Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven

• Genre: RPG
• Spoiler Free Review: Since there isn't too much to spoil story-wise, the biggest spoiler may be in my screenshots.
• Time Played: ~60 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Some sections can feel a little long compared to others, but overall it feels about right. Which is actually surprising because often the more story-light rpgs at this length can grow tiresome, but I think the structure of the game helps subvert the normal rpg fatigue.
• Soundtrack: The soundtrack is not it's strongest point. Originally an SNES title, it only has just as much music as it needs. While I don't think the game is too long, and people playing it more efficiently than me can probably knock it out a good deal quicker - I was trying to do everything and that does mean hearing a lot of semi-repetitive tracks over and over. The new renditions of the music are great, and it does feature both full soundtracks, but 20ish tracks isn't quite enough to carry a 60 hour experience. At least they had three entirely separate tracks for the Dancer scenes.
• Why I played: While my experience with the SaGa series isn't entirely robust, I have played a few of them, and even more games directly inspired by SaGa. I have a friend who considers it one of his favorite games, and had wholly planned to play the original version prior to this remake but never got around it, but upon checking out the demo I was instantly sold on the new version.
• Did I cry: There isn't much to cry about this one, which is odd to say because I think it was because of rpgs I put this category here. I cry with almost all rpgs. Even "sillier" ones like Pokemon and Digimon, but this just doesn't really carry those kind of moments. It's not really a character story driven game. It might have had a moment or two that made me involuntarily sad frown.
• Jank: Most the game is jank-free. I wouldn't say it's the MOST polished game, but mostly free of jank. I played the Switch version and there is almost constantly texture-loading issues where textures resolution updates like a couple seconds into any given scene, which I imagine are not present in other versions(and maybe not if you play on Switch 2?) but besides that I maybe ran into one or two quirks the whole game.
• Difficulty: It can be pretty challenging. In fact, I would argue that's the point of this game over many other rpgs that are more meant to tell a story. The combat is really good and engaging, but sometimes requires catered set-ups utilized to perfection. The game can punish you for it, but you're meant to learn and proceed with a new party. I just wish it took the punishing aspects out that can prevent you from accessing content entirely.
• Recommend to others: I definitely would recommend it to anyone who likes old-school jrpgs, and have already gone out of my way to recommend it to a couple people. I do have to mention the fact that this game has "consequences" for your actions though. You can easily lock yourself out of aspects of the game permanently, and for someone like me that's a very stressful aspect of the game.

I feel like I already covered so much in what is supposed to be short bullet points. So what else is there to say?

I really liked Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven. It was the perfect type of remake for the type of game it was. Mechanically I think it's nearly identical to the original. There are a lot of moving parts in the game, and honestly, I'm impressed that an SNES game did some of the things this did, in the same ways. This remake offers some quality of life stuff, new music, new graphics, new perspective, new story, new dialog, new classes, new moves, the works so to speak, but inherently, is built almost identically.

I believe all the conditions for doing certain things remain the same, the ways to trigger events, and how the game progresses, is all the same, which just makes the original version that much more impressive.

Because the story is a little more bare bones than most JRPGs, it's more reliant on how your imprint onto the characters and how you experience the adventure, which I think actually makes the fact that you can experience the game "uniquely" pretty important. If it was just a static experience for everyone, it wouldn't be as good as it is, but it's a rare "non-linear" JRPG in many ways.

I do think the combat really... shines. Glimmers even. While aspects that rely too much on RNG can be annoying, I think glimmering techniques as your partake in combat has mostly just the right amount of fairness to be engaging. You do have to really pay close attention to what potential techniques your characters can learn though, and I think that could be a little less restrictive at times. It's kind of annoying when you have a character who is only good with one or two weapons, but can't learn any of the dozens unknown techniques for them. Sometimes I felt myself wanting for the freedom of choice. I rarely felt the game was limiting, but I might have liked it just a little more if the customization I wanted was equally available. Such as my choices of inheritor, or which "version" of any class character was available at any given time. 

Decisions like that are either just the game being a product of it's time, or looking more positively, there to get players who wouldn't normally explore everything to expand their horizons. As someone who wants to explore everything and use every class eventually - as I did - it's not exactly something that is as good of a fit for me, so I had to get let down a few times by using variations of characters I didn't like as much.

It's still a great game, and I enjoyed it immensely.