say, a mass meeting where everyone’s simultaneous command gets shouted out one right after another. Actually, I imagine a mass meeting in an assembly line factory would go pretty well, since the factory floor is big enough for all those workers to be up at a safe distance. But I digress.) Both characters and enemies appear to follow an invisible cue to prepare for the next action in their sequence.
The overdrive gauge is another new feature. It bears a resemblance to the system in Octopath Traveller. Every enemy reveals its weapon or elemental weakness when you strike them. Exploiting those weaknesses fills the Overdrive Gauge. If you’re not using it as a standard turns gauge, the Overdrive Gauge essentially serves as an ordering tool and a buff to damage done by special attacks. In the early game, it’s pretty standard fare. Using your special commands serves to quickly fill the gauge, but if you’re not careful, you could waste it by using commands that only serve to fill it, when you could really be using your characters in ways that have an impact on the battlefield. Using powerful combo strikes never stops being satisfying.
You must fully understand the fundamental differences between the SaGa systems and conventional RPGs to fully appreciate combat—though this particular remake makes a concerted effort to reveal the core elements that the original’s dated presentation might have obscured. In combat, your characters won’t level up in the standard manner, but they will gain stats and proficiency based on the behaviors you direct them toward during the fight. For example, if you command a character to use a spear in battle, that character’s proficiencies and spear-related stats will increase significantly post-battle, assuming they stay alive, of course—just as they would if you directed them to use a sword, axe, or whatever weapon you felt like having them swing at the enemies.
Romancing SaGa 2 combines innovative combat mechanics with strategic depth.
There is also a unique method of learning attack techniques. Using weapons and magic raises the character’s proficiency with those tools. If you wish to master all possible attacks (which you should, as they significantly enhance the combat experience), you must also possess the ability to “glimmer” them during battle. This is a random occurrence that essentially signals your character’s readiness to learn a new skill. Unlike the previous method of glimmering, which occurs when you simply keep using skills, this method is superior as it provides a clearer indication of the skills you can actually acquire at that moment. Future generations can inherit the skills that one character acquires, much like a family secret.
As you progress, you will acquire new formations, typically accompanied by the arrival of a new Emperor. The positioning of your Emperor and allies can significantly impact the game by providing various status buffs and debuffs, as well as influencing their Area of Effect (AoE) techniques. Strategy is your best bet, because there’s still the easy-to-describe but hard-to-stomach SaGa staple of permadeath. Characters begin with a set number of Life Points; each KO in combat depletes one, and once their LP exhausts, they lose them entirely. You can replace your current Emperor at a strategic save point, but if you have to start replacing fallen comrades in the middle of a dungeon, the new replacement regimen could pose a significant challenge.
If this combination of systems sounds interesting, it’s because it is. Despite their initial abrasiveness, once a SaGa game gets a hold of you, it’s tough to break free. Romancing SaGa 2’s presentation and design improvements make it much easier for people who have never played a SaGa game before, or who may have given up on earlier ones in the series. And the story? Although the storytelling has undergone significant expansion, it remains relatively restrained in comparison to many other role-playing games. And that’s fine, because the Tale of the Seven Heroes has a lot more character to it than what you’d find in most RPG plots.
Gameplay Issues and Difficulties in Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven
The game isn’t perfect. As you play, the battles become longer and more exhausting. Your enemies don’t just get more numerous; they get better and tougher too. Even the standard monsters tend to dish out a lot of damage. And while you do heal up to full HP after each fight, you end up feeling that much closer to death after all is said and done and the experience has been had—especially when you’re using the high-cost (but necessary) move sets to get through what feels like one long dungeon of straight teeth-gnashing encounters. And every “social RPG” needs its trinkets, so you also have a handful of janky restorative items that provide a couple of life-saving moments when it feels like the game is insisting you throw all your high-cost moves at archers that do as much damage as the final boss.
Another reason to avoid encounters is that the remake has done a decent job of making many of the game’s elements clearer. There remains one element that conceals its workings, and that’s the game timer. While it doesn’t seem like the game loves making these timers, it certainly mastered the craft when it came to Procyon 3. Many unseen factors, such as the number of battles and certain event flags, determine the timer, necessitating experimentation. If you’ve already replayed the game once, then you’re probably enjoying the humour of the ongoing farce that’s these timer shenanigans. Why not make the player more informed, though, so we can either steer the course of this progression or at least understand its internal logic?
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is a truly magnificent remake of a classic role-playing game that had for too long been a cult title known only to a select few outside of Japan. It has a core concept that remains unique among JRPGs, and ‘core concept’ doesn’t begin to express the number of ways the game opens itself to exploration and interaction with its numerous seldom-seen systems. If it is not a Nippon Ichi Software title, it feels a bit like one in how filled with small wonder it is.
