I’ve played a good handful of RPGs over the years, dabbling in just about everything. But one of my biggest gaps of knowledge has been in the SaGa series, a franchise that I just simply haven’t gotten to yet. With Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, a remake of a thirty-one-year-old game (older than me!) due later this year, it’s high time I finally give it all a go. Having now experienced a hands-on preview of the game, I’m mad at myself for not having checked out the IP sooner. Romancing SaGa 2 looks like more RPG excellence from Square Enix in 2024.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is an RPG story spanning thousands of years. How exactly does that work? Well, you’re following the lineage of a royal family of the Empire of Varennes. Throughout your journey, you as the ruler will have knowledge and abilities that are passed down from your ancestors, a chain that continues to your children, and so on. It’s a compelling means of telling an epic story and to match it is the threat of the vengeful ‘Seven Heroes,’ a series of beings that have returned to cause devastation to your land. Using the power of those who have come before you, you must take on these goodies turned baddies and stop them once and for all. If that isn’t a metal as hell premise then I don’t know what is.
This is already incredibly evident in the two gameplay slices I experienced, both 20 or so minutes apiece. You see, in battles, characters have their normal HP and then a smaller figure known as LP (Life Points). Each time a character’s health is depleted to zero, they’re downed and use up a Life Point. Tutorials warned me that once all of a character’s Life Points are used up, this spells their permanent end. While permadeath is by no means new in RPGs (you need look no further than Fire Emblem), this ticking clock of a character’s life is a much more interesting spin to the idea. In Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, everything is temporary.
Not getting too attached to characters will be a difficult feat for me come full release. Though they’re not as lively personality-wise as some of its competitors, the cast is filled with striking and quite fun character design. There’s a green-haired cowgirl equipped with a bow named Andromache. James is an ethereal-looking man who’s a light infantry unit with long lavender hair and a spear. Kongming is a freak with an eye visor that makes him look like Xmen‘s Scott Summers. There’s a class of merchants that simply look like pirates while many of the male mercenaries are just named after characters from Greek Myth. Weird. I love it.
Outside of that, Romancing SaGa 2 seems like a pretty typical turn-based RPG affair, though that’s far from a bad thing. A timeline at the top of the screen previews the turn order in battles of both your enemies and foes. Naturally, your strategy is to deal with the ones attacking sooner to mitigate possible damage. When you find a weakness against an enemy type, this information is immediately right in front of your face when targeting them. You don’t have to deploy an ability that assesses them in a separate menu like in Final Fantasy VII, for example. This is a simple but efficient implementation that means no time is wasted; you just focus on doling out as much damage as possible. Constant exploiting of said weaknesses will fill up a meter to later allow for an ultimate chain attack between party members for devastating damage. You know, that little combat thing all the good RPGs have. You get it.
Though it doesn’t by any means look to be as much of a graphical spectacle as this year’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, it’s always nice to experience a classic 2D game now in the 3D. The nice SNES sprites may be gone but the characters are at least now more realised. Some may be disappointed that Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven isn’t taking the HD-2D approach but it evens out with the fact that the game already looks to have a good sense of place. Your castle HUB is there to be built up for you to experience in real-time. In my limited time with it, I already went through classic RPG jaunts through Goblin caves and an underwater biome where I came toe-to-toe with one of the Seven Heroes in a beast that was part man part squid.
Feeling eager for a challenge, I bumped up the difficulty to its highest for this encounter. Though I got close a few times, they rinsed me. With one step forward and one foot back, I would deploy quality damage to them only to have them both heal and damage my party close together enough to outlive me. It didn’t feel unfair either, it felt like a quality fight that was asking a lot more of me than other stock-standard turn-based games would. I had to balance playing offensive and defensive in a way I hadn’t before. I liked this demand so much that I’ve been convinced this is the difficulty I’ll be playing on full release.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven looks to be another exciting release from Square Enix this year. Though not all that deep, there’s that slight bit of exploring the linear environments to find secret chests with goodies. SaGa looks the best it ever has and the most realised. There are dozens of characters and over 30 classes to choose from. Narrative choices will bend and shape your story. It’s got so many nice little moving parts to make this a promising RPG for the final quarter of this year.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven releases on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5 and PC on October 24, 2024. It seems like its gonna be one hell of a remake. Stay tuned.
Bandai Namco flew the journalist to Sydney for this preview.
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
