Romancing SaGa 2

I figured I'd give this one a try as an introduction to the SaGa series despite the mixed reviews because it was pretty cheap on sale and I read somewhere that this series took the leveling system from Final Fantasy 2 and further developed it, as well as that it was a pretty open world game that did not really hold your hand at all and just let you do whatever you wanted in whatever order you wanted, plus the whole gimmick about playing as a series of generations of characters because perma-death is a thing in this game sounded interesting.
I have to say that, just as Final Fantasy 2 turned out to be much better than its reputation, RS2 was also pretty good and nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests based on the reviews. Is it often unforgiving and punishing AF? Yeah, it is. But that's part of the point of the game. Is it needlessly obtuse and hard to figure out, both from its systems and story's p.o.v.? Yeah, it certainly is, and though I understand if someone would hate this (I often hate this kind of thing in other games, myself), I was actually surprised by how these flaws interact with the actual story progression because it results in several different ways to approach a given scenario/mission depending on your characters' skills and/or the moment in time you try the mission.
As an example (mild SPOILER), I got stuck at some point because I didn't know how to find a strategist to help my character come up with a plan to help some NPC's storm a main bad guy's moving fortress, and I ended up abandoning that mission and trying something else, which led to me being tricked and captured during what I thought was a completely different side-quest and ending up as a slave working at said moving fortress's engine room, so now I had to escape and beat the boss dude despite having lost 100% of my gear and having to rely on barehanded attacks and magic. To say it was tough is an understatement, but I ultimately managed it.
Later, I was consulting an online guide to understand how to learn new skills more efficiently and I came upon an explanation for that mission and I found out that if I had waited until they had finished building the university in my capital city (I had already paid for it) and joined it as a student myself, I would've been able to recruit a visiting foreign scholar who was the aforementioned strategist and would have allowed me to storm and break into the moving fortress with all my gear, making that mission many times easier instead of panicking when I found myself captured and thinking I had soft-locked myself into an unwinnable quest because all my characters were solid melee fighters and mediocre mages/martial artists.
A quick glance in that guide showed that this is the norm and many of the quests/scenarios I had already beaten also had alternate routes, such as joining a rebellion during a civil war in a neighboring country, which was a scenario I had beaten a couple of centuries later during a different generation by laying to rest the ghosts of the original rebel princes, and so on, because the game forces you to do time skips within a generation or even change generations after you beat a certain amount of missions and many of the smaller scenarios that make up the bigger narrative scenarios are time-sensitive, so if you don't do them and wander off to do something else the window closes. I'm actually very impressed by this level of detail and thought put into such an old game.
Judging from the map I've unlocked and made part of my empire and by the amount of Legendary Heroes I've defeated so far, as well as how many generations have passed (four generations across roughly 500 years, not including one empress who died stupidly during a random encounter and then I accidentally overwrote my last save instead of re-loading to avoid my screw-up), I'd say I'm currently done with a third of the game, which is interesting because I feel I've played A LOT, so this is definitely a long game with a lot of content.
I haven't encountered any bugs and my only complaint is that, except for your main character and each subsequent recruitable NPC's main skill that seems to be tied to your main character's own level in that skill, every time you skip a generation you have to "start all over again" and your party loses all their progress in different skills they had, though the game allows you to retain all techniques and spells learned up to the previous time skip at the dojo and magic tower, which means that you can re-teach your crew pretty much whatever you want, but it's a bit annoying because it takes a some time to re-equip and re-teach what you want to have on hand, and their level in spell schools drops to zero unless they're mages.
If this is the worst Romancing SaGa available on Steam, after RS3 and the remake of the original, I'm looking forward to beating it and playing the other two, as well as the upcoming remake for this one, which looks pretty awesome. Long live the Varenne Empire!
Edit: I made it all the way to the final boss after unlocking most character classes and doing almost all side-quests except for the one with the mermaid because I either missed its time window or it didn't spawn due to a random bug. Other than that I loved my time with this game despite the fact that it does a lot of things I usually hate in other JRPG's. My only complaint, and it's totally my fault, is that I saved just before fighting the final boss only to find out my party was way too weak and/or didn't have the right skills/spells/gear and now I was unable to leave and come back fully prepared, and my most recent alternate save file was a generation before. Oh, well.

I dunno why this has mixed reviews its a SaGa game, they have wonky mechanics, perma death for your characters if you lose all your LP and wild wacky formations + skill combos.
It looks great, runs great on the deck.
Sounds fantastic.
It was also never released in America and now we have it. HOW GLORIOUS IS THAT.
30 fps cap does make me weep tho. Not enough to stop me from enjoying it tho!

What a game. It seems impossible that an RPG so intricate, complex, challenging and sophisticated came out in 1993.

Definitely not for everyone, but an amazing treat for hardcore JRPG fans.

tl;dr
A blast from the past Romancing SaGa 2 feels almost like an alternate evolutionary route for the JRPG genre. One where story takes a backseat and character drama is far less important than mastering the glimmer system so you add more skills to your repertoire as well as take over territories to recruit more characters. At its core a turn-based affair operating on “you are what you do” progression system, you step into the shoes of ephemeral emperors facing inevitable succession. Will you defeat the returning Seven Heroes? Answer depends on a single question – is your head thicker than the metaphorical wall you're trying to smash through? Mild concussion was the price I was eventually strong-armed into paying and I'd probably do it again. Reading the manual is HIGHLY recommended.
Full Review
Having practically no experience with SaGa franchise at large I was shocked by just how abruptly story is dispensed to the player. In fact, if you skip the opening you'll have no idea who the Seven Heroes even are. What we see is good king Leon and his scholarly son Gerard embarking on a quest to cleanse the nearby ruin of monsters. Not long after disaster strikes – while the pair was outside with their retinue, castle Avalon, safe kept by the king's other son Victor, is laid siege to by monstrous Kzinssie who slays Victor for opposing him. Except... wasn't Kzinssie one of the Seven Heroes according to legends? Receiving council from a mysterious seer our king Leon and prince Gerad track down the fiend only for king to fall in mortal combat. Emboldened by revenge and effects of mysterious “inheritance magic” it now falls to Gerard to settle the score, expand the empire of Varennese and set straight this mad world where monsters are on the rise once more.
More than few hours further into the game we're introduced to the actual central mechanic of Romancing SaGa 2 – succession. With Gerard it happens after three “fade to black” screens, something to keep in mind for the future as well since it indicates passage of time, as he accomplishes milestone tasks available, but can also be forced if your party dies for real real aka they run out of LP in combat. So what exactly happens then? You get to choose from four not-so-randomly picked emperor candidates drawing from a pool of unlocked classes. Something worth pointing out is only Gerard and the Last Emperor, individual you got to name when you started the game, have something resembling story relevance. Aforementioned inheritance magic means your emperors have a continual line of inheriting skills, spells and proficiency from their predecessors giving them advantage by default.
Since I've started name dropping classes I might as well get into what the game's actual content is. You'll be annexing other regions and kingdoms, usually by resolving whatever issue is present there. Putting aside that you're raising your empire's income, very useful for projects that cost hundreds of thousands and even millions, the real reason why you want every region is for further missions it may offer generations down the line AND class unlocks. Almost every region seems to directly or indirectly add a class to your roster. If there's story in Romancing SaGa 2 it's found in these localized arcs which are created wildly uneven. Much to my surprise there are bad decisions to made which will result in screwing yourself over. Keep multiple saves which could be a problem since you have four slots + autosave.
I can imagine fear some of my readers may be experiencing upon reading “timed” in context of any RPG, but there is no ticking real-time clock here. You essentially get to perform three big events in every generation. Annex a region, defeat one of the Seven Heroes, resolve a quest, etc.
What Romancing SaGa 2 taketh away in the story department it more than made up for in combat and systems in general.
I don't like repeating myself, but if I was more experienced with the franchise at large I would've already been familiar with its glimmer system. Level ups are neat and yet inadequate next to the glorious light bulb effect when your character learns a brand new skill, doubly so when you know it's now stored in the Dojo and you can train it to all future characters. It's also exceedingly rare in JRPGs to see character advancement running on “you are what you do” akin to The Elder Scrolls. There are formulae involved here you can look up online if you want to, but you should know there are no character levels with which to easily gauge progress or difficulty. Get hit a lot? Your HP goes up. Want to get better at Hydrology? Cast water spells. Want to glimmer a specific skill you've looked up in a guide? Recruit a Saigo Clansman inclined towards the Mace category, find a tough enemy and start pray.
But what of combaaaat?
Elegant deli platter of turn-based offering where your chosen formation, as taught by certain classes-turned-emperor, can make a notable difference. Since you have FIVE characters to play with and shuffle around your choice of current emperor is very important as that is the only spot which cannot be moved. Wouldn't want to put your squishy Strategist autocrat on the front line, now would you? I'm struggling to put into words exactly how combat plays as there is this constant “will my party setup get me more glimmers?” high overriding everything else. I did notice reliance on gimmicks and having faith in the player to figure it out. I've lost count how many bosses have overpowered attacks that will quickly wipe you unless you're A) tackling them later so you're the overpowered one, or B) capable of exploiting their undisclosed weakness.
Add to that no random encounters, albeit some very tight corridors with enemy placement aplenty, and the ball seems to be in your corner. There were a few instances I got frustrated enough to quit the game due to enemy density. Fight more = get more stats = get more glimmers, right? Well yes, but Battle Rank exists for a reason. The more you engage in combat, fight or flee, the more enemies get upgraded to deadlier variants with advancing generations. A cynical man would call this level scaling, but that's not entirely accurate. Presumably this is in place to prevent you from grinding a single spot for hours on end.
I've used some acronyms earlier and Romancing SaGa 2 brings its peculiarities. HP is automatically recovered after every battle, your SP/MP require manual curatives and are used to power skills/magic respectively, but LP is where things get interesting. Life Points vary on by-character basis, even within the same class, are extremely difficult to restore and once they hit 0 it's permadeath time. If it happens to your emperor it's time to pick a new one. Don't be alarmed because your recruits are not lifelong companions and assembling a new party with each new ascendance quickly becomes second nature. Or point of annoyance depending how you feel about it.
Do I sound somewhat bitter? Maybe, but that's the sort of obtuseness you, well, learn to live with. At the end of the day this is a SNES title with a slight facelift. Checking out the manual is highly recommended lest you completely miss out on some concepts like global magic level or research order. Mind you, the SNES comment is not meant to be derogatory in any way. I was taken aback by aspects of the game playing it now so it may be difficult to grasp what reactions were like back in 1993. Despite there being the Imperial Log which tracks the state of the world, rumors and everything you've done so far, very nature of the game feels so far ahead of its time you can feel it buckling under pressure. Speaking from first hand experience it takes a while for the game to click and there's an extended sweet spot between early and late game when you get to bask in your own ignorance exploring this unrestricted world before the hammer falls on you.

It's on of my favorite games of all time. It's hard, but rewarding if you're willing to engage with it.

This game should be mentioned with Chrono Trigger and FF6 as the SNES rpg kings. Masterpiece. If you don't like it then I blame you for being weak, not the game.

Playing this for the first time as the remake is coming soon. Definitely is a good classic.