Feel the love this holiday season with the Romancing SaGa 2 remastered
At last, a Christmas romance to top "Love, Actually".
We recently covered the Final Fantasy Legend games, also known as SaGa, in a full-length podcast episode. While we found those particular journeys through the realm of role-playing to be quite interesting, we also lamented the fact that they're largely inaccessible. Not only have the Game Boy SaGa games never been reissued in the U.S. since their SunSoft reprints in 1998 — that's almost 20 years ago, if you're keeping score — several of their immediate follow-ups remain unseen in the U.S. Romancing SaGa for Super NES got an elaborate remake on PlayStation 2; Romancing SaGa 2 has only appeared as a mobile conversion; and Romancing SaGa 3 has never even gotten a full fan translation thanks to its complexity. Meanwhile, the SaGa Frontier duology remains (by my count) the only PlayStation role-playing games Square Enix has yet to post to PS1 classics on PlayStation Network. What's a self-flagellating nerd to do?
Well! Funny you should ask. As it turns out, you'll have ample opportunity to experience the strange, idiomatic, frequently inexplicable world of SaGa – and soon. Square Enix announced today that it will be launching an English language adaptation of Romancing SaGa 2 for basically every active platform under the sun… in one week. On December 15, you too will be able to experience Akitoshi Kawazu's confusing world view on Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam, and — shockingly — even Vita.
In short, there is no excuse for you not to play a SaGa game now.
Many people consider Romancing SaGa 2 to be the single best SaGa game ever made. It featured a sprawling story, and in keeping with SaGa tradition, both an opaque battle system and an aversion to the generic tropes and clichés of other RPGs. The remake holds extremely true to the original game while bumping the graphical quality (and Kenji Ito's wonderful soundtrack) to a higher standard. Although the mobile port has come under fire for mediocre localization, it's entirely possible Square Enix has taken another pass at it. And if not, well, SaGa has always been about gameplay. Opaque, bewildering, iconoclastic gameplay.
Merry Christmas, nerds.
