Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven Review - Heavy is the Crown
From the get-go, it’s easy to tell that Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is not your friend. It demands many things from the player and the moment you let your guard down, you’ll be punished. This isn’t to say it’s a bad game; far from it. Much like approaching someone else’s pet for the first time, you need to be cautious but have an open heart.

It’s been 20 years since I last played this game. Pouring over Blogspot translation pages as the game was not released originally in English, I played this game while understanding very little of it. There was a remaster, which I picked up but sat on my backlog. We’re in a really good era for remakes of games, and I am very excited for Romancing SaGa to get that same treatment.
You play as the emperor or empress of the Varennes, fighting back against the heroes that people of old banished to another dimension because they feared their power. Now they’re back and they’re mad that they’ve been sealed away. Honestly, I kinda get it. They did get done dirty.
It won’t take players long to see the basics of what this game is about. You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a normal RPG, but the moment you step into combat you’ll get whiplash. Combat is frenetic, strategic and more than anything else, dangerous. Combat is based on rounds, where every unit gets an attack in order based on their speed (and other factors). The strategy comes in three parts; making sure you’re finding and hitting the enemy’s weakness for extra damage, using crowd control via status effects or killing enemies before they get a chance to act, and finally, making sure you’re not getting the snot beaten out of you. More often than not, one or two attacks will be enough to take one of your characters out of combat. You can heal them to bring them back up (which gives you another action for the next turn), and this is a good option because a unit downed in battle puts you in a bit of a failure cascade. You’ll be doing less damage, there’s less people to take hits from the enemy and if all your units are killed then you’ll start as a new emperor and party.


This is the hook of the game. Units downed in combat have their life points reduced by one, and if they lose all of their life points then they’ll be “lost” forever, and you’ll need to recruit someone else from the tavern. You’ll lose some skill points and it’s a bit annoying, but not game-breaking. The same style of unit can be hired, or you can change up your party to make things easier against whatever you’re facing.
I started on Hard (classic) mode because that’s how I played it before. I might have become soft, but it didn’t take me too long to lick my wounds and retreat to Normal difficulty. I thought to myself that I was immune to the effect of losing units, but whenever one of my units lost a Life Point I suddenly found myself becoming a lot more cautious. Again, this game is as tough as shoe leather, so expect plenty of unit losses and total party knockouts.

The next hook is in the weird levelling system, but you can read all about that in my preview. Suffice it to say, you’ll want to be switching up weapons and magic with your party, and especially with your emperor, to raise the competence of the kingdom, but also to make sure skills are memorised at the training hall or the incantations lab. This means that for future runs, you’ll be able to customise your team more to your liking. Every wipe (and there was plenty) I wasn’t angry at the game. I knew it was me being underprepared, or overextended for a dungeon. Instead of being mad at the game, I thought towards the future instead of what I could do differently.
There are so many mechanics to this game too. There’s a city to improve, the economy needs to be fixed, and every region has its own problems that can be tackled in any order before they sign on with the empire. It’s this openness that gives the game replayability. There are actually choices in this game that matter. Some mean you’ll never get certain types of units, sometimes a city will be wiped out, and people will be killed. As I said, the choices matter.


If you’ve played the original game, then you’re probably excited for the remake anyway. The switch to 3D, as well as the quality of life changes, are all amazing. The additions are also very good, such as the redone soundtrack (with a toggle to change to the classic soundtrack) and the weakness system, decoupling weapons from dual type (slashing) to say, more unique categorisation (Swords and Great Swords). It sounds small, but you can tell there’s so much love in the creation of this game that I really hope people who haven’t tried it before give it a try. There’s even a New Game plus there are two harder difficulties if you really aren’t getting your fill through self-flagellation.
It’s hard reviewing RPGs. I could wax lyrical about systems upon systems all day, especially in this game. I’ve only scratched the surface of some of the components of the game. At the end of the day, it boils down to this; Romancing SaGa 2 was always a great RPG, and it’s been made even better in the remake. This is a title that stands amongst the greats; Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, Persona 4, Final Fantasy VI, and Baldurs Gate 3 to name a few. I’ll even go a step further; if you like JRPGs at all and you haven’t played this, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.