September’s game: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Autumn bonus game: Final Fantasy Adventure [“Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden”]
Romancing SaGa 2 is a curious game. It was hugely successful in Japan upon its first release in 1993 and is revered as one of the greatest RPGs by the Japanese to this day, yet it never saw a Western release until decades later: first in 2016 for mobile and finally coming to consoles in 2017. I was inspired to play it purely because it’s part of the series started by Final Fantasy Legend (known in Japan as SaGa), which in turn is related to Final Fantasy Adventure (a.k.a. “Secret of Mana 0", known in Japan as Seiken Densetsu), the upcoming Autumn Bonus Game for this series.
In terms of JRPGs, RS2 just has more. More of everything. More characters, more classes, more choices, and more mechanics than the majority of SNES-era JRPGs (and even beyond that). And all of these influence and interplay combat, story scenarios, and exploration. This is either a huge turnoff or the main appeal of the game, depending on your style. If this sounds appealing to you, then you are in for a treat.
Perhaps pundits would say the best way to play Romancing SaGa 2 is by going in completely blind. I agree with that in spirit: if you have several dozens, perhaps even hundreds of hours to experiment, then going in blind, taking copious notes, and trying to work out damage and experience formulas yourself is the ideal way to experience the game. But if you don’t have this much free time to devote to a single RPG, I recommend grabbing hold of a basic guide to get a feel for the mechanics and flow of the game.
That’s because Romancing SaGa 2 is nothing close to a traditional JRPG. For one, there are hundreds of characters to choose from, and they’re not random. Each character has a unique name and stats, but only a few characters for each class are available at any given time. Don’t like the Heavy Infantry unit you have? The only way to get another is to let your current Heavy Infantry die, a system which in this game is represented by Life Points, or LP. You see, in Romancing SaGa 2, death is permanent. HP works the same way as in traditional JRPGs, but when a character runs out of HP in battle, they lose one LP (most characters have around 8 to 16 LP). Once all of their LP is exhausted, they die for good, and another unique character from their corresponding class spawns. At that point, you’re free to go recruit the same class again, or choose a different class for that party slot. There are very few restrictions on party setup, and practically any strategy will work for the majority of the game.
That’s because of the generation system, a wholly unique feature of the series that involves telling an epic story over generations upon generations of heroes. Instead of playing as one protagonist or group of protagonists for the whole game, you sort of play as the kingdom itself. Each generation has an Emperor (or Empress) of the kingdom who must be in your party, and when that emperor dies, his heir takes his place. Once certain gameplay conditions are met, the entire game shifts forward a generation to follow the Emperor’s offspring, who becomes the new emperor. Typically, this happens after two to three major story events are completed, and your entire party gets wiped. No one can live that long, after all. With each generation, you’re forced to recruit a brand new party, all with characters you haven’t met yet, and the game’s roster of hundreds of possible characters ensures you won’t see any duplicates unless you’re really trying to break the game.
Each battle contributes to an underlying (and invisible) global rank for weapon and magic proficiencies, and when you recruit a new character, the global rank is used to determine their base stats. In this manner, you can work toward increasing the global rank for the eventual final strategy you want to use in the endgame. And you’ll need it—Romancing SaGa 2 is by no means an easy game, especially if you don’t have a good plan to follow. However, once you do fully understand the mechanics, it’s a piece of cake and becomes incredibly fun. This is a hallmark of a good JRPG, if you ask me, and the freedom allowed here is astounding. It is absolutely possible to complete the endgame with just magic, just weapons, or a combination of both. That’s due to the complex spell system, including fusion spells of multiple magic types, as well as the unique weapon “sparking” system, which allows characters to unlock new weapon abilities mid-battle. This is all based on hidden underlying stats, which a guide is particularly useful for—each character has a different chance to “spark” (i.e., unlock) certain weapon skills in battle. When this happens, in place of using the attack or skill you chose, the character will do a flourish and use the new skill instead. After that, it’s permanently available to them, and other characters can learn it via training in the main castle’s barracks.
Beyond weapon skills, there are also skills that guarantee a character will dodge every attack with a certain name. For example, the attack Hypnosis is typically devastating when used against your party—it puts your characters to sleep and leaves them open for a ton of damage and rapid LP loss. But, some characters have a good chance of randomly learning the Hypnosis Evade skill mid-battle when Hypnosis is used against them. By having Hypnosis Evade equipped, a character will always evade Hypnosis without fail, making it a complete non-issue for the player. And just like weapon skills, once one character learns Hypnosis Evade, all other characters can learn it too, at any time, for free. This is the key to completing the difficult endgame battles without using magic, if that’s the path you choose. Many bosses, for example, have just a few devastating attacks, and if your entire party can automatically evade them all, you have little to worry about. Or, you could entirely ignore weapon and evade skills and focus on magic, which is perhaps the easiest and recommended way to go through the game. Magic in general gets completely broken by the endgame if you focus on it, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Unlike many JRPGs, you also have great freedom in how to approach the story. Each story event can be done in almost any order, but completing certain events unlocks other events. Due to this structure, it’s possible (expected, even) that you won’t see anywhere close to all of the content in the game in one playthrough. The whole idea is to craft your own experience based on your preferences. Don’t care about the Mole Man class? You can trigger an explosion to destroy them all, permanently locking you out of recruiting any Mole Men in the future (however, this also has a beneficial side effect that I won’t spoil here).
The Nintendo Switch is my preferred platform, but it comes with the drawback of bit of lag in the controls, just like with Square Enix’s console ports of Secret of Mana and Dragon Quest. Beyond that, it’s a fantastic port that I’d recommend to any JRPG fan who has a little patience. While I didn’t focus on them much in this review, the music, story, and writing are all top-notch, especially for 1993, and I can’t wait to play its sequel, Romancing SaGa 3.
However, that will have to wait till next year. Next up for November 2020 is Final Fantasy X, one of the most well-known and well-revered Final Fantasy games (and JRPGs in general), perhaps only behind Final Fantasy VII, which I greatly enjoyed earlier this year. See you next month!
