Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven is going to ruin my life - Demo Impressions

We here at RPG Site are in large part fans of the SaGa series, and the upcoming remake of Romancing SaGa 2 has many of us excited. Josh tried two snippets of Revenge of the Seven at a PAX West preview, and Adam has just recently published his interview with the producer Shinichi Tatsuke.

Square Enix has now put out a demo of the game’s prologue chapter, giving people a look at the events that set up your adventure to come and the gameplay you can expect. Square reached out to us in advance to see if we wanted to take a look at this demo before it publicly released. We of course said yes, because even with us having done a recent preview you can never have enough SaGa in your life.

In this sliver of the game, you get to play the opening hours to see how the young Gerard ends up succeeding his father Leon as Emperor of Varennes, stopping right before you take full charge of Gerard to begin his journey properly. You’ll get to explore the capital of Avalon and play the first couple of dungeons up until his father’s untimely passing. Romancing SaGa 2 pioneered a progression system where death allowed you to pass on protagonist duty to a new emperor, and the demo shows their successful attempts to ease new fans into one of this series’ most beloved entries.

Josh’s preview from PAX was pretty in-depth with the mechanics, so I won’t delve too into that. Having said that, I’ll also agree with him that the combat system is especially strong in this title. There have been a bunch of little modern touch ups to bring a lot of clarity to the system, highlighting that not much was really needed to make Romancing SaGa 2’s combat shine. Battles play out differently, but feel fast paced and snappy. Potential glimmers will show up in your battle menu for weapons you have. The biggest addition is the United Attack system, rewarding you for experimenting and hitting enemy weaknesses by having you and the character immediately following you in the timeline to attack. This feels like a compromise between the classic gameplay and the utter insanity (endearing) of the recent two SaGa games in combat design. 

Avalon has the proper scale you’d expect from an RPG town while not being so big it becomes unwieldy. The caverns you are tasked with exploring offer winding paths full of enemies and treasure. Finally, the simple top-down mansion you explore in the original game to hunt down Kzinssie has been turned into a proper 3D dungeon. Originally it was just a couple of map screens with enemies roaming about, and now it feels like you’re properly working your way through the decrepit halls of a slightly spooky manor. 

The visuals of this game won’t blow you away if you exclusively play AAA mega games, but I think this is one of the better looking Square games of this scale they’ve published in ages. The lower fidelity also means it’ll likely run on just about everything, and they can put more effort into making a large variety of environments that still all look pretty good. This is a good step up from developer Xeen’s previous SFC remake, Trials of Mana, while still feeling like it builds on that game’s visual identity. 

I think my favorite moment in the demo was found in that manor, where the game not only ramps the challenge up but also introduces the mimic chests found in the original. In the very first move it one shot one of my party members, breaking my formation. This gave me a tutorial message, letting me know that permadeath is still here and LP could not be restored (something you can do in the modern games) unless in special circumstances. So good, the pressure is on. Fighting one of these also means you’re trapped in battle with them for at least three turns, and running away means losing BP you’ll probably need to keep yourself going later in the dungeon. Toughing it out lost me some LP but rewarded me with a special sword, one that can break immediately if I use a powerful attack exclusive to it. My inner sicko grinned at the brilliant risk reward gameplay I’ve grown to love in this series. I can tell this game is going to be a problem, one I’ve grown to love with these yearly SaGa releases we’ve seen in the 2020s.

Everything I played in this demo was incredibly faithful to the original’s “vibe”. The content is similar, the plot plays out the same, but there’s just a bit more oomph to the whole thing you just couldn’t have done with the limitations of making what was essentially an open world pixel based RPG on Super Famicom hardware. There’s clearly a lot of respect being given to that original game, with even the minimalist storytelling given enough weight to appease newcomers who aren’t as used to SaGa storytelling. The voice acting is quite good, but that’s rather common for modern Square Enix titles.

They’ve clearly put a lot of work into expanding every single map into a rich 3D locale. Trials of Mana also had this kind of design ethos with adapting the old 2D maps into explorable locations, adding a sense of scale we could have only imagined. Xeen really does feel like they were the perfect team to put on this game. I love my remakes in all shapes and sizes, but this does seem to be the textbook ideal for the “faithful remake”. What they were able to do here in reimagining a Super Famicom game was truly incredible. 

My only gripe with the demo is that it cuts you off right before things seem to get really promising. The path forward in this intro looks to be as linear as it was in the original game, and while that isn’t a bad thing my experience with other games in this series has me well aware that I was moments away from it opening up. I was already impressed with how it handled the dungeons and battle system, so letting me loose in the world to do whatever I want from here? The last time we got a 3D SaGa that seems this sprawling in even a remotely similar way was with Minstrel Song, the remake of the original Romancing SaGa game. I truly cannot wait to see this kind of open-ended game design on a game with this heft behind it. This game is going to absolutely ruin me.

Lastly, for those curious about Steam Deck performance: This is looking promising! With some setting tweaks I was able to get this hitting 60 FPS without much degradation to the visuals. It has me really curious about how the Switch will hold up, and we can only hope they deliver at least a solid 30 FPS experience that doesn’t sacrifice too much on the resolution side of things. I can imagine losing countless hours playing this game as fall transitions to winter.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven’s demo gives you just enough of a taste of the game to see if this will be up your alley, and stops things right before the game truly opens up. My yearning for this game has only increased substantially, and the next month and a half spent waiting will be detrimental to my wellbeing. I need this game like I need a shot of espresso in the morning before I go to work. Realistically though, I’m just left curious about how the full remake will continue handling adapting the scope of the SFC version on a modern scale. This is an incredibly promising start, and it feels good to know that Xeen is primed to give Romancing SaGa 2 the love it deserved.