Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven

 

I played Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven.

This game was released in 2024 for modern platforms. I played the Nintendo Switch version.

Revenge of the Seven is a remake of Romancing SaGa 2, which was originally released for the Super Famicom in 1993, and later got an enhanced port to Switch in 2017. 

I never played either of these versions though - I've only played the 2024 version!

This is a turn-based RPG with a rather unconventional non-linear structure.

The game follows the story of the Kingdom of Avalon, and its thousand-year-long quest to rid the world of the evil fiends known as the Seven Heroes. 

The prologue of the game follows the Emperor Leon and his son Gerard in the Imperial Year 1000. After some events involving Kzinssie of the Seven Heroes ravaging the kingdom, the Emperor seeks revenge - however the Emperor is killed during the battle by Kzinssie's "Soulsteal" magic. But Leon didn't sacrifice himself without a plan - using the power of Inheritance bestowed upon him by the seeress Orieve, Leon is able to pass down his knowledge of Kzinssie's Soulsteal spell to whomever sits upon the throne next - and with Gerard as the new emperor, he now understands how to fully avoid its effects. With this knowledge, Gerard is able to take down Kzinssie to avenge his father.

However, there are six more Heroes out there: Subier, the king of the oceans. Dantarg, the beast who strives to be the strongest. Noel, the stoic knight. Rocbouquet, the beautiful temptress. Bokhohn, the scheming puppetmaster. And Wagnas, the ruler in the sky.

The Seven Heroes rule over regions all across the lands, infesting the world with their monsters. In order for this world to know peace, all of the Seven Heroes need to be eliminated.

During the prologue, we learn how combat works in this game. For the most part it is a simple turn-based JRPG style combat system, though it has some unique elements that make it interesting.

You travel with a party of five characters, and you position them into a "formation" that affects their stats. The default formation you have at the start of the game is the Imperial Cross, which allows you to select one party member to get attacked more often, and two to get attacked less often. Thankfully the prologue provides you with a Heavy Infantry character named Bear who is great at tanking damage.

Characters can equip two weapons at once, which allows access to two types of Techs at a time for each character.

This game doesn't have a standard EXP system, but rather, characters' individual weapon proficiencies are leveled-up instead, gaining weapon exp whenever you attack with them. Any character can equip any weapon, but they start with higher proficiencies with their preferred weapons. So if you want to give an archer a sword, you can definitely do it, but it will take some grinding before they can actually deal any damage with it.

Each weapon's Techs are special moves that cost BP to use. (BP is this game's MP).

However, it's not so simple to acquire these techs. Techs have to be obtained by "Glimmering". What this means is, whenever you do an attack, there is a chance that your character will suddenly have a spark of inspiration, a lightbulb will appear over their head as they come up with a new idea for an attack. And thus they have now learned a new tech they can use from now on.

The ability to glimmer a new tech is based on a number of things, including the user's weapon proficiency levels, and also which character is attacking in the first place. So an archer is inherently much more likely to glimmer new bow techs than sword techs, even if you train them well in swords.

Thankfully the game does have an in-game "Glimmer Chart" that lets you know if there are any new moves available, and whether your character is able to glimmer it or not. Takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.

Additionally, some special weapons have specific glimmers that are tied to the weapon, which require you to keep the weapon equipped if you want to use it. These are usually the stronger or more interesting techs. I do like when RPGs have a reason to keep older weapons around.

Additionally, characters have a chance of glimmering Evasions to specific moves. If a monster uses a move, there is a small chance that a lightbulb appears over the head of your character, and they will figure out how to perfectly dodge it. And from now on, this character cannot be hit with that specific move at all. It seems to happen completely randomly, but I'm sure there's some behind-the-scenes systems that determines which characters are more likely to figure out how to avoid which enemy moves.

The Evasions system is in fact the gameplay mechanic that allows Gerard to avoid Kzinssie's Soulsteal during the prologue boss fight - it appears as an Evasion in his skills menu.

Characters can also glimmer new magic spells if they are proficient in specific magic elements. This happens after combat rather than during it. 

There is a limit to how many techs and spells and evasions characters can have at once - you can only know 8 techs, 8 spells, and 4 evasions at a time. And much like in Pokémon, if you learn a new one you don't have room for, you'll be prompted to select a previous one to forget.

Having a spread of different weapon types available to use across your party is very useful, as all enemies have weaknesses to specific weapon types. Additionally, attacking a foe with their weakness will fill up an Overdrive gauge, which will let you perform a super attack when it's full. So sometimes, even attacking with a weapon you're no good with can be helpful if it gives you the extra Overdrive juice you need. 

I like this kind of system where a simple set of combat options can have multiple layers of usefulness. It comes together really cleverly.

After every combat, HP is restored, but BP is not restored. Your regular attacks are normally quite weak, so constantly using Techs and burning through your BP is pretty much mandatory in order to get through the dungeons. So it is often wise to buy some BP-restoration items.

The player has an unlimited inventory, however medicine items can only be used mid-battle if you equip them to your character beforehand, and each character only has two slots for medicine. Interestingly, BP restoration cannot be equipped and is only usable outside of combat, which means that a character's max BP is actually a limiting factor for the strategy versus some of the harder bosses.

Thankfully, before each boss battle is a save point and a BP restoration point, so it's not too harsh. 

Overall, the difficulty of this game was pretty good. I played on "Normal" difficulty, and it wasn't a walk in the park by any means - I had to think about my options and which techs to use, and when to use my Overdrive, and all of that good JRPG combat stuff. 

During the prologue, the game feels like a fairly standard JRPG - You've got a main character, a main questline, a linear narrative with story cutscenes, and all that regular JRPG stuff. But right after the prologue has finished introducing the game, things take a turn in a rather unusual direction. The game becomes completely nonlinear, to the point where it doesn't even have a "main quest" any more.

The game structure goes like this: 

Explorable areas appear as icons on your world map, and you can fast-travel to any one of them at (mostly) any time.

At first, you have the Avalon castle town, as well as the port town of Somon, where Kzinssie was battled in the prologue.

After the prologue, there is a scene where the emperor's advisors tell you that there may be something interesting to investigate in some other nearby towns and caves. It unlocks these areas for fast-travel, and also adds quest markers to them on the map to remind you to take a look.

From Somon's port, you can sail to a few other port towns, which will add them to your fast travel map. From these, you can explore even further out, adding more towns and dungeons and even some wide-open field areas to your map. Reaching the other side the fields unlocks the towns on the other side.

From the towns you have access to, you can find new sidequests, which will unlock new dungeon locations, and quite often they will lead into more sidequests that unlock more new towns and dungeons, and... it just keeps going and going like this. The more sidequests you complete, the more and more area icons get added to your fast-travel map, giving you more and more access to the world as you continue playing. 

So essentially, the whole game is spent completing sidequests in order to collect more fast-travel points on your map, so you can find even more sidequests.

The entire game is pretty much comprised entirely of sidequests.

The sidequests in this game usually involve travelling through a dungeon area full of monsters, and fighting a boss at the end.

The Kingdom of Avalon will also gain favour with the region whose quest you completed, leading to that region being annexed into Avalon. The more regions that become part of Avalon, the more "Imperial Revenue" your kingdom will have, which is essentially just how much gold you earn after defeating monsters.

Clearing sidequests can also grant access to new party members. They will join your kingdom, and can be swapped out at any tavern in the towns. There's a good amount of party members to collect - there's over 30 of them! So you'll definitely want to be changing up your party often to use them all.

Each party member has a unique character class, with their own weapon preferences and a unique skill.

It is useful to keep new party members in your team when you first get them - every new character you recruit has a unique skill that is unlocked after 30 victories in combat. These skills can be things like "heals a bit of BP every turn", "more likely to inflict status effects on enemies", "gets healed for more HP than normal", "has complete immunity to water-based damage", among other things. 

Later on in the game, you can unlock the ability to "master" learned skills, which takes 30 more victories. Mastered skills can then be equipped by other party members, but only when the skill-master is not in the team themselves. 

So for example the Blacksmith character has "increase weapon and armor effectiveness by 10%" skill, which is a pretty good skill for anyone to have. So in order to make it available, you first need to take the Blacksmith into at least 60 battles.

After that, you can equip this skill to any other party member, but only if the Blacksmith isn't in the team. Because it is not possible to have two members with the same skill at once, and a character cannot not have their own skill.

I like this system, it adds a ton of individuality and customisability to your choice of party, and it can make party members useful even when you're not using them. In fact it makes certain characters more useful to not use. This is a really cool way to make a game with lots of party members feel like every one of them is contributing in their own way.

...

So anyway. That's the gist of the game progression. In order to reach the remaining members of the Seven Heroes, you have to find their sidequests. They are not marked any differently to any of the other sidequests in the game - you have to discover them naturally. The quests that lead to one of the Seven tend to involve travelling through longer dungeons, multiple dungeons, or completing some other prerequisite quests before gaining access. So it's not likely you'll stumble into most of them. ...Though it seems Dantarg and Subier in particular don't have all that many prerequisites, so these two might be easier to stumble into than the other ones I guess. I dunno. It's possible there are special conditions I met without realising or something.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit here. I haven't mentioned one very important and interesting aspect about this game.

After the prologue, after Gerard has killed Kzinssie and begins exploring and investigating and discovering new towns, and maybe even completing a few quests here and there, suddenly the game will do something highly unusual.

One moment you're playing as Gerard, solving a monster problem in the next town over, but as soon as you complete the quest, the game fades to a black screen, and text appears that simply says... "136 years later...".

... Wow. I mean. What??? Really?

Okay. So... what exactly happens?

Well Gerard isn't around any more, that's for sure. In fact, he's never heard from again after this happens. Because this isn't actually Gerard's story, it's the story of the Kingdom of Avalon as a whole.

You get to choose a successor. You're given five options, from a selection of character classes you've unlocked so far.

So what kind of emperor would you like to appoint to the throne next? A Heavy Infantry? A Ranger? A Mercenary? A Thief?

Whoever you choose becomes the new main character.

Due to Leon's Inheritance magic, whoever you choose will inherit all weapon proficiency levels from both the previous emperor, and the previous member of that character class. So for example, if you choose Heavy Infantry, both Gerard (the previous emperor) and Bear (the previous Heavy Infantry)'s weapon proficiency levels will be inherited to the new Heavy Infantry Emperor.

Additionally, whichever character class you choose will unlock a unique new Formation for you to use in battles.

All the other characters in your party are replaced by their direct descendants, which in practical terms doesn't actually change much - They all wear the exact same style of outfit as their predecessors, and they all have the same weapons and skills you've been training them in. They just have different names and faces.

 So if you were giving Therese the Ranger some sword practice on the side, then after the timeskip, her identical descendant Mary the Ranger will start with a similar amount of sword proficiency, even though that skill isn't natural to archers.

You never really lose your character building progress, even though your characters are getting replaced.

But it's not as simple as a copy and paste job. Every weapon level has an overall "Imperial Standing" that can be checked in the pause menu, which is basically an average of how much weapon experience levels all of your party members have accumulated amongst everyone. The higher the overall standing, the higher all the next descendants' weapon levels will be at the beginning of a new era. 

This system allows for classes that you don't use on your team much to not get outclassed later - as long as you've been using archery attacks at all, then the archers you haven't been using will be all caught up when the next generation starts.

The timeskip is also how party members can pass down their glimmered techs to become teachable to others.

After glimmering a new tech, only the one who glimmered it has access to it - however, after a timeskip, the knowledge of the tech will be passed down through the Knights' Training Hall, and now anyone with sufficient weapon proficiency will be able to learn it, for free. This also allows you to safely forget learned techs and evasions to make room for new ones, without permanently losing them. Once it's recorded in the Training Hall, it's always available to relearn.

This system is also how magic is primarily given to party members. 

At first, only mage characters know how to do spells. But after a timeskip, all of their spells will be recorded in the Incantations Lab, and after that, they can be taught to anyone. If any new spells are glimmered afterwards, then you'll have to wait for the next timeskip before these ones can be equipped on anyone too.

There are six different spell elements - Pyrology, Hydrology, Terrology, Aerology, Cosmology, and Umbrology. 

Characters cannot equip spells of opposing elements - if you equip a Pyrology spell, then all Hydrology spells will become unequipped. And the same applies for Terrology vs Aerology, and Cosmology vs Umbrology. You'll need to be a bit careful, because you might lose access to a spell entirely if you unequip it before it gets recorded for the next generation via a timeskip.

Umbrology is an interesting case, because I never actually had the opportunity to use a single Umbrology spell during my entire playthrough. It turns out that the ability to use Umbrology is locked behind a mutually-exclusive choice during one sidequest. And I just so happened to choose the other way.

Hmm. Not so sure about that game design choice to be honest.

So the sidequests in this game actually do have some choices to make, and they also interact with the generations system too.

...other than locking me out of using dark magic for the whole game, there are some other mutually-exclusive events that may or may not occur depending on your choices.

For example, there is a quest where the emperor receives a request for aid by the neighbouring region of Cumberland, as they are in the midst of a civil war. If the emperor does not deal with this situation before the next timeskip occurs, then in the next generation, Cumberland will have turned into a hostile territory, and the questline changes from aiding Cumberland to liberating Cumberland. 

This is kind of interesting. But this unfortunately isn't actually a common thing throughout the game. The vast majority of the sidequests in the game will happily wait patiently for you to get around to them, now matter how many hundreds of years pass by.

...

In fact, this leads me to the part of this writeup where I start complaining about the game. 

So. This whole generations system. All these timeskips, new emperors, inheritance...

I'm not sure I exactly like the way it's presented.

First of all. The game doesn't really explain why there needs to be such large timeskips. Did the emperor just decide to stop doing anything for the entire rest of his natural life? Even when there was much more to accomplish? Why?  Why would he willingly let Cumberland fall if it was in his ability to aid them? Presumably, he was on the throne for years and years after the screen goes blank, but literally nothing gets accomplished in between then and now? ...I suppose we just have to come up with our own storytelling to explain it? Is this a game that expects you to do your own GMing??

The timeskips seem to occur when the game decides that "enough things" have been accomplished in the current era. There really isn't more to it than that, it seems. After three or four quests are completed in a single era, the game decides that that's enough, now it's time for the next emperor to have their go. 

The game honestly does a really really poor job making it feel like any time has actually passed. A hundred years is an extremely long time, you would've thought, but absolutely nothing about the world changes at all. Every town remains literally exactly the same. No towns develop, no new towns are established, no towns are abandoned, and worst of all, all town NPCs are still standing in the exact same spots as before, saying the exact same dialogue as before.

After rescuing Somon from Kzinssie's fiends, the NPCs around town will have dialogue... Children say "Yay, the monsters are gone, now we can play outside!", or another NPC says  "We can start to rebuild now that the monsters are gone"... Skip 150 years into the future, and visit Somon again and..... the exact same kid is still saying the exact same dialogue. "Yay, now we can play outside!" .... hey kid, this town has been monster-free for over 150 years, what the heck are you still celebrating for????

It's just so bad. It completely ruins the effect they're trying to pull off here. It's honestly bafflingly bad. There is no way I'm going to truly get into the idea that literally over 100 years has passed when I'm seeing things like this, I'm sorry Square Enix.

Important quest-giving NPCs are another poor showing of this. They introduce themselves when you first meet them, and generally they join your party after completing their quest. However, if you don't manage to fully complete the quest before a timeskip happens to you, then...they'll still be there waiting for you, over 150 years later. And the quest will continue as if nothing happened. I mean, What??? 

They actually do occasionally try to explain this. In Cumberland, the quest-important character is Sophie the Crusader, and one of Sophie's aides says "It is tradition that all Crusaders leading the rebellion will be named Sophie"..................... yeah okay. That's the best they got, huh? 

Except, after completing the quest and recruiting Sophie to our party, now the regular game mechanics regarding inheritance will apply to her, so the next Crusader descendant will have a new face and a new name. In this case, the new name is Agatha. So we've already broken that rule.

..........And if you go back to Cumberland after this, all NPC dialogue mentioning Sophie is still the exact same as it was 150 years ago, except now all the dialogue has been find+replaced to change "Sophie" into "Agatha". So apparently now Agatha is the saviour of the town and always has been, even though the town was actually saved 150 years ago by Sophie. They literally just have NPC dialogue that is "<Insert Current Crusader Name Here> is the saviour of our town!!!", not at all paying attention to how things actually played out.

There are other things that don't make any sense to be able to carry over a timeskip. If you visit the Amazon village, you rescue one of the Amazonians from monsters, but she runs away from you. If you chase after her, she does not let you in to the village if you are playing as a male emperor. The quest objective says "Follow after the woman", but it's a dead end until you change emperor.

So okay. We'll go do some other quests then. Now, another 150 or so years have passed. So we can choose a lady to inherit the throne, and now we can finally fulfil the quest objective of "follow after the woman". ...which is a quest objective that doesn't even make sense to still exist after 100 years but whatever. ... And so we get there, and she greets our new empress with "Thanks for saving me back there". ................yeah. I mean. .....are you seeing the problem here? If we entertain what the game is trying to say here, then I suppose we are to believe that she is thanking our ancestors for saving her ancestor, despite neither of us having met before. And that's the first thing she says to us. It's just. I'm sorry game. I just can't with this.

God this is so obnoxiously implemented. I'm not trying to pick it apart so cynically like this, I'm really trying to engage with the story as it's presented, but it's just. ...it just immediately falls apart. I don't even have to do anything, it's shoving plot holes in my face without me even going to look for them. it's just not well done. :( It really doesn't feel like a story that spans over many years. It really, really, really doesn't feel like that at all.

Instead, it just feels like a regular JRPG with tons of sidequests, where occasionally you have to change main character.

The quests in this game are designed as if this was a normal RPG where timeframes aren't relevant. But this is very much a game where timeframes are relevant, yet the sidequests were not designed with that in mind at all. It's just so.... baffling to see it.

The fact that there is no actual main character of the game means that, after the prologue is done and Gerard is gone, your party members don't have any lines of dialogue for the rest of the game. It's pure silent protagonist mode for the whole game. That's fine and all I suppose. I've played old RPGs before, they don't all need fleshed-out party members. We can use this as an opportunity to make up our own interpersonal storylines, right? JRPGs are all descended from D&D after all, right??

So while there's no such thing as character development for your team members, there actually still is at least one plot thread the game shows you. And this is in the form of the Memories of the Seven.

Occasionally as you explore the dungeons you'll come across a terminal that has a recording of a scene from the past, back from before the Seven Heroes became monsters. These scenes show snippets of the Seven Heroes' past lives, how they became friends, and how they dealt with a monster threat that was terrorising the kingdom. And importantly, it also shows the events that eventually led to them becoming the immortal monsters we see today.

This kind of reminds me of how the Memories work in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. It's a look into the past, and just like in Zelda, this is the only time the game's narrative gets to shine through. These memory scenes are definitely an important addition to the game, as the game is extremely light on story without them.

...Interestingly, the memories can be found out of order, depending on which order you do the various dungeons. It's not too big of a deal, but it can make them a bit more confusing to follow. It wouldn't have been so hard to force the memories to be viewed in a set order, would it? Oh well.

...

So alrighty. The majority of the gameplay is doing fun JRPG sidequests, and occasionally being forced into changing main characters. Overall it's pretty fun as a game. I enjoy the combat, I enjoy the dungeon exploration, and I enjoy the sidequests, as long as I don't think about how many hundreds of years are supposedly passing as I play. 

But once you reach a certain point, something interesting happens.

Once you reach 5/7 Heroes killed, the game forces a timeskip, and now we are presented with only one choice for the throne. The "Final Emperor".

In my playthrough, the Final Emperor was given to me once I had reached around Imperial Year 2200. That's 1200 years after Gerard's reign. I don't know how variable the years are, since the numbers of years in each timeskip seem to fluctuate based on how many quests you've done or something, but I have a feeling that the final emperor will always be in the 2000+ range.

Apparently, it takes 1000 or so years for Kzinssie's spirit to revive itself, and the initial Inheritance Spell wears off the moment Kzinssie starts existing again. So it's up to the Final Emperor to put a stop to the Seven Heroes once and for all, by defeating Kzinssie again, along with the other remaining two Heroes.

After you become the Final Emperor, your Knight's Training Hall gains the ability to record newly-glimmered techs immediately, rather than only after a timeskip. ...And the fact that this happens kinda makes me wonder whether the whole timeskip and inheritance system actually has any purpose to it at all...?  

I'm imagining a hypothetical version of this game where the entire game is just Gerard going around and killing all the Seven Heroes by himself, with no time skips at all. Sure, some of the more interesting mutually-exclusive choices would not be possible any more, and maybe some of the sidequest storylines would have to be rewritten, but... that's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make in exchange for a game that presents itself in a way that actually makes any sense. I dunno. ...1000 years is an extremely long time, and the fact that every single town remains completely unchanged for the entire duration of over 1000 years is just too impossible for me to accept. Let alone all the other problems this system causes.

I feel like... the concept of the game was more ambitious than they had the ability to properly implement, and instead of scaling back and doing something that works, they went ahead and implemented what they could of the system gameplaywise, but had absolutely no way to make it fit narratively, so they just... decided it didn't matter how nonsensical it comes across. 

And you know what? I actually think that's really really interesting. This is clearly a game for fans of RPG gameplay more than fans of RPG storytelling. The mechanics and systems are all extremely solid and fun. And the inheritance system adds just a touch of unique flavouring to this game, and the way it affects certain sidequests does give it value. It serves to really stand out as something no other game has really done. So for achieveing something like that... I have to commend them, honestly.

So yeah, overall...

I like Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven.

I really do like it.

I spent over 80 hours on this game, I played every single dungeon, I did every single sidequest, I watched every single memory scene, I beat the bonus dungeon. I did it all. This is a really fun RPG. I enjoy levelling up my weapons and glimmering new moves and passing down my learned skills and all that stuff. It's a very well-built RPG system that focuses heavily on the gameplay side of things, while for the most part completely ignoring the story side of things... to the point where it doesn't even care that it makes no sense.

I know I spent the latter half of this writeup mostly complaining, but.... once you realise that the game is supposed to be more representational than literal, then you can overlook its blatant inconsistencies more easily. 

I actually think this game's biggest failing is the fact that it's a fully modern-looking remake of a 1993 game. It's much easier to consider pixel sprites as abstractions than it is to consider highly detailed HD characters as such. So I'd imagine that any problems where the game isn't internally consistent are easier to brush aside when playing a pixel game, but much harder to overlook when things are presented to you much more realistically. Even if the actual game design hasn't changed.

Maybe this has something to do with why I spent so much time complaining about it. I dunno.

Anyway. It's a very good game. Just don't play this game expecting a storyline. because it only kinda has one. For the most part it's just a game about doing sidequests and dungeons. ...And sometimes that's all you need!

...Oh and one last thing, unfortunately the Switch version has really long loading times. cest la vie. I just put up with it. the end.