Romancing SaGa 2 (PC) Review

Romancing SaGa 2 plays like most turn-based RPGs, albeit with a battle system that can be confusing; characters spin or perform a little action before and after being selected, and with no other indicator, it's sometimes easy to lose track of what move was selected for what character. Other than that, it has the strategy and action most would suspect of a turn-based RPG, complete with levelling up, skills, magic, physical attacks, and a party formation system, where placement of characters can offer certain benefits.

Players are tasked with creating a character (mostly just choosing a name and gender) at the beginning of the adventure, but it will be a while before they see this character, as the story begins further up the family tree, with pre-made characters in an already-thriving kingdom. This kingdom will change and grow or fail based on player actions made throughout, such as the amount of money the kingdom has, right down to what skills the player character will pass to their offspring.

Where Romancing SaGa 2 falls flat is on the technical side. This is a great game made very shoddily for the PC. As far as lazy ports go, it doesn't get much more egregious than this: the developers seem to have gone no further than making sure the game can actually boot on a PC. There are no settings to dig into, no platform-specific benefits to buying the game for PC, the resolution feels off (at least on certain monitors), and it generally comes across as sloppy and poorly optimised.

It seems clearly made for touch screens, likely due to its Android roots, with no attention paid at all to controls - and not just gamepad controls, but even basic mouse and keyboard. Sometimes the mouse can be used to press buttons, sometimes not. There's no consistency; it's like a random grab-bag of controls the player has to guess-and-check to figure out. Autosave is non-existent, and with some enemies spiking in difficulty at early points in the journey, it's easy to lose hours of progress, something the videogame world seems to have moved away from over the last few decades.