There is something really special about Romancing Saga 2, and I think I figured out what it is (to me):
The gameplay loop in RS2 of optimizing your party, acquiring new weapons and armor, learning new spells and experimenting with different classes in order to stand a chance against increasingly more powerful enemies puts me in almost the exact same flow state as a good Wizardry or Wiz-like game does, even if on a surface level the games are nothing alike.
It becomes incredibly addictive to seek out new drops from new enemies in order to outfit your party as you slowly increase in weapon skills and magic power, and the balance of the game is constantly border on almost-too-difficult, but always in a way that seems "fair"; but what puts it over the top is the LP system.
Unlike the future SaGa franchise games, in RS 2 the LPs mechanic is serious business. While it's true that there is no game-over (except in the final scenario), and losing a character simply means replacing them with another one (again, much like Wizardry), due to the way RS 2 is structured you can find yourself severely disadvantaged if you lose a character in-between generation changes. With each new generation you build a fresh new party and inherit all learned spells and skills, but they only become "stored" for future-generation use when a scenario ends, which means if your characters die while you still have no idea how far off the next generation is then your new replacement character won't be able to inherit anything learned during the current scenario.
On the surface that might not seem like a big deal but RS 2's tight-rope balancing act (pun intended) means that everything matters, and 1 new skill learned can literally be the difference between being life and death. Enemies are ferocious in RS 2 and from mid-game onwards it can be incredibly matter-of-fact for a single enemy to wipe you out if you're not careful. Right now, in the current scenario I'm attempting to clear, there are many enemies with multi-hit attacks that can easily kill half your party if the Turn Order die-rolls happen to favor them for that round, or if your 80-accuracy axe skill attack that you're counting on to kill the enemy in that round happens to miss, that can easily mean that because you missed in the next round the enemy might just decide to target the one character who doesn't have any Heat Resistance gear with his Fire-element ki blast, or whatever, and then that char is dead...
...and when a char is knocked unconscious they lose 1 more LP with each strike from the enemy if you don't revive them fast and well-enough, so that means that if you still didn't kill the enemy in that round, then in the next round he just might decide to focus all 3 of his turns on the Unconscious character and that means they will lose 1 lp with one of those attacks: and before you ask, the average amount of LP for a unit is around 10 or so, which means one bad fight can easily consume more than half of their LP if things go really badly.
There are LP restoration potions but they're a bitch to get. You can buy 1 for 10 thousand GP but the NPC that sells them is at the end of a mini-dungeon always stuffed with extremely strong enemies (lol), and you can only buy 1 potion per visit, so that means if you're unlucky you can find yourself losing LPs on the way to get LPs. Insert "lol" here from the devs.
Sometimes it borders on a bit too-unfair, and frankly if I didn't have my training from playing dungeon crawlers with hard-core difficulties I would have definitely given up. This is the type of RPG that I would have dismissed out-of-hand back in the day, but now I can appreciate it because now I "get it". I understand the gameplay loop and I like it.
Oh, I almost forgot to explain something: so the main reason that it's so bad to lose a character mid-mission, when you don't know when the next generation/party is coming, is because skills are learned somewhat randomly. If that char with your most prized-skills runs out of LPs and dies (something that can happen in 2 consecutive bad fights if you're not careful), you have to manually trek back to your home base to recruit a replacement and you have no guaranteed way of learning that skill again except by going through the normal process of sparking it "randomly" against an enemy in a fight.
It can be pretty fucking daunting. I looked at the data and even in the most favorable conditions to spark a high-level skill you're still looking at only around a 10 or 20% chance of sparking it, and that's only if the char fulfills the tech requirements and is fighting the correct enemy (because different enemies allow sparking different skills). While low-level skills spark very easily (so it's no bother losing a character with Knee Split, for example), losing a char who just learned a high-level skill can be brutal.
Now I'm not complaining about the SaGa sparking system, that's fine, I'm just typing that it's understandable why losing a char is a big deal, and because the game is such a fine tight-rope balancing act in its difficulty and power curve it means that every fight is important. Sometimes that can be a little mentally taxing as I often find myself unconsciously holding my breath during enemy turns in anticipation of whether they rekt my party or not, but then I realize that it's moments like that that make the game rewarding to play.
Another thing that reminded me of Wizardry is that as you progress through scenarios you can (if you do things right) unlock new and more powerful unique classes, like samurais and ninjas and shamans and stuff like that. They come with unique gear/abilities/etc, so that as you compose each new generation's party your "party power curve" increases along with your own game knowledge. You always have something "new" to look foward to as you play (for example I'm eagerly anticipating getting Ninja recruits). This is another mechanic that I don't know if it's present in future SaGa games since they revolve more around "named" characters, so I don't know if this same feeling will be replicated in RS 3 or in the future-made games, as for example it's certainly not present in SaGa Frontier 1 which I played and finished back in the day.
Apparently there's a secret race of flying angel-women that you can unlock who have permanent "Float" status but it's a completely optional and secret side-quest, so I'm also looking foward to that. Oh yeah, there are also races you can unlock so you can pimp out each new party with progressively more beastial party members such as Molemen, Salamander Drakes, the Angel-women, even fucking Mermaids (heh). I have no idea how to unlock the Mermaids but I think the first step is probably going to that one town where the local culture is about pearl-diving. Just a thought, right?
Conclusion: Romancing Saga 2's pretty good, hard as fuck but rewarding to understand and master. I do recommend looking up how the different mechanics all work in a Wiki, tho, cos the game doesn't explain jack shit. I really do tip my hat to the japs who finished RS 2 in its original SNES days, before an internet and wikis, cos that shit ain't no joke. The game is completely freeform and NPC dialog is extremely limited so there are few hints about how to finish quests. I prefer that, now, since it means the majority of your time is spent engaged in the actual gameplay loop. It's very pick-up and play in that you can actually get something done in 20 minutes of play, learn a skill, a spell, explore multiple towns, level up skills, etc, all is very fast.
I think I'm officially a SaGa fan now. Romancing Saga 2 is by far the most challenging and rewarding "traditional-style top-down view" JRPG that I've played in years and ironically it came out 25 years ago.
Bonus tip: each character has unique stat spreads and I highly recommend looking them up on the wiki/data sheets. Later SaGa games give you this information in some way or another, but RS 1-3 do not... I spent like 2 hours trying to get my Male Mercenary named Perseus to learn an Axe Skill that he cannot learn, and there is no way to know that in RS 2 without looking it up. It just so happens that that specific Male Mercenary named Perseus that I recruited, though his character class advertises compatability with swords and axes, that due to him being a "generalist type" he doesn't have access to the full list of skills from either of the sword of axe trees, only the common ones from both. It makes complete sense now that I know this but without the information I would never have understood this specific thing.
The gameplay loop in RS2 of optimizing your party, acquiring new weapons and armor, learning new spells and experimenting with different classes in order to stand a chance against increasingly more powerful enemies puts me in almost the exact same flow state as a good Wizardry or Wiz-like game does, even if on a surface level the games are nothing alike.
It becomes incredibly addictive to seek out new drops from new enemies in order to outfit your party as you slowly increase in weapon skills and magic power, and the balance of the game is constantly border on almost-too-difficult, but always in a way that seems "fair"; but what puts it over the top is the LP system.
Unlike the future SaGa franchise games, in RS 2 the LPs mechanic is serious business. While it's true that there is no game-over (except in the final scenario), and losing a character simply means replacing them with another one (again, much like Wizardry), due to the way RS 2 is structured you can find yourself severely disadvantaged if you lose a character in-between generation changes. With each new generation you build a fresh new party and inherit all learned spells and skills, but they only become "stored" for future-generation use when a scenario ends, which means if your characters die while you still have no idea how far off the next generation is then your new replacement character won't be able to inherit anything learned during the current scenario.
On the surface that might not seem like a big deal but RS 2's tight-rope balancing act (pun intended) means that everything matters, and 1 new skill learned can literally be the difference between being life and death. Enemies are ferocious in RS 2 and from mid-game onwards it can be incredibly matter-of-fact for a single enemy to wipe you out if you're not careful. Right now, in the current scenario I'm attempting to clear, there are many enemies with multi-hit attacks that can easily kill half your party if the Turn Order die-rolls happen to favor them for that round, or if your 80-accuracy axe skill attack that you're counting on to kill the enemy in that round happens to miss, that can easily mean that because you missed in the next round the enemy might just decide to target the one character who doesn't have any Heat Resistance gear with his Fire-element ki blast, or whatever, and then that char is dead...
...and when a char is knocked unconscious they lose 1 more LP with each strike from the enemy if you don't revive them fast and well-enough, so that means that if you still didn't kill the enemy in that round, then in the next round he just might decide to focus all 3 of his turns on the Unconscious character and that means they will lose 1 lp with one of those attacks: and before you ask, the average amount of LP for a unit is around 10 or so, which means one bad fight can easily consume more than half of their LP if things go really badly.
There are LP restoration potions but they're a bitch to get. You can buy 1 for 10 thousand GP but the NPC that sells them is at the end of a mini-dungeon always stuffed with extremely strong enemies (lol), and you can only buy 1 potion per visit, so that means if you're unlucky you can find yourself losing LPs on the way to get LPs. Insert "lol" here from the devs.
Sometimes it borders on a bit too-unfair, and frankly if I didn't have my training from playing dungeon crawlers with hard-core difficulties I would have definitely given up. This is the type of RPG that I would have dismissed out-of-hand back in the day, but now I can appreciate it because now I "get it". I understand the gameplay loop and I like it.
Oh, I almost forgot to explain something: so the main reason that it's so bad to lose a character mid-mission, when you don't know when the next generation/party is coming, is because skills are learned somewhat randomly. If that char with your most prized-skills runs out of LPs and dies (something that can happen in 2 consecutive bad fights if you're not careful), you have to manually trek back to your home base to recruit a replacement and you have no guaranteed way of learning that skill again except by going through the normal process of sparking it "randomly" against an enemy in a fight.
It can be pretty fucking daunting. I looked at the data and even in the most favorable conditions to spark a high-level skill you're still looking at only around a 10 or 20% chance of sparking it, and that's only if the char fulfills the tech requirements and is fighting the correct enemy (because different enemies allow sparking different skills). While low-level skills spark very easily (so it's no bother losing a character with Knee Split, for example), losing a char who just learned a high-level skill can be brutal.
Now I'm not complaining about the SaGa sparking system, that's fine, I'm just typing that it's understandable why losing a char is a big deal, and because the game is such a fine tight-rope balancing act in its difficulty and power curve it means that every fight is important. Sometimes that can be a little mentally taxing as I often find myself unconsciously holding my breath during enemy turns in anticipation of whether they rekt my party or not, but then I realize that it's moments like that that make the game rewarding to play.
Another thing that reminded me of Wizardry is that as you progress through scenarios you can (if you do things right) unlock new and more powerful unique classes, like samurais and ninjas and shamans and stuff like that. They come with unique gear/abilities/etc, so that as you compose each new generation's party your "party power curve" increases along with your own game knowledge. You always have something "new" to look foward to as you play (for example I'm eagerly anticipating getting Ninja recruits). This is another mechanic that I don't know if it's present in future SaGa games since they revolve more around "named" characters, so I don't know if this same feeling will be replicated in RS 3 or in the future-made games, as for example it's certainly not present in SaGa Frontier 1 which I played and finished back in the day.
Apparently there's a secret race of flying angel-women that you can unlock who have permanent "Float" status but it's a completely optional and secret side-quest, so I'm also looking foward to that. Oh yeah, there are also races you can unlock so you can pimp out each new party with progressively more beastial party members such as Molemen, Salamander Drakes, the Angel-women, even fucking Mermaids (heh). I have no idea how to unlock the Mermaids but I think the first step is probably going to that one town where the local culture is about pearl-diving. Just a thought, right?
Conclusion: Romancing Saga 2's pretty good, hard as fuck but rewarding to understand and master. I do recommend looking up how the different mechanics all work in a Wiki, tho, cos the game doesn't explain jack shit. I really do tip my hat to the japs who finished RS 2 in its original SNES days, before an internet and wikis, cos that shit ain't no joke. The game is completely freeform and NPC dialog is extremely limited so there are few hints about how to finish quests. I prefer that, now, since it means the majority of your time is spent engaged in the actual gameplay loop. It's very pick-up and play in that you can actually get something done in 20 minutes of play, learn a skill, a spell, explore multiple towns, level up skills, etc, all is very fast.
I think I'm officially a SaGa fan now. Romancing Saga 2 is by far the most challenging and rewarding "traditional-style top-down view" JRPG that I've played in years and ironically it came out 25 years ago.
Bonus tip: each character has unique stat spreads and I highly recommend looking them up on the wiki/data sheets. Later SaGa games give you this information in some way or another, but RS 1-3 do not... I spent like 2 hours trying to get my Male Mercenary named Perseus to learn an Axe Skill that he cannot learn, and there is no way to know that in RS 2 without looking it up. It just so happens that that specific Male Mercenary named Perseus that I recruited, though his character class advertises compatability with swords and axes, that due to him being a "generalist type" he doesn't have access to the full list of skills from either of the sword of axe trees, only the common ones from both. It makes complete sense now that I know this but without the information I would never have understood this specific thing.
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