Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven Review – Review

It may seem standard practice to begin any SaGa game review with a history lesson, about how it’s seen as a successor to Final Fantasy II and how it would borrow that naming convention for the Western releases of the Final Fantasy Legend games. There are more than a dozen entries in the series, but Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is all about looking forward. It epitomizes the heights of what can be achieved when remaking something old, and it absolutely soars with its unique gameplay, approachable systems, and countless surprises. While it retains a lot of what SaGa veterans love about the original versions of Romancing SaGa 2, it’s the modern upgrades lovingly implemented that make this not only the definitive SaGa experience, but an unmissable RPG that stands among the giants of the genre.

At its core is a lineage system that deftly interweaves progression and world building. Your hero, the Emperor of Varennes, persists across generations, which means that should he or she fall in battle, they return as a new Emperor; or perhaps you accomplish a major victory against one of the titular Seven, triggering a time skip of 48 or maybe even 86 years. The progress you’ve made comes with you, including sites and cities you’ve visited, stats you’ve gained, and equipment you’ve acquired: all of these stay with your kingdom.

What follows is an engaging push and pull between wanting to see your Emperor and their retinue go as far as they can, and then perhaps unexpectedly having the reset button pushed (or pushing it yourself), forcing you to discover the joys of new character classes or seeing how familiar places have changed in the intervening years. Some of the quest paths are tied to having the Emperor take on a particular job class or gender, and so there’s much to be gained from having a new individual donning the mantle.

The world around you grows steadily as you complete quests and converse with your citizens. Spending a night in the inn or downing a pint at the pub can lead to conversations that populate new places to visit on the world map, and so begins a simple but satisfying loop of exploring the sights in one territory until you reach its boundaries and push into the next one. It doesn’t hurt that the music and voice acting are also excellent and truly do bring this world to life. Even tracks that were repeated in many instances continued to leave me humming along long after my latest play session had concluded.

Along the way, you’ll encounter the deformed members of old heroes who have come back to exact their revenge, and it’s through taking them down that you recapture territories for the empire and expand not only your revenue generation but also your exploration horizons. In various caves and dungeons you also run into relics that grant a look back at the past to understand what happened to the Seven that set them on their course for vengeance. Story beats like these are doled out at a steady clip that help to color the world of Romancing SaGa 2.

Rather than feeling like a long connected story, the 30 to 40-hour runtime plays out more like a series of vignettes, with each territory of the empire having its own smaller tales and overarching narrative. Fighting the Seven and understanding their backstory provides a throughline for the game, but its soul comes from the way you accomplish different goals in every generation. The world is full of surprises and wonder, and there aren’t countless hours of wandering in the middle (aimless or otherwise) that sometimes bogs down RPGs of this length.

One of the glimmering stars of the show is the combat system, which feels refined compared to recent SaGa titles and a generational leap or two ahead of the original Romancing SaGa 2. After adding four comrades to join the Emperor in battle–from over 30 job classes–you slot them into a growing number of battle formations that bestow advantages and disadvantages to take advantage of based on your team composition. Throw a tank in front who will absorb most of the punishment, or perhaps opt for a formation that boosts your spell power and go mage-sage crazy. Many of the side and even main story quests unlock new job classes, and it’s good fun to start every generation with a fresh face or two as you work toward building the right party for the challenges of a new age.

The actual turn-based battles themselves feature a timeline at the top of the screen that displays ally and enemy turn order, including when your foes are preparing a particularly dangerous move. It’s familiar proceedings, barring a few wrinkles.

One of these is the United Attack, which carries over from SaGa Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond, allowing multiple party members to unleash double damage blows in succession. Another is the Glimmer system, where new techs and spells are learned at random in and after combat. A light bulb icon will show up beside moves in your arsenal that offers a chance to glimmer a new ability, and so even though your basic sword slash attack might not hit a weak point or do the most damage, it may be worth choosing to increase the number of sword techs in your repertoire. The likelihood of glimmering goes up against stout opponents like bosses, which creates an exciting risk-reward system for expanding your kit.

Enemy weaknesses are displayed below their sprites in battle, and as you discover them this information persists across generations. With eight weapon types and six spell elements, it’s worth unlocking as many weaknesses as you can so your future parties will know how best to dispatch foes. You also glimmer the ability to evade certain enemy attacks, and these become equippable in future generations. But outside of boss moves, it can be hard to know which evasions to bring with you into battle. As much as the combat feels like standard genre fare, it takes beloved elements from earlier games like Octopath Traveler and Final Fantasy X and creates a system that stays fresh over an entire playthrough.

Character progression is fairly transparent and carries over between generations; this includes both the Emperor and the job classes of your party members. It can initially feel like starting over from scratch when a time jump occurs or when your party falls in battle, but it’s central to Revenge of the Seven’s premise that you are playing a lineage and a world more than an individual character and a static setting. The world progresses with you, with areas opening up as you liberate them from evildoers and monsters or follow tribes as they migrate across the land. The game is brimming with compelling and rewarding side stories that tell about the lives of those living in your kingdom, with the Emperor being a figurehead almost universally beloved and respected by the populace.

Another remarkable aspect of Romancing SaGa 2 is your choices really do matter. I wasn’t able to see everything during my first playthrough, with a couple of paths and multiple sidequests eventually gated off as I focused on other objectives. Your order of operations as a ruler plays a key role in how much of the world you get to experience, and so it may be easy for new players and the unprepared to miss out on parts of the game. Rather than be disappointed by this, it instead galvanizes my resolve to start another playthrough and try out different classes and strategies, working to see what I missed the first time around.

In spite of how much I enjoyed my time with Revenge of the Seven, its performance on Switch is not without flaws. There’s a slight hitch when loading into combat or accessing some cutscenes, and I experienced three or four crashes during my first 10-15 hours (with none in the remainder of my time). Fortunately, the auto-save is quite regular and no real progress was lost. The visual fidelity is pretty decent in both docked and handheld, but there’s texture pop in, particularly with the clothing worn by the various characters. I experienced noticeable frame drops in one late-game fight, but otherwise frame rate appeared to be fairly steady. If you’re particularly attuned to performance issues, you may want to consider another platform, but for me the overall quality of the game was able to win out over these nagging concerns.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven has become my favorite game of 2024, and it might be the best turn-based RPG on Switch. From the moment I played the demo at PAX West to when I rolled credits and immediately dove back in, I’ve been completely enamored with its nonlinear trappings and charming world-building. It’s my sincere hope that the team that brought this remake to life will be given the reins to a Romancing SaGa 3 remake and then new SaGa titles moving forward, because they hit a grand slam with this one. There’s no doubt on my end – cold or otherwise: Revenge is a dish best served with romance.