When you embark on a saga of epic proportions, you usually don’t think it will take a long time. But Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven takes those expectations and runs with it. Your journey takes hundreds of years as you fight evil at different ages. Taking control of new protagonists, you must pass down your skills to future generations. If you don’t, you find yourself grinding in painful dungeons.

Having your story take place over long periods reflects the difficulty of hunting down evil. Characters can be customised for combat over several generations. However, this game is punishingly difficult and there is some gameplay-story segregation. The overall experience is enjoyable but you must fight through the frustration before it pays off.

The story’s premise is that seven heroes of legend have seemingly turned against the world they once protected. You control a kingdom of warriors that are outmatched against the heroes. Thanks to your monarch’s eternal pledge to protect the kingdom, you slowly fight back. You unite an entire continent while gradually dismantling the heroes’ plans. This doesn’t happen over a few weeks or months. Centuries pass before you actually face the heroes themselves.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven’s story is also somewhat open-ended. While nothing changes the fight against evil, you can choose your method of resolving conflicts. Do you recruit a band of thieves to infiltrate a castle or lead a direct assault? Should you let some hired hands finish the job or complete it yourself? These choices have short and long-term consequences, helping or hindering you down the line.

On the other hand, it does create some discrepancies when it comes to developing your land. While the game does show changes in the environment over time, it doesn’t make sense that nations don’t develop during that time. 100 years can pass and your in-game infrastructure doesn’t improve. That disconnect makes you wonder what the forces of good are doing over the time skips. It portrays the heroes as passive while the villains are active and more resourceful.

Fortunately, your heroes aren’t just sitting around. Not only do they fight against evil in the short term, but they build skills to pass down to their successors. Every generation begins their adventure with abilities from the previous generation, making them stronger and better equipped to face new threats. Successors don’t inherit stats or classes, but they do retain the same equipment that their predecessors wielded.

Inheriting skills from the past generation fits the theme of continually fighting against evil. Previous characters can’t evade death forever and sometimes old age robs them of their combat capabilities. You have a variety of classes to include in your party and you can change the ruler’s class every generation. This helps you adapt to incoming threats and overwrite potential mistakes during the skill acquisition process.

This also clashes against the time skips that occur, because it feels like the rulers became stagnant. After stopping a conflict and letting years pass, they did nothing during the interim. No training, no research, just sitting around and passing their efforts to their successors. The lack of progress between time skips makes it feel like there’s no serious effort to stamp out evil. It’s nice to eventually take care of the threats when they appear, but you feel being proactive is better.

Even if rulers don’t do anything for 100 years, the skills they pass on are useful for combat. You fight against several enemies and use various skills to uncover their weaknesses. Enemies have powerful moves and you must respond with strategy to avoid getting overwhelmed. Combat encourages you to target weaknesses to build up a meter for powerful moves. These powerful moves can make or break a tough situation, especially in boss fights.

Combat is punishing as your characters can get KO’d quickly. Enemies coordinate and often target weaker characters to ruin your offence. Character survival is determined by Life Points or LP. Every time someone is KO’d, they lose one LP but return in the next fight as if nothing happened. If a character loses all their LP, they die permanently and can’t be revived again. This means you must be careful during combat or you could lose your well-trained team.

You can replace those who fall but if they inherited skills from their predecessor, it’s tough to replace. Crafting equipment and improving your character’s proficiency helps them survive and overpower enemies. Formations help protect weaker characters while maximising the effectiveness of others. There’s a lot to learn but everything helps you succeed against your enemies.

However, the game does have a soft cap to prevent you from grinding and becoming overpowered. This is a double-edged sword as this prevents you from forgetting about the story. Eventually, the returns on training are minuscule enough that you must proceed with the story. Characters also don’t improve their base stats without a time skip, encouraging you to move on before you get bored.

However, it sometimes feels like your resources aren’t sufficient and you can’t get anything better without a time skip. Sometimes you feel like you can’t take any ranged character without losing them forever. This creates a cycle where you never feel strong enough, but training doesn’t help the situation. You take a leap of faith and hope that no one falls in combat, letting you continue the story without trouble.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is a fun game with a good story. But it feels punishing enough that you must dedicate lots of time to learning about the game. It’s a long battle against evil, with the task falling onto successive generations. Take the time to learn, and explore the world, and there will be a rewarding experience awaiting you. That road is filled with frustration and possibly the pain of losing characters, but it’s a road worth walking.