Summary
When you boil them down to their constituent parts, the Romancing SaGa games stand out as odd ducks within a genre where following the leader is often the recipe for success. SaGa will punish you for grinding, obscure its mechanics behind four layers of opaque non-explanations, and do everything in its power to make suffering enjoyable.Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, the most recent entry in the series, is no exception.
It’s a testament to how deeply ingrained this suffering-first approach to game design is that I will say this now, loud and proud:
Do not play Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven on Casual mode. You are supposed to die.
I have 41 hours racked up in this game so far, and very little of it has been difficult. From the word ‘go’ I played on Casual mode. I’m a veteran of the original and have played most of the series so felt like I’d paid my dues. I was due an easy, breezy time. I was also playing it for guiding purposes, so being able to get through the game quickly was tantamount. I justified the coward’s way out as a logistical decision. What a fool I turned out to be.
Well, I certainly managed that. I made it to the end of the game with only a single Game Over, and this was due to my having no status resistance against a single annoying boss, who I then trounced easily on my second attempt. Even the final boss, particularly infamous amongst the pantheon of brutal final bosses, fell to my blade with little fuss. A hollow victory, to be sure.
Romancing Saga expects you to die. It builds entire mechanics around it. Characters have a certain amount of LP, Life Points, which drain away every time they fall in battle. Hit zero, and the character isdeaddead, never to be revived again, forcing a trip to the bar to recruit another in their place. If this happens to your Emperor, you’re forced to select their successor, which gets you thinking deeply about party builds, considering which quests and formations you can complete and unlock with particular Emperors, and experimenting more with the vast range of character classes in the game.
With my minimal number of Emperors, which were only forced on me through natural story progression points, I experienced a very small amount of this part of the game. I never lost a character. I was forced to complete story quests in a wonky way just to engineer a generation skip that allowed me to select particular Emperors just to complete quests. I sailed through one of the hardest games of the year. Bosses were brute forced, quests took little effort, and I felt like I didn’t experience the game as well as I could have.
In short, I feel like the filthy casual I am. Would things have been different had I not been playing the game for work? Possibly. But to find that out, I’d have to sinkanother 40+ hours into this 3.5/5when I’ve not even scratched Metaphor: ReFantazio, the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, or Dragon Quest 3. Do I have the time? Do any of us? Don’t make the same mistake that I did. Reserve Casual mode for emergencies and enjoy your suffering as Square Enix intended.
