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Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven (2024) Review
11 months ago
General
That was one hell of a game. In a nutshell, it was the ideal SaGa game I've been waiting for so long and i hope they keep this momentum going forward. Romancing SaGa 2 started out as a SFC game in 1993 that got a remaster in 2017 due to how Romancing SaGa 2 became a cult classic that never got translated into English properly by Squaresoft. Revenge of the Seven is a full on 3D remake of the game building it up into a more modernized take on the classic.
Romancing SaGa 2 is more of a CRPG with JRPG features and style. You play as not a single protagonist but multiple emperors you play as over time leading the Varennes Empire over multiple generations expanding your empire while defeating all 7 heroes who have fallen from grace and became evil as a result.
In a nutshell, each emperor/empress is granted the power of inheritance magic which allows emperors to pass on their memories, skills, and weapon / magic skill levels to their heir should the emperor die. And you will be doing a fair bit of dying so this is to ensure you keep some progress on death. This single feature is easily the best as it encourages experimentation and trying out different classes so your emperor gets stronger through inheritance magic such that if you died as a Court Mage (M), you can choose a Heavy Infantry to inherit your stats and skills which grants you the ability to become a self-sustaining tank who can heal and buff themselves with water magic inherited from the Court Mage and vice versa.
This is the best mix of non-linear quest design where you can choose how to complete quests in various ways and choose where you want to expand. For instance, you have a quest where you need to invade a landship to kill one of the 7 heroes using it. You can choose to hire a strategist to sneak onto the landship or pretend to be slaves to get onto the landship. Even when you fail, you can take a 3rd option such as picking a robot to be your emperor so you get a formation that makes the rematch against the hero easier. Nearly all quests in this game can be resolved in 2 ways or more and the remake even improves upon the original by giving you quest markers, something that the original Romancing SaGa 2 needed badly.
The combat is a massive improvement as it takes what SaGa learned from Scarlet Grace & Emerald Beyond by refining the SaGa formula to be something better. It's your basic turn based JRPG fare but with its own SaGa twist on the formula in that there are no character levels; everyone has a series of base stats that are fixed and can only be improved with gear while leveling is done by Weapon & Magic skill levels. The combat takes on more of a Persona approach in that everyone acts once they select their commands which is important as you can see the turn order so you need to be able to time your interrupts and vice versa. Elements now plays a much larger role as you can see what the weaknesses are and hitting weaknesses is the only way you're able to get your limit breaks. In addition, Formations are important as you will need to use different formations for various buffs benefiting your team that is more suited to your current situation. Again, the whole battle system is a MASSIVE improvement over the original and remaster.
What ties this all together is that there are so many different character classes for you to pick as your emperor and build your teams around. I also love how each character from the class has its own quirk so no two classes are the same such as two freelancer mages being martial arts specialists and vice versa. Furthermore, each class now has its own passive ability that enhances their specialties such as the Heavy Infantry gaining the "Auto-Parry" ability which makes tanking much more viable in the remake than the original SFC version. You can even master the abilities and pass them onto other classes ensuring that even if a class becomes useless, their ability will help make others stronger. Not only are you passing on your skills via inheritance but so are the units with their skills and abilities. Again, a massive improvement over the SFC version where too many classes just felt like upgrades or overlapped with each other. You can now swap out party members at will meaning that you don't have to kill off your members once they outlive their usefulness. There are still several cases of classes being overshadowed such as the Dancer being a better Nereid or the Mole being a better Freelancer Mage but the abilities system makes the power creep more bearable and actually consistent with the game's world.
Revenge of the Seven also adds in more story content that explains the backstory behind the seven heroes which adds more into the world and the voice-acted animated cutscenes ends up making the game feel like a complete whole. The additional content from the 2017 remaster makes its appearance here as the Diviner and the Ninja class shows up here but not the Maze of Memories which makes sense as the game is already full of content as is.
The major flaw is that the emperor/empress is made into a silent protagonist which defeats the point of being an emperor. In fact, there are only 4 (5 if you count Coppelia) that are actually voice acted during story beats. The emperor being a silent protagonist really makes them stick out like a sore thumb instead of an emperor and I had many moments where I thought they would talk with an air of authority but they just nod, grunt, and shrug. I wish that Square-Enix would have taken the Mass Effect 1 approach to the protagonist by voicing lines used in dialogue choices so that they are still silent but when they talk, its exactly what you want to say. This change would have made the emperor actually stand out rather than just being someone the NPCs yell at all the time. Another nitpick is that the voice lines don't change if you pick a female emperor as everyone still calls you the emperor even though you should be called the Empress. Its really a minor nitpick but a noticeable one.
Overall, this is in the same running of being the best remake of 2024 as P3 and this game deserves your attention if you love CRPGs like Baldur's Gate but with a JRPG twist. You should pick this game up if you also love Atlus RPGs past SMT3 Nocturne and onwards.
Romancing SaGa 2 is more of a CRPG with JRPG features and style. You play as not a single protagonist but multiple emperors you play as over time leading the Varennes Empire over multiple generations expanding your empire while defeating all 7 heroes who have fallen from grace and became evil as a result.
In a nutshell, each emperor/empress is granted the power of inheritance magic which allows emperors to pass on their memories, skills, and weapon / magic skill levels to their heir should the emperor die. And you will be doing a fair bit of dying so this is to ensure you keep some progress on death. This single feature is easily the best as it encourages experimentation and trying out different classes so your emperor gets stronger through inheritance magic such that if you died as a Court Mage (M), you can choose a Heavy Infantry to inherit your stats and skills which grants you the ability to become a self-sustaining tank who can heal and buff themselves with water magic inherited from the Court Mage and vice versa.
This is the best mix of non-linear quest design where you can choose how to complete quests in various ways and choose where you want to expand. For instance, you have a quest where you need to invade a landship to kill one of the 7 heroes using it. You can choose to hire a strategist to sneak onto the landship or pretend to be slaves to get onto the landship. Even when you fail, you can take a 3rd option such as picking a robot to be your emperor so you get a formation that makes the rematch against the hero easier. Nearly all quests in this game can be resolved in 2 ways or more and the remake even improves upon the original by giving you quest markers, something that the original Romancing SaGa 2 needed badly.
The combat is a massive improvement as it takes what SaGa learned from Scarlet Grace & Emerald Beyond by refining the SaGa formula to be something better. It's your basic turn based JRPG fare but with its own SaGa twist on the formula in that there are no character levels; everyone has a series of base stats that are fixed and can only be improved with gear while leveling is done by Weapon & Magic skill levels. The combat takes on more of a Persona approach in that everyone acts once they select their commands which is important as you can see the turn order so you need to be able to time your interrupts and vice versa. Elements now plays a much larger role as you can see what the weaknesses are and hitting weaknesses is the only way you're able to get your limit breaks. In addition, Formations are important as you will need to use different formations for various buffs benefiting your team that is more suited to your current situation. Again, the whole battle system is a MASSIVE improvement over the original and remaster.
What ties this all together is that there are so many different character classes for you to pick as your emperor and build your teams around. I also love how each character from the class has its own quirk so no two classes are the same such as two freelancer mages being martial arts specialists and vice versa. Furthermore, each class now has its own passive ability that enhances their specialties such as the Heavy Infantry gaining the "Auto-Parry" ability which makes tanking much more viable in the remake than the original SFC version. You can even master the abilities and pass them onto other classes ensuring that even if a class becomes useless, their ability will help make others stronger. Not only are you passing on your skills via inheritance but so are the units with their skills and abilities. Again, a massive improvement over the SFC version where too many classes just felt like upgrades or overlapped with each other. You can now swap out party members at will meaning that you don't have to kill off your members once they outlive their usefulness. There are still several cases of classes being overshadowed such as the Dancer being a better Nereid or the Mole being a better Freelancer Mage but the abilities system makes the power creep more bearable and actually consistent with the game's world.
Revenge of the Seven also adds in more story content that explains the backstory behind the seven heroes which adds more into the world and the voice-acted animated cutscenes ends up making the game feel like a complete whole. The additional content from the 2017 remaster makes its appearance here as the Diviner and the Ninja class shows up here but not the Maze of Memories which makes sense as the game is already full of content as is.
The major flaw is that the emperor/empress is made into a silent protagonist which defeats the point of being an emperor. In fact, there are only 4 (5 if you count Coppelia) that are actually voice acted during story beats. The emperor being a silent protagonist really makes them stick out like a sore thumb instead of an emperor and I had many moments where I thought they would talk with an air of authority but they just nod, grunt, and shrug. I wish that Square-Enix would have taken the Mass Effect 1 approach to the protagonist by voicing lines used in dialogue choices so that they are still silent but when they talk, its exactly what you want to say. This change would have made the emperor actually stand out rather than just being someone the NPCs yell at all the time. Another nitpick is that the voice lines don't change if you pick a female emperor as everyone still calls you the emperor even though you should be called the Empress. Its really a minor nitpick but a noticeable one.
Overall, this is in the same running of being the best remake of 2024 as P3 and this game deserves your attention if you love CRPGs like Baldur's Gate but with a JRPG twist. You should pick this game up if you also love Atlus RPGs past SMT3 Nocturne and onwards.
