Revenge of the Seven in casual mode

When you boil them down to their component parts, romancing SaGa games stand out as the odd duck within a genre where following the leader is often the recipe for success. SaGa will punish you for grinding, obfuscate its mechanics behind four layers of opaque non-explanation, and do everything in its power to make the pain enjoyable. Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven, the most recent entry in the series, is no exception.

It's a testament to how deeply ingrained this pain-first approach to game design is that I'm going to do this now, loud and proud:

Do not play Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven in casual mode. You must die.

I've racked up 41 hours on this game so far, and it's gotten a lot less difficult. From the word 'go' I played on casual mode. I'm a veteran of the original and have played most of the series so I feel like I've paid my dues. I was due for an easy, breezy time. I was also playing it for guiding purposes, so being able to get through the game quickly was the same. I justified the coward's way as a logical decision. What a fool I have been.

Well, I certainly managed that. I made it to the end of the game with only one game over, and this was due to my lack of positional resistance against a single annoying boss, who I easily defeated on my second try. Even the final boss, notorious in the pantheon of particularly brutal final bosses, fell to my blade with little fuss. A narrow victory, to be sure.

The romancing saga expects you to die. It builds the entire mechanics around it. Characters have a certain amount of LP, Life Points, which are depleted each time they fight in battle. Zero hits, and has character dead Dead, never to revive again, forcing a trip to the bar to recruit another in his place. If this happens to your emperor, you're forced to select their successor, which forces you to think deeply about party building, what quests and formations you can complete and unlock with specific emperors, and further experiment with the vast range of character classes. . the game

With my minimal number of emperors, which were only forced upon me through natural story progression points, I experienced very little of this part of the game. I have never lost character. I was forced to complete story quests in an odd way to engineer a generation skip that allowed me to select specific emperors to complete quests. I went through one of the toughest games of the year. The bosses were brutally forced, the quests took little effort, and I felt like I didn't experience the game as much as I did.

In short, I'm as dirty casual as I think I am. Would things have been different if I had played games for work? Probably. But to find that out, I'll have to sink another 40+ hours into this 3.5/5 while I haven't even scratched the surface of Metaphor: Refantazio, the upcoming Dragon Age: The Velgard, or Dragon Quest 3. do i have time ? Are there any of us? Don't make the same mistake I did. Reserve casual mode for emergencies and enjoy your pain as Square Enix intended.

Franchise

Saga

issued

October 24, 2024