4/5 ★ – Jrdotan's review of Romancing SaGa 2.

After the first RS introduced us to the flagship system of the series, the free scenario system, fans would probably ask how a follow up would build on what actually worked on the previous game and hopefully fix what were wrong with the first RS, because there was a lot of room for improvements in that one. The response Square gave us was Romancing SaGa 2, released in 1993. What i'm reviewing here being the remaster released in 2010 and the first time this was localized here in the west. The first noticeable improvement is presentation, if we compare even the original sfc version to the first RS game, sprites look much more polished, well implemented alongside the scenario and swimming in detail, scenarios have more color and in general look much better, in the remaster they were upscaled and redesigned to look much cleaner but this also present a bit of a contrast, because sprites themselves still use the same old design present in the SFC version, regardless of which version you are playing, the one thing that looks MILES ahead of the first game are the animations. Movements in battle look gorgeous and every single tech or spell will feel much better to use mid battle due to all the flair and detail put on those quick but effective animations. As a result, the game looks also much more distinctive in comparison to the original game Sound design was also improvement to an astounishing degree when it comes to sound effects. Doors opening, moves, spells and weapons all sound much more natural in comparison to the previous games in which they sounded like a bunch of sound chip effects put together, now every move, spell and item usage have their own sounds and it really does its job well What can be considered a downgrade to some when it comes to sound design is the soundtrack. The music itself is quite good and well composed as it is, but theres just too few of them in a quite long game and they often repeat WAY too much to the point where they can pretty quickly become annoying to listen in large doses of gameplay, which is a pretty considerable letdown as Kenji ito always rocked with the series´s soundtrack to the point of being one of the series´s most iconic elements. But that besides the point, the most important points in the series are the writing (specifically the setting and lore) and the gameplay And when it comes to the writing, the initial premise is that this story takes place after a war against a greater evil, in which 7 heroes where chosen to take down on said evil. after the war ended, the heroes were corrupted and returned for the war seeking revenge and other twisted desires against those who sent them to war, you control a family of emperors in a generational kind of story, going after those heroes and defeating them in order to restore order (or just conquest territories for your empire, its up to you). The premise is quite cool but in general the writing is quite subpar and theres not a whole lot of historical context for the setting even compared to the original game, what is cool when it comes to writing is the small events that takes place in the game, which are now much more involving and can actually affect the state of the world as a true roleplaying game would, because in this game the player can actually choose and choices will alter how things progress and how prepared (or not) you will be for the final conflict and thats when we transition to gameplay and here we have a LOT to talk about, for start with, choices arent the only new fleshed out feature in the gameplay loop of this game, it goes beyond and tries to actually introduce more things to the gameplay loop outside of combat such as crafting or the castle management system in which you can build different things in your kingdom such as a university or a research laboratory that you can use to study different spells and such buildings will not only mean that the player has more choices in which things they can actually use during gameplay but they also directly affect the economy of the game, because this game has a very different economy system. Instead of using money to buy items and spend in spells, for the most part you wont use your money for that, only places that are outside of your domain will sell you equipment, places conquered by your kingdom will give you their equipment for free, where the player will actually spend money at is in buildings, crafting and different economic deals that you can make during the game. The economy system gives you an actual economic goal in the game, which is maximizing the economy of your kingdom so you can actually build your castle, the reason why the goal is a thing being that you dont actually get money drops just by chests or questing nor enemies have a fixed value that they will drop depending on enemy type, instead depending on how many places you have conquered, how many public services your castle offer and how your economic deals are, people living under your territory will pay you taxes and as you battle, time will pass and money will be added to your revenue in your kingdom. Its a very interesting system and does change the flow of progression significantly. Several things were changed when it comes to character building and battle systems either, Gone are the weird weapon level glitches that made you lose weapon levels once you unequipped your equipment as well as the weird tech system that required you to have those weapon levels by individual weapons in order to have new techs unlocked. Now, techs are learn by a system named "spark" in which by fullfilling a set of conditions, during battle a player can randomly spark a new technique, after learned, the technique can be passed in the castle´s dojo and at that point, players can teach that technique to any other character in the party at any point in the game. This system was EXTREMELY well received due to how innovative it was and how much it adds to the tactical value of the series. a player will always have the tools to a boss fight since he can always acess the Dojo and formulate a strategy to tackle on a difficult fight, the sparks also are a good way to balance out harder fights as the harder the fights, the more chances you have of sparking techniques, eventually it became a staple in the series. Another extremely well received system was the formation system. The grid system is still present, but instead of making the player move different grids in order to hit an enemy or manually set characters in a grid, theres pre allocated formations that do different sorts of stuffs and have some effects in the party. one formation can radically reduce the damage suffered by the party, while other can raise your speed and make your party always have advantage during turn order, etc... and those can create a number of different creative strats when combined with your party setup which just adds to the game. Another thing to add is spells in which were vastly improved in comparison to the previous games. Spellcasting is part of this game's soul. Not only its extremely easy to mess with magic and teach magic to your party members, but magic itself is really strong both in terms of having very good spells for offensive crowd control or for supportive usages with a bunch of interesting effects such as the ability to create elemental walls that will damage enemies in physical contact, spells that deny projectile-based damage, spells that will duplicate your damage in battle and even things like auto ressurection after death. They are very useful to the point where one of the most prominent strats i have for the early game is casting your emperor's light ball spell in the beggining of every battle since this spell has the ability to blind enemies and this will vastly help you as in the early game, most enemies will try for physical damage (which will often miss if they are blinded) This is aided by the fact that this game is very difficult and combat tends to be lethal with high risk involved. Not only enemies will deal large quantities of damage and deplete your resources pretty easily, but the LP system of the first gb SaGa game is back, revamped. Now, your party is composed of recruited characters for different classes that you can find in the world, all of those have a set of different ablities and skills that they can have or learn and a set of stats that can either change over time (hp/sp and weapon levels) or are fixed such as LP, when LP is completely depleted, the character is permanent dead and their items and equipments are moved to the castle's storage. If your emperor die, you move to another generation and have to choose a new emperor from a selection of classes that the game will randomly present to you As you can imagine, having spells and techs in different slots, those weapon teaching mechanics, items being moved back and fourth between characters and your storage will add a notorious ammount of micro-management to the game, in particular a big problem when it comes to that is when it comes to the start of a set generation, meaning that when you choose a new emperor, at some point you will have to recruit a party, get all of your spells equipped in all of them, pick your equipment in storage and re-equip everybody with what you will need AND teach them the techiques you have in your Dojo with can take something up to 25 minutes just to have your party prepared to go on which is ridiculous to say the least and one of the reasons you may not want to die. Not wanting to die is however, not a guarantee you can deal with the game's challenge, not only because of all the systems i mentioned but because even when it comes to enemy formations and design, the game is brutal. Formations are really well done in this game and often you will find different formations in which enemies will complement each other and fuck you over with ease. a good example being how Mandrakes can be comboed with Sorcerers that are slow, basically meaning they can hypnosis your whole party making you unable to defeat the sorcerers before they can cast powerful spells to wipe your entire party. Enemies also have different resistances that are not only elemental, but in terms of weapons so you cant expect to hit a swarm with a hammer and be good for the day nor to try and penetrate a slime with a spear. This give weapons more meaning and will result in different equipment being better or worse for different scenarios which will add to the substance of the gameplay loop and loot obtained, they also maintained the idea of loot with special abilities that were presented in RS1, which is good since that made itemization in that game much better than expected. When we put everything in the table the overall experience ends up being a very ambitious jrpg that has a lot of interesting systems, a very tactical combat system and character building mechanics and had a very noticeable impact in the series as a whole, being a very important title in shaping what SaGa would become from that point onwards The remaster may have some issues such as input delay which can get in the way when you are trying to run from enemies in the scenario and the micro management can get a bit annoying at times, specially as a result of some boss fights being pretty much trial and error, But if you can put that aside this is a game worth playing that i very easily recommend as one of the most intriguing jrpgs of that era, that may surprise you at times even on modern days. Rank - 8/10