Is it Romancing Saga 2 more focused in this regard?
Yes. It is ironically far more conventional: although you control multiple parties throughout the game you only ever do so once at a time, and you don't have to search around for people to form a party with as the basic classes are all represented in your home base. It is enjoyable to go around recruiting people into your party each time you control a new Emperor, and as you progress thru the game you unlock new people/classes to recruit so that you start looking foward to the next generation and planning out that party. It's something not really present in Minstrel Song or RS 3.
It is also, again a bit surprisingly, a lot more focused in terms of what "quest" you're going to do at any given moment. You're the Emperor/Empress, and you have an advisor that literally comes up to you and says "Hey there's a goblin raid happening in this town! Maybe u should go", stuff like that, and the game is surprisingly very restrained in the amount of places you can go to for the first half so it is hard to get "lost"; eventually the hints do stop coming, though, and the advisors will fall silent but that's by mid-game or so and by then you will have around 60% of all locations and know what to do and where to go in general terms.
Also, in RS 2, there is no overworld travel per-se, when you exit your castle you are greeted with a world map with locations that you select and then instantly go there, and you automatically unlock most locations for the first half of the game. There is a ton of side-content of course (a LOT), and it is unforgiving for missables (I locked myself out of Brawler monks, Amazons, and Mermaids just from the choices I made and/or locations I chose to visit), but it is far less "open-world" than Minstrel Song or RS 3 or SaGa Frontier 1.
That said, you still have to unlock locations and things to do by talking to everyone in every location, tho, you do that in RS 2 as well. I remember at one point I just gave up trying to find one of the 7 Heroes, the fish guy one, and just went to a walkthru and it turns out I just had to talk to an NPC I had "missed" in a town, just like I suspected, but It did become grating. In retrospect, in that particular case, it was entirely my own fault as the NPC that unlocks
that NPC does tell you where to go, it's just a bit vague and I must have spaced out and mashed the A button and didn't register the information.
Also, while I haven't played RS 3 it seems like RS 2 is definitely the outlier in the series in terms of goals: in RS 2 you always have a driving motivation and the game goal is the same throughout... you are the motherfucking EMPEROR and you are hunting down the 7 Heroes cos they need to be put down, and everything you do is towards that, so it seems like it gives a bit more clarity to the proceedings; and you operate out of your home town, and at least for the first half of the game there is always something or someone there telling you what to do or giving some kind of hint. Eventually that stops tho, but like I said by then you already know what's what.
EDIT: I did end up using a walkthru for some stuff, like for example I couldn't figure out how to do the Bard quest in RS 2, and after looking it up I'm glad I did. Involves a metric ton of "leg work" going around and asking people. NPCs will say "the Bard went north!" and it's like, bitch there are 5 different towns north of here wtf...
Stuff like that will be a bit "shocking" because the game itself is so fucking ahead of its time that you forget that it's almost 30 years old.
***Definitely recommend looking up the data sheets on every recruitable character. The games don't tell you shit about them and even tho one guy might go "I'm good with greatswords!" it will turn out he is a 1-handed sword spark-type because while lore-wise he's a "greatsword user", stat-wise he's classified as a Sword Generalist and not as a Greatsword Specialist, and that sort of stuff dictates the access to specific sparks and techs. Also it's good to know a character's modifiers for the rest of the stuff, it's nice to know whether they have a +4 in fire magic but are have a negative -2 modifier in Magic resistance, etc.***