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Valraune
@Valraune

I don't recall if I've really talked at length about Romancing SaGa 2 despite it genuinely being one of my favorite game ever, like easily in my top 20.

I don't quite know if I have the energy in me to try and attempt at talking about it at length today either, nor do I know if I could do it justice even if I wanted to.

This game was well, my introduction to SaGa. It was a franchise that I had heard about off and on in my younger years, like SaGa Frontier 1 and 2 were games that would get brought up on occasion or you'd catch a glimpse of them in manuals for other Squaresoft games when they would attempt at advertising other games such as Bushido Blade and the like. Anyhow, I didn't get an opportunity to engage with SaGa proper until... gosh, maybe 5-6 years ago? I got Romancing SaGa 2 on the Switch and initially bounced off of it. It's a very daunting game, there are so many things going on mechanically with this game. The thing is too, I hadn't even really digested any of it when I had bounced off in the way I did. I knew you would learn skills randomly in combat, "leveling up" proper didn't exist and permadeath was a thing due to LP. In fact, I had JUST gotten to the first real inheritance when I had stopped due to being overwhelmed.

I wouldn't go back to the game again until about a year later just to give it another shot and for some reason or another, it clicked that time. An absolutely wonderful adventure spanning across generations of a lone kingdom's attempts at fighting back against Seven Heroes who have now turned to evil.

Effectively it may as well be an "open world rpg" for the Super Famicom in the way you can just, choose what you want to do in whatever order you desire. Depending on what you do or do not know, you can have different playthroughs due to this. The world is so alive too. Of course you have the primary objectives of the game, which are often given to you in briefings, but more often than not you engage in side events on your way to handle whatever pressing matters are at hand. Every two relatively "large" events you play through will let you go to the next generation as a new Emperor of Avalon will be there to inherit the powers and role of the previous and you continue on the same mission given to you from your predecessors.

Just, this game rocks so much. Can you believe that while, there is quite a bit to digest regarding Romancing SaGa 2 for lore and story there's a whole 3 hour stage play that adds so much more regarding the backstory and motivations of all the Seven Heroes prior to the events that start the game? Essentially anything related to RS2 in like say, the gacha game utilize this additional characterization.

I hope that in the future a full on remake of RS2 does happen that will also use this additional bit of writing and motivations moving forward. It'd be so cool.

I didn't begin to scratch the surface in this post at all for the many ways I think this game is so special, but let this at least be a glimpse if anything. Thank you for reading.


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in reply to @Valraune's post:

love this game. i played it after scarlet grace, rsms, and frontier, but i was really taken with it and it's always in contention for my favorite in the series. it's such a wildly innovative game, combining a ton of surprising ideas in a way that fits together tightly and matches an unusual narrative. (it was also the first one with the light bulbs...) i really can't imagine how they came up with all of it.

i do think it's probably the most linear of the romancing games, imo to its benefit. you don't actually have to do things in a particular order but the methods for skipping far past the stuff that's nearest to avalon are tricky enough to come up with that i feel like they qualify as sequence breaking, and the furthest classes you can recruit (the samurai guys and the irises) both have really long quest lines leading up to them that will take a good chunk of a playthrough even once you know they're there and have some idea how they work. but it's still pretty open-ended and the multiple resolutions to the vast majority of quests, as well as the various ways the endgame can play out based on who you found, are really cool

beyond that, this might be my favorite saga story. (if not, it'd go to sf2, which also has a kind of long, world-spanning fantasy-epic storyline but with more of a traditional presentation, with less variations in how things play out and more focus on the characters.) in a sense, that story is just..."what you did"-the game is a bunch of little vignettes that piece together in a mostly arbitrary order with some different possible outcomes at each point. but it's the feeling of the changing characters and party members, and the feeling of oneness across the whole game despite all your main characters' differences, that really hits hard for me. and the ending is simple, but it's really effective, and combined with the little chronicle of everything you did, i found it truly moving in a way that's really rare.