To those of you out there who have been holding your breath since 1993 waiting for a Western release of Romancing SaGa 2, it’s time to exhale. After 23 years, Square’s finally bringing it here.
Even if you’re not familiar with Square’s off-beat SaGa series, you’ve probably heard the name. It’s best described as “alt-JRPG”, a series of games that reject conventional design choices in favour of complex mechanics and weird systems. Most of them eschew traditional levelling in favour of stats and skills that improve based on combat, sort of like Final Fantasy II. The first three SaGa games were released in the West in the early ’90s under the title Final Fantasy Legend, but the next three, all called Romancing SaGa in Japan, never made it. The most famous entry is probably SaGa Frontier, an underappreciated, unfinished game in which you could play out the stories of seven different characters whose paths frequently intersected.
In March, Square put out a remake of the second Romancing SaGa game for iOS, Android and Vita in Japan. Earlier this month they announced plans to release the iOS and Android versions — not Vita: they have given up on that one — in English as well, which is surprising. How often do we get to play an officially localised version of a Super Famicom game that never quite made it overseas?
There’s no release date for the Western version of Romancing SaGa 2 yet, but today Square put out a new trailer, which you can watch right atop this article here.
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