Romancing SaGa 2™ Reviews

Rewarding and very unique old school RPG game that is semi-free form where you play as the Emperor across multiple years and generations and grow your Empire. Couple of down sides design quirks to be aware of: Some of the quests are 'old school' and there is not a lot of guidance/hints around how to complete them. You might need to use a walkthrough. By design, you can't dismiss people from your party and they have to die in order to leave your party and a lot of monsters can kill your characters in one hit. That is to encourage you to try out new characters. Dying is okay for the most part and actually often beneficial as you can pick another party member to become the Emperor/Empress while inheriting their skills. The game doesn't tell you how close you are to learning a new skill/tech. It's semi-random but can be triggered by battling harder monsters and using the right type of weapons for your class. Certain mechanics are not quite well-explained such as how to get new formations. For example, you have to be an Emperor from a different class and then talk to the formation officer instead of just gaining a new formation by choosing a new Emperor from a different class. After every time skip or when party members die you have to manually recruit and re-equip and respec your party members which is very annoying and time consuming. Unfortunately I ended up stuck because I couldn't leave before the final boss and I didn't quite have the right skills/spells. Unfortunately the game doesn't tell you this and I don't have earlier save file to revert to. I'm surprised they didn't change this in this remaster to at least allow you to leave. There seems to be crashing that can happen if you quit while in combat. There are other quirks but hopefully this gives you some idea of what you're in for. Still recommended as a journey however except for that last dungeon. :-(

The game itself seems fun enough, sadly the port is an atrocity that makes the game very hard to play. You have no options at all, need steam input to get your controller to work and if you tab out it sometimes forgets that your controller exists forever (until you restart the game that is).