Whoooooof. This sure is a SaGa game.
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Akioshi Kawazu, a developer who is equal parts criminally insane and a magificent auteur. He's the one responsible for FF2, the SaGa series, and a lot of the more bullshit pieces of FF12's frankensteined gameplay, and you can just sort of tell. All of his games have that same "this GM loves his dice more than he loves any human being" feel to them and none of them adhere to standard JRPG conventions. (SaGa 3, the one we got as Final Fantasy Legend 3, is a half-exception because it wasn't Kawazu's crew that worked on it so much as the team that would move on to do Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.)
Romancing SaGa 2 is the most pure encapsulation of what the SaGa series is and I will stand by that statement. Unlimited Saga (the one on PS2 that bombed because nobody understood What The Fuck Even) may be more arcane and cryptic and far more blatant with its RNG fuckery, but Romancing 2 is the purest distillation, if that makes sense. You're not going to get a game more emblematic of the SaGa experience than this.
How? Well, let me just dig up a few snippets sent to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
xyzzysqrl over Telegram as examples.
SaGa, y'all.
Would I recommend this game to fans of the series, or fans of weird RPGs with arcane, poorly-documented mechanics that can frequently mean the difference between life and death? Yes. But they probably already have it.
Would I recommend this to John Q. Gamer whose experience with RPGs is strictly Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy? hahahah hellllll no. I'd even hesitate to recommend it to SMT players, who expect that the answer to a problem will be honestly provided to them within the game itself. Romancing SaGa 2 doesn't tell you shit about some of its more arcane mechanics, all of the english guides on the internet are from a half-working Super Famicom fan translation, and honestly not knowing what the fuck you're doing is about 30% of the charm. This is a game that makes death relatively non-painful... but also relatively pointless. You don't learn anything about WHY you died, just to git gud. The game has a lot of "what did I do wrong, what could I have done differently", and while cracking a guide open will answer those questions, it also removes a lot of the magic of the series.
I'm only a sometimes masochist, honest.
But it's $30 right now, for slapdash port of a PS Vita/mobile port. A port of a game that's over 25 years old. That's maybe a bit excessive and Square needs to lay off the price gouging. If it wasn't basically a Christmas gift, I would have not played this, so thanks again to Xyzzy for putting up with both making me hurt and listening to me ramble about this game for the past two weeks.
the evil is defeated
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Akioshi Kawazu, a developer who is equal parts criminally insane and a magificent auteur. He's the one responsible for FF2, the SaGa series, and a lot of the more bullshit pieces of FF12's frankensteined gameplay, and you can just sort of tell. All of his games have that same "this GM loves his dice more than he loves any human being" feel to them and none of them adhere to standard JRPG conventions. (SaGa 3, the one we got as Final Fantasy Legend 3, is a half-exception because it wasn't Kawazu's crew that worked on it so much as the team that would move on to do Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.)
Romancing SaGa 2 is the most pure encapsulation of what the SaGa series is and I will stand by that statement. Unlimited Saga (the one on PS2 that bombed because nobody understood What The Fuck Even) may be more arcane and cryptic and far more blatant with its RNG fuckery, but Romancing 2 is the purest distillation, if that makes sense. You're not going to get a game more emblematic of the SaGa experience than this.
How? Well, let me just dig up a few snippets sent to
xyzzysqrl over Telegram as examples.SaGa, y'all.
Would I recommend this game to fans of the series, or fans of weird RPGs with arcane, poorly-documented mechanics that can frequently mean the difference between life and death? Yes. But they probably already have it.
Would I recommend this to John Q. Gamer whose experience with RPGs is strictly Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy? hahahah hellllll no. I'd even hesitate to recommend it to SMT players, who expect that the answer to a problem will be honestly provided to them within the game itself. Romancing SaGa 2 doesn't tell you shit about some of its more arcane mechanics, all of the english guides on the internet are from a half-working Super Famicom fan translation, and honestly not knowing what the fuck you're doing is about 30% of the charm. This is a game that makes death relatively non-painful... but also relatively pointless. You don't learn anything about WHY you died, just to git gud. The game has a lot of "what did I do wrong, what could I have done differently", and while cracking a guide open will answer those questions, it also removes a lot of the magic of the series.
I'm only a sometimes masochist, honest.
But it's $30 right now, for slapdash port of a PS Vita/mobile port. A port of a game that's over 25 years old. That's maybe a bit excessive and Square needs to lay off the price gouging. If it wasn't basically a Christmas gift, I would have not played this, so thanks again to Xyzzy for putting up with both making me hurt and listening to me ramble about this game for the past two weeks.
the evil is defeated
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