Can this remake inherit the best of the original title? Is it on the verge of losing its last life point? Find out in our Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven review!

It is no easy task being the emperor, let alone being a handful over many generations. Yet, this is something that Romancing SaGa 2 sets out to portray through its fantasy vision. Published by Square Enix and created by Akitoshi Kawazu who returns from the original. Can this re-imagining recapture that original vision and perhaps even improve on it or does this remake gets lost to its ancestors? Find out in our Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven Review!

Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven Review – Story

Step into the shoes of the Emperor of Avalon, Leon. A mighty ruler, he seeks to train his son Gerard in the art of leadership. After a simple outing they return to a disastrous scene where one of the legendary heroes, Kzinssie, appears in the form of a giant fiend, has ravaged the town and killed his other son. He speaks to a mysterious woman, for a yet unknown purpose, then heads with Gerard to kill Kizinssie. Unfortunately, things take a turn for the worse and with Leon’s soul drained he passes his knowledge onto Gerard. He uses a rare form of inheritance magic which sets up the main plot perfectly.

Oh Gerard, so overly polite.

So begins generations worth of passing skills down to new rulers nominated by the player. The writing makes sure that each generation, the player has at least one main-line quest to enjoy. Each of these has an fantastic story to latch onto. Though, after a certain event the game will simply skip like 89 years and the player is now playing as the descendants of the player’s previous party.

Oh, guess that character is done then!

It can be jarring but it’s pretty interesting and often the iterative designs of the characters are very cool! Empire expansion is important as players do this by travelling the globe and helping others with their problems. This then aligns those areas of the map with the Empire, giving them more power to face the ever present terror of the 7 heroes.

Expand thy Empire.

Taking the idea of heroes and turning it on its head is interesting, and something the original game didn’t really lean into. This remake adds a huge side dish of the 7 heroes story for the player to find and watch. It gives them all presence and shows their outstanding heroics before whatever happened to them. It humanises them adding a very real tangible sadness to their current condition. It’s something that really adds a secret sauce to the story despite it being just a smattering.

A legend gone sour…

Some of the smaller stories players interact with are also fascinating! They never outstay their welcome but they give the game a certain episodic feeling, reminiscent of a morning cartoon. Which could be seen as a negative by those who believe it to be a great epic work of fiction. The overall pacing is a little stilted with the way the game jumps in time reasonably frequently but the narrative holds together well and once it picks up a thread, it runs with it in a very engaging manner.

NPCs actually play decent roles in the overall story.

After a certain number of emperors players will finally arrive on their chosen character, picked during the opening of the game. Take up the duty of the final Emperor they set out to accomplish the culmination of the entire story. Without going in-depth the game also has a great and emotional conclusion worthy of players riding out the slower paced segments!

Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven Review – Gameplay

A world of turn based battling and dungeon delving where things are recognisable but somewhat evolved and sometimes even simplified. Players become the emperor of Avalon, spreading their imperial might and influence across the world. Over the generations they will assign new emperors and pass down their skills. It’s a really cool concept as it rewards players who take their time to complete each objective and battle most enemies, while making careful decisions about who they travel with.

The new menu showing the party is a nice touch, look at them looking all important.

At the beginning of each rule, or whenever the player returns to the main city, they can sit on the throne and improve their city. City expansion is a light element of the game but the benefits are huge allowing for crafting, magic and more to be easily improved and assigned in town. Avalon gardens also makes a return offering yet more content to players seeking the definitive experience. It’s not the only returning feature, the job classes for companion characters are also sporting all previous classes as well as a couple of new/restored ones! It’s a lot of fun picking and balancing a party for each segment of the adventure.

Kzinssie has seen better days!

The majority of the gameplay takes place in the 3D levels which players can explore, however, these are connected by a world map which acts as the level select. It shows the currently available missions as well as places the player can return to and have a jaunt around a familiar or conquered space. Surprisingly this lends itself well to the feeling of an epic winding story. As the game progresses more of the map turns golden signalling its availability and allegiance.

That is a nice cliff-sized boulder!

Exploring has been given further incentive, with revised level layouts hiding treasure and items in all nooks and crannies. Area maps have all been redone but have some similarities to their original layouts, now offering much more in the way of layered vertical exploration. Due to this each area feels larger in scale and reasonably interconnected. There are a couple of areas where the player can see bits of a future dungeon from a town which feels really immersive and does a fantastic job of tying the areas together naturally.

So many idealistic locations.

Battles have seen a huge overhaul. Still sporting turn-based combat that relies on player picked formations, things will feel fairly familiar to fans of the original. However, the camerawork is somewhat more dynamic than the old static angles battles used to use. Now, during a turn the camera sweeps in behind the active character similar to how a Persona title might place things. Drawing comparisons with other Square titles is inevitable so let’s get the most obvious one out of the way. Battles are similar to those in Final Fantasy 10, this means static turn-based combat where each turn has infinite time for making choices. It does, however, implement a timeline of turns at the top of the screen where the player can delay enemy turns by attacking their weaknesses.

Make sure to target the enemy who attacks next!

Enemies now have more defined elemental and physical weaknesses that if exploited affects the turn order. This adds a nice bit of strategy to the combat that it might otherwise have lacked. Attacking these weaknesses also charges up the new Union Attack meter. Union attacks are special abilities that use two character’s spells or attacks to simultaneously attack a group of enemies with bonuses added to the attacks. This is something that helps the flow of combat and helps keep the player focused on identifying enemy exploits.

Finding weak spots charges the union attack bar.

Battles are fast paced with some being over in as little as a single turn. This feels particularly good as there are a lot of battles in dungeons. Partaking in them allows for characters to grow in many ways. As with the original, although now tweaked, characters “Glimmer” skills and spells. This essentially means that through skill and spell use they gradually unlock new abilities mid battle. This is great as the character essentially has one skill more than the ability slots available to them and as an added bonus they immediately use said skill which can sometimes land significantly more useful attacks.

A lovely sea-side town.

While exploring players can see enemies running around and if the player is careful, they can sneak up behind them. This gives an opportunity to score a surprise attack. Unfortunately this is a prompted interaction and can only be done at certain opportunites. Often before a boss fight the game also tends to drop a BP charge point and a save point together for a full recharge.

Now that’s a castle!

In fact there are two elements of this game that take some getting used to. Firstly, life is refilled after battle and secondly, Life Points are a limited resource that once depleted, result in permadeath. Not having to always carry health potions is great but managing LP can be quite difficult especially in favourite characters as they can deplete quite rapidly in a boss battle. Classes and attributes like strength determine how many LP a character has, quite often amazing characters like the archers only come with around 7, so 7 deaths will kill them. This risk and reward balance is great and keeps things at a suitable stress level.

Glimmering abilities feels pretty cool!

Now that’s not to say the game is necessarily too difficult, unlike its original form the game now sports multiple difficulty levels so that all players can enjoy the adventure. This makes it easier to gain skills and keep characters alive. However, for fans of the original there is also the harder difficulty that aims to keep that experience alive!

When this message first pops-up it means the character is in trouble.

Finally, the user interface has been massively overhauled. Gone are the very basic and confusing menus of the original. These new menu’s are split up more naturally and everything is visually far more guiding. Optimising equipment and items is now as simple as pressing a couple of buttons on clearly labelled screens. The menu’s and systems are not totally de-mystified, but it’s a darn sight better!

Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven Review – Visuals

The world of Romancing SaGa 2 is a really intriguing and vibrant one. Going for a decidedly Secret of Mana art style was an unusual choice but after a bit of adjusting the visuals really start to feel rather strong. Environments especially, though simple and lowly populated with buildings and points of interest can be striking at times. The artists have used some really nice colour choices to bring each biome to life. Towns and dungeons both look great with a huge variety of stylings for even basic scenery like caves, water and buildings.

Towns and dungeon areas have amazing vistas.

It means, though not always the case, most of the towns feel distinct. Particularly cool is the aforementioned sections of the maps where a dungeon can look over a town or a town over the dungeon. This helps knit the world together and also brings some attention to the amazing backdrops to each area. An early town has almost a swiss alps look with nice alpine buildings and long views of the mountains in the background. Lovely stuff.

These cutscene animations are actually really good!

Battles and areas sport many different effects as well with really nice looking particles and some of the areas have really nice lighting details that help sell the scale and impact of things like magic attacks. Combat benefits the most from the new animation work with most attacks featuring little cutaway animations showing the full impact of the hit and it really helps add another layer that the original didn’t have. Characters have a nice art style and often have alright animation work, running can look a little floaty though. Character costume design is strong, especially on the main cast with lots of animated materials and chunky details on items like leather.

Oops there goes the first successor…

Gerard has the strongest design with his violently orange hair, golden armour and green cloak. NPCs are unfortunately not always afforded the same care, they don’t look bad, but they have less detail overall and tend to be a little flatter. Speaking of NPCs, enemies are a mixed bag, all the designs are faithful to the original sprites but it does lead to a mismatch in art style that might put some players off. That said, bosses and some other enemies have fun, unique and generally well animated movements. Bosses especially are rendered in a pleasing way that meshes with the vibrant colours of the main characters.

The new user interface is so much more intuitive.

A lot of work has also gone into the user interface, as mentioned in the gameplay section, is a huge improvement over the vanilla SNES menu style. Now all the menus are revitalised with flourishes and the main menu shows all of the current retinue along with the protagonist. They’re still not terribly intuitive but they do look good. One small issue in the visuals is that on PS5 the game still shows half rate animations on distant characters and enemies but that distance is so close to the player it’s hard to miss. With the fidelity on show the game is cheapened by the effect, even if it keeps the frame rate steady. A small blip on the otherwise great presentation.

Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven Review – Sounds

Returning composer, Kenji Ito, does an amazing job revisiting the original soundtrack of Romancing SaGa 2. He’s plucked what were already fantastic layered tracks for the SNES era and used a huge range of instruments to bring these to life as fully orchestrated and remixed works. Every tune he has written has been tweaked and touched to the point where the game’s music feels truly modern. Fans of Bravely and Octopath will enjoy the music for sure!

The battle song remakes are fantastic and slower town themes benefit from the better instrumentation. Here is the main battle theme:

Music isn’t the only overhauled feature though! There is now voice acting across the game, available in both English and Japanese. Not all dialogue is voiced, which would have been amazing but given the amount of dialogue and characters presumably that would have inflated the cost of development. The voice work that is in the game in both languages is great, it sells the characters well and doesn’t suffer too much from clashing tones. A nice upgrade on the original. All sound effects are also reworked with nice bassy impacts and fun collection sounds. Ending a battle is an assault of pings that all hit those serotonin receptors.

There are a lot of tweakable options, including the OG music!

Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven Review – Conclusion

Romancing SaGa 2: Return of the Seven is a fantastic remake. It keeps the soul of the original alive, while refreshing it in a way that makes it a great modern RPG experience. Though the time hopping could sometimes feel surprising, as it is not obviously communicated with the player it effectively presents an epic time spanning story and having the heroes of old be the antagonists is still a fun angle even in 2024. Combat and other gameplay overhauls make this a joy to play and the definitive Romancing SaGa 2 experience.

This game inherits a great legacy and improves upon it.

So, why should you play Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven?

• It’s a very tasteful retooling of the original Romancing SaGa 2
• One of the most iconic SNES RPGs retold
• Reworked difficulty and UI makes this very approachable
• Fantastic turn-based battling

But, why shouldn’t you play Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven?

• The new visuals can look a bit flat at times
• It’s a turn-based RPG which can be polarising
• The story time leaps can be frustrating

A review code was kindly provided by Square Enix for the purpose of our Romancing SaGa 2 Revenge of the Seven Review.  You can check out our other reviews here and if you haven’t already, be sure to join the Qualbert Discord to find out about the latest game and review updates!