Final Fantasy Legend 2 (the American name for the original release of the game) was a favorite of mine growing up. The music was so cool for a gameboy game and I loved the weird ways that characters got stronger – especially monsters transforming as they eat the flesh of their foes.

More personally, I played the game on a transpacific flight to visit my dad in Korea when I was in 6th grade. Hearing the battle theme for this game for the first time in over 20 years brought back such a rush of emotion -- being cramped on the plane, excited to see a new country, and excited to see my dad for the first time in 6 months. As much nostalgia as I have for the game, I've found that I frequently don't enjoy my childhood favorites near as much on a revisit.

So how did SaGa 2 hold up?

I would say surprisingly well, actually. The Goddess of Destiny remake took a rather light touch overall outside of bringing the music and graphics up to par with 2009 standards, so I think most of my sentiments would apply nearly as well to the original version.

I had fun the entire way through. There were some important conveniences over other games from the early 90s. In the original version of the game, you could run away from any random battle with 100% chance and without having to wait for your turn. The remake does away with random battles in favor of having enemies visible on the field map. They’re very easy to dodge, and you can still run away fairly easily –I never had it fail at least, though I only ran away a few times. You can also save anywhere, as long as you are not in combat. These conveniences are huge to me, but random battles in particular are a reason I frequently burn out on older JRPGs when I go back these days.

I still really enjoy the bizarre SaGa-style character progression. At the start of the game, you choose a party of 4 characters, picked from Humans, Espers, Robots, and Monsters. Humans and Espers receive stat upgrades at the end of battles based on the actions they performed. Attack with a heavy weapon, and you increase strength. Cast a spell, and you increase spirit, and so on. Humans gain stats easier than espers, but espers randomly learn some unique and useful spells over time. Robots capabilities are entirely based on their equipment – equip a powerful sword and their base strength will sky rocket along with having a powerful weapon to use in combat. Finally, monsters change forms when consuming the meat of other monsters, entirely taking on the new monsters characteristics, other than possibly maintaining an ability or two. New to the remake are variant monsters, with extra abilities and stats over the common versions. Fighting an out of depth monster and obtaining a powerful form early is so damn exciting.

The combat remains fairly standard menu-based JRPG fare of picking your best abilities from a menu. Except, you can’t always pick your best abilities because items have durability and cannot be repaired. So, you’re usually picking abilities that are good enough to get you through the current battle, or abilities that raise the stats you're looking to raise. The remake adds in a couple of new, interconnected systems here that are quite welcome, if a bit odd. As you travel the world, you are able to rescue various muses. These muses reward you with MP for fighting in battle certain ways, e.g. winning quickly or using many defensive moves, and for giving them gifts. This MP is then used to purchase Threads of Fate, which allow you to chain attacks from multiple characters together, resulting in increased damage and sometimes a character skipping forward in the turn order. They also have a secondary function of developing ‘bonds’ between your characters, such as ‘love’, ‘family’, ‘hate’, ‘strife’, and so on. These bonds are mostly inconsequential, but do change the availability of certain quests and can alter dialogue in some situations -- some of the negative bond dialogue is fairly amusing.

Grinding really isn’t too necessary for the majority of the game – I generally outright avoided fights with easy enemies since they had a fairly low chance of paying out with more stats. That said, my proclivity to avoid combat did end up with me spending an hour or two grinding out fights in a challenge arena new to the remake to be able to handle the final sequence. In particular, the remake added an extra form to the final boss that took it from fairly easy in the original to rather frustrating.

The story is about the best you can expect from a well done gameboy game – not impressive per se, but fun enough to keep things moving. It starts with your dad visiting you in your bedroom at night. He tells you he has to collect relics to protect the world, and then proceeds to jump right out of your bedroom window, leaving you wondering aloud why he always leaves through the window. The game is full of little humorous touches like that, which I really appreciate, even if they’re corny. The game starts with you grown up and setting off to find your missing father (strangely appropriate for my own situation when I played it...), moving from world to world in hunt of relics yourself. Each world has its own little story, and it was fun to see what the next one will be. I’m not actually sure the overall story and reason for the existence of the relics you’ve been collecting completely makes sense, but whatever, it was fun. I also have to say, it has one of my post story scenes of all times:

Your dad comes to your room at night again, telling you he is about to leave on a journey to find a new MacGuffin. This time you ask to join. Your mother comes rushing up, says she’s tired of worrying and decides to join as well. The entire family then exits through your bedroom window to begin their new quest together. Again, corny, but it left a big smile on my face.

Overall, I had a really good time with the game. The storyline and systems were certainly simple by today’s standards, but I found the whole package to have enough charm that I enjoyed the 20 hours I spent with it. Nostalgia was certainly a bit of a factor, but the game was made to be convenient to play on the go which led to it avoiding many of my normal pain points with JRPGs. I’d definitely recommend giving it a try if you’re interested in the SaGa series!