I recently played Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven. I would love to say I finished it, but in reality, I gave up after a while. I dropped it, still feeling a lingering desire to see more, but that feeling was drowned under waves of mediocrity and terrible design choices in every aspect of the game.
It starts wonderfully. The mechanics seem promising, the story seems engaging, and the main plot is actually quite good. You play as the leader of a dynasty, and as you progress, your main character eventually retires. Their knowledge and skills are magically transferred to their successors, allowing you to take control of a new main character with all the stats, techniques, and powers learned by the previous generation. You can even choose a completely different class or job, if your previous character was a mage, you can now switch to a paladin while retaining all the magic powers and focusing on melee combat instead, and later if you want a successor that is a mage again, you have all those stats kept safe for you.
The world mechanics tie into this heritage system as well. Many world problems take generations to solve or evolve. Bridges take years to be built, settlements grow over time, and areas you once visited as barren lands can flourish into bustling cities over several generations. And the story! A long time ago, seven heroes saved the world from an imminent doom but lost their humanity in the process. Now, possessed by their deepest desires, they have become the very calamity that must be overcome. Your goal is to vanquish these fallen heroes.
Of course, both the main story and side quests are full of clichés and dumbed-down narratives, but comparatively speaking, it’s close to a masterpiece! Or at least it could have been, if not for the disastrous way the game was made.
It’s just terrible. I’m really glad I didn’t buy it at full price. I was tempted by videos and reviews, but maybe it was instinct, or perhaps just tight fisted. Either way, I didn’t get the game at launch, and waiting was worth it because I didn’t like it.
At first, I loved it. For a week, I was constantly thinking about the game, planning my next steps, and wishing I had more time to play. But as I progressed, that passion quickly faded, replaced by disappointment, frustration, and eventually, a bit of hate.
Let’s start with the main mechanic, the heritage system. A wonderful idea, but terribly adapted. Your main character can only complete three quests before being forced into retirement. I didn’t learn this from the game itself, I had to find out through online reviews when I was already on my last iteration.
And when your character retires, hundreds of years pass. It’s not just a simple passing of the torch to the next generation, no, dozens of generations exist between your main characters. When your protagonist dies or retires, 190 years pass before you get to choose the next emperor. That means two centuries without leadership between rulers. The heritage system is supposedly a magic spell that requires one person to speak specific words to transfer their knowledge to the next generation. That’s how the game explains it initially, the emperor speaks the incantation and transfers their knowledge to his son. But in actual gameplay, after two centuries of your character being long dead or retired, the empty throne somehow casts the spell on its own for the next emperor. Magic, I guess.
But then there’s the world. Two hundred years pass between emperors, two centuries, yet the world remains unchanged. NPCs are exactly the same. Before I gave up, I had spent almost two millennia between emperors, two thousand years had passed since I started the game, yet every single NPC was exactly the same as when I first started.
The first time I changed characters, I had a small scare. I was evolving my second emperor, the son, along with his entourage, and when it was time for him to retire, the game flashed a message: “197 years have passed.” My immediate thought was that I had lost all my companions. But to my surprise, every single one of them was still there, two hundred years later, unchanged. My emperor had changed completely, but his companions, archer, mage, knight, lancer, all remained exactly the same, not a single hair different. The only thing that changed was their names.
And the NPCs? They didn’t even get that. No name change, no appearance change, no difference in their fixed positions on the map, even ten emperors later. This is lazy, terrible game development.
The battle mechanics start off nice. A bit difficult at first, but I got the hang of it midway through the first dungeon. However, the more I played, the more it became frustrating. There are too many dungeons. Every minor side quest requires you to battle dozens of enemies before you can proceed, and every battle lasts for a while, all the way through my 5th boss fight, 10 emperors later, i was still taking more than a minute to finish random encounters.
By my fourth emperor, I was tired of dungeons. I was doing everything I could to avoid battles. I just wanted to progress in the story and explore other game mechanics, but instead, I was forced into monotonous, repetitive combat. At first, it was fun. But the sheer amount of battles turns it into a grueling chore.
The game introduces several mechanics, but all of them are equally underdeveloped. The library allows you to store, learn, and research magic, but the research aspect is practically useless. You need to find books hidden in random dungeons, and there aren’t even that many spells to research. It mainly serves to teach existing magic to non-magic characters. Somewhat useful, but it could have been so much more. The university is a joke. The poor reward comes from answering multiple-choice questions about the game world’s history and geography. The smithy, something I usually love in games, is just awful here. There’s a limited selection of items to research and forge, basically one per class and its immediate evolution. All these mechanics could have added hundreds of hours of meaningful gameplay. Instead, they feel like wasted potential.
Lastly, I have to complain about the world itself. This isn’t unique to Romancing Saga 2, but a problem I often see in Asian RPGs, or JRPGs. The world is ugly. Textures are basic, environments are almost monochrome, and detailed textures barely exist. The most you get are some lighting and shadow effects. The game’s graphics remind me of PlayStation 2 era RPGs, I mean, the graphics are better, we do have more resolution and more polygons now in Romancing Saga 2, but the style, the layout, are still as simplistic as it were on those game of 15-20 years ago. The character models here are fine, at least the important ones, they’re detailed and decently designed (some of them could make use of more clothes). But the environments are dull, lifeless, monotonous, ugly, and just painful to look at.
That’s it for my complaints. And once again, I’m so glad I didn’t get this game at full price. But at the same time, I’m sad. This game could have been great. The mechanics had so much potential, but they were executed horribly. If only it had been done right…
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