Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven will keep its powerful enemies, but running away won’t make them progressively stronger, producer says

Square Enix’s Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, slated for launch on October 24, will bring a JRPG classic from 1993 to modern platforms. The original game is known for the high complexity of its systems and even described as punishing at times, but how will the remake differ in this sense? AUTOMATON recently spoke to producer Shinichi Tatsuke, who gave interesting insights into how the Romancing SaGa 2 remake will make the game more approachable without losing its identity and one-of-a-kind mechanics.

Apart from introducing three distinct difficulty settings to give players more freedom in choosing their gameplay experience, Romancing SaGa 2 remake introduces some fundamental changes to better communicate the game’s systems to the player.

“In (the original) Romancing SaGa 2, it was difficult to understand how to enjoy the gameplay.” Tatsuke comments. “That’s why we’ve simplified the rules and made them easier to follow in the remake. Specifically, this includes displaying information about weapons, glimmering (Tech Sparking), and attributes that were previously hidden from the player. In addition, we have simplified defense types to include only physical defense and magic defense.” It may be worth noting here that in the original Romancing SaGa 2, the player had to keep track of eight distinct defense types.

The upcoming remake will also do a lot more to actively teach the player how to play, as Tatsuke explains, “The Romancing SaGa 2 remake has an insane amount of tutorials (laughs). For example, in the original game, there was an (optional) event where you could talk to the Court Mage called Emerald and learn the fire magic ‘Fireball.’ But in the remake, this will be a mandatory event. Also, the tutorial will tell you that you can use ‘Fireball’ in the battle after that. This is to avoid a situation where the player is unable to build the Magic Research Center. Once the center is built, the next tutorial will follow.”

Regarding enemy difficulty, the original Romancing SaGa 2 had many enemies scale up based on the number of battles you’d fought, i.e., they grew more powerful depending on your battle count. However, running from battles also added to your battle count, which sometimes resulted in players accidentally getting themselves stuck in a situation where they were continuously faced with enemies too powerful for them to beat.

It seems the remake will prevent things like this from happening with a new approach to enemy encounters, as the producer explains, “The enemies’ habitats are predetermined, and the enemy you encounter changes depending on the number of events you’ve completed and the number of battles you’ve won. This means that you can avoid situations like in the original where you keep running away and get stuck because the enemies become too strong.”

This is not to say that Romancing SaGa 2’s remake is about hand-holding, however. While the game will make certain adjustments to enemies, Tatsuke assures that “memorable enemies are designed to be as powerful” as they were in the original. For example, one of the game’s main antagonists Rocbouquet was judged to be too difficult to beat in the first encounter, so the developers decided to lower her hit rate a notch. However, her attacks remain just as powerful.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is scheduled to launch for PS4/PS5 and Nintendo Switch on October 24, with the Steam version following the next day.