Romancing Saga 2: Revenge Of The Seven Review

This article is part of a directory: Romancing Saga 2🐻: Revenge Of🌞 The Seven - Complete Guide

The Saga series has always been Square Enix’s ugly duckling. Each game acts as a successor of sorts to Final Fantasy 2, one of the strangest and most contentious Final Fantasy entries. And just like its offbeat predecessor, Romancing Saga 2: The Revenge of the Seven carri💛es forward that signature progression system where characters level their proficiency with different weapons and magic based on the actions they take in battle.

These mechanics are paired with a generic fantasy setting steeped in JRPG conventions, yet also embraces an open-world design which allows you to approach the various scenarios in nearly any order you so choose. Hopefully, your brow is furrowed, and your curiosity pi🎶qued, because that is the whole Saga vibe.

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Romancing Saga 2 exists in an interesting place. It is a remake of a Super Famicom game, but instead of remaking it in HD-2D, like 2022’s excellent 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Live A Live, they took the tightly budgeted polygonal approach of something like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Trials of Mana. The end result looks like a gorgeous PS2 game that has been gracefully remastered. It can be stunning: it is colorful, bold, and the effective lighting does a lot to punch up its environꦛments.

As pretty as it can be, its presentation has issues that feel rooted in the past. There is an aggressive amount of clipping. Anytime a character moves their arm you can be certain that solid objects will pass through each other. Modern niceties such as cloth physics are barely present. It isn’t quite as rudimentary as it was during the PS2 era, but cloth doesn’t really flow so much as it deforms. Hair is also largely locked in place – everything that should flow feels 🍃oddly stiff. I noticed it less as I played more, but the game’s budget is still apparent in every frame.

Another aspect that feels ripped from the past is the narrative, though we’re going to have to go back a touch further than the PS2 to place it. The story starts off pretty conventionally: you follow the rise of Gerard, a reluctant hero who must rise to the occasion, but once the timeline skips forward, you take control of a generic emperor chosen from a random selection of mooks. Which is to say, your party members, after the first chapter of the game, are as well-defined as your party members from the first Final Fantasy game. The one on the NES.

However, while Romancing Saga 2 doesn’t have a great story, I wouldn’t say it has a bad story either. It is simple, but it moves at a brisk pace, and never gets bogged ⛦dowꦫn in the melodrama that so often infects modern JRPGs. The end result feels quaint.

While the story may lack complexity, its gameplay mechanics most certainly do not. They are as flexible and dynamic as they are inscrutable. When playinꦓg a Saga game, you need to meet it on its own terms, and that is true here as well. Leveling doesn’t work the way it does in the majority of RPGs. Progression is made by way of using weapons and magic. Different classes have different proficiencies, but there is enough wiggle 🅺room to take them in unique directions.

The monk flexes after winning a batting in Romancing Saga 2 Revenge Of The Seven.

The further you get into the game, the more options for tweaking and optimizing your characters you’ll get. You will eventually unlock cla𒀰ss abilities while later on you can mix and match those same abilities. On top of that, the late♒-game classes tend to be more suited to filling multiple roles as well, further enhancing your ability to create versatile warriors.

Throw in the ability to provide each party member with the ability nullify a set number of specific attacks through the game's novel evasion mechanic, as well as unique formations that benefit different team compositions, and you’ll start to get a picture of how potent a well-built team can be. And I’m only scratching the s🗹urface here.

This level of customization allows you to adapt your troops in a number of pretty fascinating ways. There were bosses that I just so happened to be built to beat when I bumped into them. I had an encounter where my entire party nullified the magic type that a boss heavily relied on, turning them into an absolute joke. But, of course, it is also possible to walk into a battle with a party that is uniquely vulnerable to a boss’s lineup of attacks, at which point you will quite simply die. Permanently. Expect that to happen more often than not, as Romancing Saga 2 can be pretty brutal.

My primary playthrough was on the ‘classic’ difficulty setting, but I did try the easier difficulty modes as well. The easiest mode can still present some challenge, but the mechanics shine the brightest when the game pushes you to optimize you෴r builds.

The whole party preparing to battle the Goblin King in Romancing Saga 2 Revenge Of The Seven.

Yes, that’s right, like Fire Emblem, allied units can be permanently killed if you so choose. Unlike Fire Emblem, however, this extends to the main character, and death is far more inevitable. It can even be a good thing. The constant reshuffling allows you to assemble a Voltron of a main character, who is able to gradually assimilate the strengths of every class through the inherita🅘nce system🦄.

It’s too bad that the barebones story never tries to leverage this turnstile of death. It feels like a missed opportunity, given that death is, traditionally, one of the most compelling narrative devices storytellers have in their toolboxes. But I suspect that was a conscious decision, as Romancing Saga 2 isn’t that kind of RPG. It doesn’t want you to feel sad about characters dying, it wants you to experiment with di𒀰fferent🌞 party configurations, tweak your load-outs, and build teams of super soldiers.

By the mid-point in the game, I was intentionally killing off characters so I could swap them out for another version that had more LP, and I felt nothing as I did so. That’s kind of messed up!

While I love how much room you are given to craft uniquely powerful teams, the process of doing so is far from straightforward. There are in-game tutorials, but they only give you the basics, and are pretty coy about the real inner workings. For example, the game tells you that the number of battles you engage in determines the strength of enemieಞs, and that you may want to avoid certain foes, but it doesn’t express how screwed you 🌟can get if you fight too often.

After giving you a vague warning, Romancing Saga 2 is all too happy to give you all the rope in the world to hang yourself with. The game also doesn’t inform you of how guarding in battle will diminish how many Techniqu꧟e Points (this game’s version of EXP) a character receꦐives. Multiple players will likely play through the entire game without discovering this. I only found this out through hours of deliberate experimentation.

You’ll want to avoid fighting every enemy yꦅou encounter, especially in the earlier parts of the game. Clearing every enemy you encounter will cause their power to accelerate at an untenable rate.

At times it almost feels like it is snickering as you paint yourself into a corner. I don’t mind the lack of clarity, and found grappling with these unique systems super rewarding, but I suspect that your mileage will vary. A splash of masochism will hel𓃲p you get the most out of your time with this remarkably strange game.

Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven is likely to be your weirdest friend’s favorite RPG. It is a playfully obtuse, mechanically deep outing paired with a story that is almost charming in its simplicity. It feels dated, but it also features a singul♎ar vision that sets it apart from other games in the genre. I suspect, at the end of the day, it will carry on the legacy of the Saga franchise and be a divisive title, which is probably a good thing. We need more divisive games.