Published , by Lucas White
Published , by Lucas White
I love the original Romancing SaGa 2. I mean, I’ve made it pretty clear that SaGa in general is my jam, but Romancing 2 in particular is the top of the mountain for me. I had a blast with SaGa Emerald Beyond earlier this year, and my jaw hit the floor when Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven was announced. Two new releases in the series in one year, with one being a remake of the GOAT? Absurd! While I was jealous of all the colleagues who got to try the game at PAX West, I recently got to try a different slice of the game. In fact, it’s a slice of the game folks out in the wild will be able to play, in the form of a demo. Saves will carry over to the final release, so there’s no excuse not to check it out!
But in case you’re still unsure about it, here’s what you can expect, based on my experience. The demo lasts a few hours depending on your pace, and it’s almost the full prologue. You play as king Leon, a dude who looks like Jesus Christ but ripped, as he goes out to handle some of his empire’s local issues. He brings his son Gerard along, who has more brains than muscles, to help beef him up and get him used to combat. Leon needs all the backup he can get, as rumors are spreading that the seven legendary heroes are back from a sort of cosmic exile, and they’re not happy.
Romancing SaGa 2, and most SaGa games of its vintage, is notorious for being difficult. Not just in terms of monsters beating you up easily (although that’s there too), but also in the way information is deliberately hidden from the player. The original game’s “Free Scenario” system was a pioneering effort in open world, player-centric storytelling, but finding and completing scenarios was extremely obtuse. There was also an unexplained scaling difficulty system based on your number of battles, which could effectively lock your progress if you tried to grind too much. To round it off, many aspects of progression and character-building were also operating in ways you couldn’t see clearly.
For many hardcore fans, the SaGa sickos, if you will, have come to enjoy that aspect of the series. It can be fun and rewarding to figure out how things work and discover new events by accident. But it’s a niche, and the team behind Revenge of the Seven is betting on those systems still being satisfying to dig into without all the obstruction. The early moments of the demo are full of tutorial messages that are useful for onboarding, but even without them the game itself is full of visible information. Anything you could possibly think of that Romancing SaGa didn’t show, Revenge of the Seven goes out of its way to provide. The menu screen, which doubles as a “throne room” in some of the coolest UI I’ve seen in an old school-style RPG, gives you everything you’ll need to keep up and then some. It seems like it could be overwhelming, but considering the opposite is almost nothing, I’m super curious to see how newcomers react.
Aside from all the information, the second most striking part of Revenge of the Seven is its visuals. This is a vibrant, detailed, and gorgeous game. It doesn’t have the sort of stylistic nuance many SaGa games have had over the years, opting for a more “traditional” look. But it’s also a more dense and open space to run around in, compared to SaGa’s interest in trimming the fat and going for a more tabletop kind of structure. It’s a fascinating shift from the core series from a different team, and again another piece of the puzzle that could bring in more new players turned off by SaGa’s historically alternative choices. Either way, especially on PC where I played the demo, it was a little weird but also refreshing to have a SaGa that let me cruise around, almost like the series’ bigger budget sibling, Final Fantasy.
The updated visuals and new flow of information both intersect with an effective impact during combat. This is still a Super Famicom game in its bones, but with the help of some lightning fast menus and dramatic camera work, simply making your choices and watching them roll out feels good. On top of that you have the classic SaGa “Glimmer” system, in which characters can learn new skills in the middle of a scrap. In Revenge of the Seven, you can actually see your chances of getting a glimmer, which can help inform which weapon or attacks to choose if you’re trying to flesh out your party’s movesets. The game also keeps track of enemy weaknesses and resistances for you, something even modern SaGa games are hesitant to give out for free. Combat feels speedy yet fulfilling, which hopefully makes up for people like me who might turn their noses up a little at all the hints. And either way, that lightbulb and sound effect are peak gaming dopamine.
Unfortunately for me, the demo ends just as the real good stuff starts to happen. The third pillar of what makes Romancing SaGa 2 so great, without spoiling too much, is how the story and gameplay both span across multiple generations of emperors. Passing skills and memories down the bloodline is a big part of how you progress, and the dreaded “thank you for playing” kicked me out of the demo just after the transition happens for the first time, and before you can actually do anything with it. It’s the kind of cliffhanger that’s perfect for a demo though, and I hope folks who play it for the first time want to dig in more, at least half as much as I want to. I know what happens next, and trust me when I say the demo’s content is simply a lead-up to an unparalleled adventure.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is available on October 24, 2024 for the PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 and 5. An early PC code for the upcoming public demo was provided by the publisher for this preview.