maybe not the strongest game ever writing or story wise but conceptually and in execution for a jrpg from 1993 romancing saga 2 is incredibly interesting and a game i'll probably be thinking about for a long time. the only version available in english being an inferior remaster definitely doesn't do it any favors for a wider audience, but it's still something worth checking out if you care at all about the genre. my only hope from something like team asano or just the influx of more classic-inspired jrpgs in general is that we go back to an era where we get experimental titles like this again

Romancing Saga 2 is a super unique RPG that isn't really very much like anything else I have played.

The premise is that you play as a series of rulers that can pass their power and experience to their children. Over the course of the game, you are trying to unite the continent and defeat a group of legendary villains. In practice, this means that if your main character dies or you complete enough events, you pick an heir, reassemble your party from your willing subjects, and continue playing. It is cool to try out different parties over the course of the game, but assembling and re-equipping your team every time you need to is very cumbersome and annoying.

Romancing Saga 2 is sort of like an open-world game. Many of the areas you can explore are unlocked by hearing about them from rumors in bars or from your advisors. Many of the dungeons and bosses you deal with are events you run across while exploring. Most of the time you don't have much clear direction as to what to do -- the game expects you to just explore things. This gives it a very free-form feel and many of the events have multiple ways to play out, are affected by other events, or can be skipped entirely.

This game can be painful to play for a couple of reasons. As mentioned above, inventory and party management are very rough and unfortunately you are forced to deal with them quite a bit.
Difficulty is very uneven. Many of the baseline enemy groups absolutely devastate your team and the damage you deal and take is very swingy, which can make some fights feel very arbitrary. In addition, encountering enemies increases the difficulty of the game, so grinding isn't really an option to help even this out.

The fact that you pick a new character every time you die makes the game feel a bit like a roguelike, but the classes aren't different enough to make it feel like changing your main character has a major impact. Hidden stats on the characters also negate some of your choices in a way that doesn't seem to serve much purpose -- some warriors are just worse than others and you can't really play around it.
This feels like the beginning of a system that could be super awesome, but just doesn't quite deliver on the promise.

Overall I like this game a lot, and the unique aspects really elevated it for me. I ultimately shelved it because the difficulty curve ends up feeling super unfair and unfun, but it is an interesting game that isn't like anything else.

After finishing the game, my thoughts on Romancing SaGa 2 haven't changed much from the status I made the other day.

There is very little story. There are tons of mechanics, but none of them are explained. There were quite a few instances in quests where I'm sure I would have gotten stuck for hours if I didn't consult a guide due to the old school lack of reasonable clues. The combat could be unfairly brutal on a regular basis. While there were no random encounters, screens were frequently flooded with far too many enemies, making some dungeons an absolute slog. The PC port controlled and ran rather poorly, having strange input issues that would cause the game to register many extra button presses at times.

Even with all of the fairly major issues, I ended up getting absolutely sucked into the stupid game. The story telling for the scenarios was quite basic, but had a charm to it that resonated with me. Combat was difficult, but had a surprising amount to offer for an RPG from 1993. I've always enjoyed SaGa style character progression, and RS2 was no exception. Building the empire through projects, research, and recruiting new units was very cool, despite the limited depth to the individual systems. Playing a string of successive emperors, each inheriting the powers of the past was really neat and led to a feeling of playing as the empire, rather than individual characters. That said, I accidentally chose a lady rogue named Beaver as my emperor due to the input issues and she went on to found the most important institution in the land -- the magic university. That's a character I'll never forget!

I actually had more fun with Romancing SaGa 2 than I did any of its SNES Final Fantasy contemporaries, including 6. Actually, to throw out a real hot take -- it might just be my favorite SNES JRPG now.

Game Review - originally written by (wraith)

Romancing SaGa 2 is considered by many to be the best of the series. Since I can't read Japanese and there's no translations that are far enough along to judge that statement, I'll pass it along with no guarantees.
(editor's note: the game received an official translation in 2016)

It does sound cool, however. Much like RS3 (which I have played), the game has a system of learning techniques from fighting and such rather than experience. The game also has a system where character age and die and pass on their skills to younger generations, though I'm not sure that the story line is specifically tailored around that, as it is in Phantasy Star III (for Sega Genesis).

Hopefully someday I'll be able to write a more complete review.

There's something intrinsically beautiful in games where dying is a mechanic in itself, but no game will ever get close to Romancing SaGa 2 where death is not only expected but enforced by the mere passage of time. If you wanted the videogame mechanics version of Snake's lecture at the end of MGS2, this is definitely the best you can get.

The inheritance system makes it clear that bloodline does not matter at all in the grand run of Empire sucessors. What does matter is everything your last emperor could pass on to their friends, family or perhaps children, in this case, stats, skills and magic proficiency. They never make it a point that this is one big lineage of the same bloodline, but rather that they all work towards a common goal: the expansion of the empire with the objective of amassing power to defeat the Seven Heroes. The very first showcase of this mechanic is your father dying against one of them so that his son can learn how to counter a very powerful spell via his inheritance, which is an ability you do keep for the rest of the whole game. It's deeply and silently powerful, because that's what you do in your (collective) journeys, get stronger so that the next generation can thrive.

This is game is also one of the games apt to be The Videogame Of All Videogames. Yes, the one fictional characters in other media will make comments about all the time and that we feel deep down how alien what they're describing is because most of our games have specific flags for events and a very predictable progression system. This game, however, is so open-ended that it's quite hard for two people to have the same experience, barring the use of a guide.

For example, I had to help a village with their monster problem, due to the fact that their band of protectors, some sort of martial arts monks, couldn't defeat a slime due to it being immune to physical damage. These monks specifically asked me to let them deal with the other big monster so that they wouldn't look so useless compared to the empress. That's fine, it's just that I absolutely forgot this was a SaGa game, and when I saw more dungeon to explore after beating the slime (and kinda expecting some kind of quest flag or cutscene, naive as I am) I just went there and kinda killed the other boss, which then made the monks furious, so their leader challenged me. I crushed him mercilessly and what happened is that their band lost any reputation they had, including the departure of every disciple that was inside their cave before, and I effectively wrestled control of the town out of their hands so that it would be empire territory. Whoops!

It's also infinitely interesting how this game has the angle of you being the emperor or empress of a perpetually expanding empire. Of course most of it is justified to you wanting to save the world, some tribes just give your their land as thanks and mostly you're seen as a good and benevolent empress (except the few times you have the choice to be terrible). But the brutal feeling of this expansionist crusade is not lost on many of the cities you visit, some that are afraid of being just lapdogs for the Empire. I'm pretty sure Kawazu took a look at FF4 and just wanted to make you be the Empire instead. (Although the payoff at the ending is pretty sensible)

All in all, this is one of the most impressive games on the system, terribly ahead of it's time for 1993 too. Yeah the final boss is infamously hard, so maybe read a guide on leveling and playing through the events so you don't suffer like me. But then again, playing this blind and not worrying if you'll be able to see every event or not creates a very special vibe to it just like the first game. One that sometimes would be nice to have in our current Game Design zeitgeist where everything must be available and experienced by everyone on their first playthrough.

As far as JRPGs go, this is... okay? It's easy to enjoy, but hard to finish. The lack of well-developed central characters and its terse dialog style mean a lot of the typical JRPG appeal just isn't present here. I enjoy the way the world incorporates different cultures and imaginative scenarios, but it feels like I'm reading an outline rather than a stage play.

No, this is a game you play for the challenging turn-based combat. I would say it aims for a mid-point between the streamlined fights of the Dragon Quest series and grid-based tactics games like the Fire Emblem series. Your control in battle is picking an attack per character from a menu and watching them play out. It's simple and fast enough that you can play dozens of random battles in a typical session, but with enough complexity that things can go wrong and make you stop to think about equipment loadout, damage types, status effects, formations, etc. The game does not feel "grindy" per se, because you always want to be working towards quest objectives (to unlock new classes and improve your empire's income) but the distribution of battles in the way is pretty dense. Like combat, character progression likewise has a simple bottom line--if you use your weapons and spells to win battles, you will gradually get stronger and wealthier--but the precise details make it tricky to optimize. A great deal of this is opaque to you in the game itself, and I can't tell if the game wants you to experiment and analyze or just rely on intuition. Regardless, there's an excellent technical guide by Nicolas Codron that you can refer to if you ever feel stuck or want to look under the hood.

A big factor in whether you will enjoy this game is its UX, which is unfortunately very 1993. The good news is that in its remastered form (I played on the Switch), the game is forgiving enough to autosave at the end of every battle victory. You'll basically never lose progress. Huzzah! The bad news is that this game wants you to change your party to adapt to the challenges of different dungeons, but provides no way to kick people out of a party you have formed. You have to intentionally get everybody killed, and that feels awful. When you're forming a new party (you'll need to, several times) there's no way to start from a previous loadout. Let's say you're forming a new party and want to add an archer similar to their deceased predecessor. You first need to talk to the NPC associated with that class--this might be the ranger in your home castle, or it might be the hunter in a remote village half-way across the world, which you access by fast travel but need to walk to a nearby port to escape. Then you have to talk to the NPC that manages your item storage to pull out the bow, armor, helm, etc you want them to use. (I hope you remember which ones you like, and don't forget that gloves impose a huge accuracy penalty on bows.) Then you have to talk to the NPC that lets you learn weapon techs mastered by previous generations. THEN you have to talk to up to three different spellcasting NPCs to load up the eight support spells you want your archer to have, one spell at a time. At no point in this process can you say, "give me this bundle of spells I used last time." Multiply this by five, and you have a huge block of mandatory prep work you need before heading back out into the field.

There are other UI quibbles--it's hard to determine attack effects from reading a scrolling marquee, there's no clear value that shows how powerful one move is relative to the next, armor only shows "slash defense" and hides its defense against the three other physical damage types. The remastered game runs at 30 FPS, which makes moving around and handling menus slightly less responsive than it ought to be. These are annoying flaws, but they're forgivable if you can accept the big process of setting up your characters. I wouldn't call RS2 a must-play import classic, but there is a lot here to enjoy for the right kind of player.