Romancing SaGa 2 was one of the SNES classics that had the misfortune of never being translated, so it remained in relative obscurity for quite a long time. While it eventually got a North American release with a remastered version several decades later, the original game is still obscure. The mechanics, gameplay and designs can be difficult to understand and frustrating if you aren't consulting a written guide. I love the original, but I understand why it remains an obscure favorite. After the success of other remakes like Live a Live and Trials of Mana, it's a welcome relief to see Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven that aims to bring yet another of SquareSoft's hidden classics to a modern audience.

Romancing SaGa 2 is focused on the Varennes Empire, and in particular its capital of Avalon. A long time ago, seven legendary heroes saved the world and then vanished. There are now rumors of their return, but the rumors become deadly reality when one of the Seven attacks the city of Avalon and slaughters the imperial heir. The emperor and his remaining son Gerard set out to get revenge, only to discover that the Seven are too strong for even the mightiest warriors to defeat. Avalon must dedicate itself and its royal family to gaining the power to stand against these heroes-turned-villains before they take over the land.

The combat system in Romancing Saga 2 exists in the comfortable middle ground between the more complex combat of the recent SaGa games and the incredibly obscure combat of the original. It's a turn-based RPG where five party members fight together. Unique to this version of Romancing SaGa 2 is that the battle takes place with a visible timeline, allowing players to determine which enemies to attack to minimize damage.

The basics of Romancing SaGa 2's combat are familiar, but there are a few distinct features. After every battle, your party's HP is restored, but BP, which is used for special attacks and magic, is not. If a character falls in battle, they will lose LP instead. LP is a resource that is not easily renewed, and if it runs dry, you'll lose that character permanently. This makes it important to fight properly in every encounter. Get lazy on a random fight, and your best character could lose one of its precious few tethers to life.

Each character can equip up to two weapons at once and learn various magic skills that can range from spears and swords to bows and martial arts. Using any weapon gradually levels up your skills with the weapon and allows you to unlock new skills, such as the bow getting a rapid volley that can hit multiple enemies or the spear getting a double stab. This is primarily done via the SaGa franchise's iconic "glimmering" mechanic, where skills have a chance to be learned mid-battle, with a higher chance in battles against tougher opponents.

The glimmering mechanic is the easiest to understand in Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven. When equipping a weapon, you can see if your character has the potential to glimmer with it, including a chart that shows potential glimmerable moves. In battle, any ability with a chance to glimmer has a lightbulb next to it, and a brighter glow means a higher chance of glimmering. It still isn't perfect, but your options are a lot clearer.

Having multiple weapons and elements is important for bonus damage and because Romancing SaGa 2 now has an Octopath Traveler-style weakness display that shows when you've struck a weak point. This is important because of the Overdrive Gauge, which is new to this version of the game. In battle, every time you strike an enemy weak point, the gauge fills. Once it is filled, you can use it to perform a Unison Attack between two characters. This attack uses one skill from each character, performed one after another, and with no BP cost. This means you can far more readily use certain powerful abilities and techniques without running dry of precious BP.

The game features three difficulty modes: easy, normal, and hard (classic), with the last said to be the closest to how the game was on the SNES/Super Famicom version. For our preview build, I went through on the normal difficulty to get an idea of the challenge level. The preview only covered a small part of the experience, but it still seemed to be more difficult than average. If I weren't cautious about the moves I used, it's possible for certain random foes to effectively one-shot one of my characters. There seemed to be slightly fewer enemies in certain formations than in the original, and prior to each boss area, there's a one-time-only free refill of BP, which made it more reasonable to use BP before each fight.

Our preview build ended with the introduction of the Emperor mechanic. This mechanic, which was present in the original Romancing SaGa 2, is a big part of how the game functions. Rather than having one dedicated protagonist, you'll go through multiple generations. Through the power of Inheritance Magic, you'll be able to pass down a portion of your hero's stats and abilities to the next generation, allowing you to build up strength to defeat the Seven. It seemed like there will be some noteworthy changes here, but we'll have to wait to see which surprises are in the full version.

The overall presentation has seen some improvements. Romancing SaGa 2's graphics are at once true to the original and an absolutely beautiful upgrade. Much like Trials of Mana, it captures the feel of the SNES original but makes the characters more expressive, the cut scenes more dynamic, and the overall feel much more modern. Despite this, it remains faithful to the original source materials. Cut scenes that were done using the in-game combat engine in the original are fully remastered as their own scenes but still contain amusing little quirks, like an enemy's attack appearing in a display bar above their head or a dying character's LP popping down to zero. There's also a new remastered soundtrack that sounds phenomenal, but players can still use the original soundtrack. It's also night and day compared to Emerald Beyond, which I enjoyed but clearly had a much simpler set of graphics and visuals.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is shaping up to be everything one could hope for in a remake. It's reverent and faithful to the original while adding polish and clarification to what was previously an infamously obscure game. I had a huge smile on my face the entire time, as I saw classic events and scenes lovingly re-created in beautiful 3D. My time with the preview build quickly shot Romancing SaGa 2 to the top of my most anticipated list, and I can't wait to play the full version when it comes out on Oct. 24, 2024, for the Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.