Japanese role-playing game enthusiasts are eating good this week, as Square Enix announce a 3D remake for 1993’s Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven. It’s a high fantasy RPG in which you must shore up an empire and defend it from generation to generation against a group of legendary adventurers, who were trapped in another dimension many moons ago and are positively livid that people don’t talk about their sacrifices enough. It’s out 24th October 2024, and springs from the turbulent brains of the team behind 2020’s Trials of Mana remake, which was well-received. I’ve got a trailer’s worth of rabble-rousing orchestral music and sparkly tag-team finishers below.
Revenge Of The Seven (Steam page here) casts you as several emperors in succession, all plucked from a pool of characters representing over 30 classes. Each ruler also inherits the knowledge and abilities of their predecessor via some funky sorcery. The campaign’s “unique story structure” is a balance of expanding your Empire and sticking it to the Seven Heroes, with “dramatically” different outcomes based on who you fight first, who you ally with, and so on. There’s a strategy game element in the shape of “a devoted Royal Court overseeing the economy, technology, city construction, and magic”. It sounds pretty involving.
The original’s turn-based battle system returns with a “Glimmer” mechanic that lets you harvest abilities in the fray, and a formation system that bestows benefits based on positioning, but they’ve added a timeline system and new combination attacks. Square Enix and their collaborators xeen Inc. have also bodged together some new difficulty settings, with Hard roughly resembling the original’s “brutal” challenge while Casual is for people who favour story over battle, and Normal is for “veteran RPG players looking for a balanced game”.
The old 2D pixel sprites have been remodelled in 3D, based on Tomomi Kobayashi’s original illustrations. Towns and dungeons are also now fully rendered with different layouts. As for the audio component, there’s full Japanese and English voice acting and they’ve brought back original Romancing SaGa 2 composer Kenji Ito to overhaul the score – you can switch between new and original soundtracks in-game.
All this forms part of Square Enix’s on-going dire scheme of essentially swapping the past for the future by remaking or, at least, remastering every bloody thing in their back catalogue. That’s not nostalgia you’re feeling, it’s anticipation! The flagship production there is obviously Final Fantasy 7, which is now two remakes in. Square have also just announced that they’re bringing a “HD-2D” remake of Dragon Quest III to PC this November, and continue to make less costly “new games in the old style”, such as Octopath Traveller. They’ve ruled out remaking FF6 and FF8 as too much work, at least.
There’s probably scope for a Square Enix role-playing game plotline about ancient Squaresoft or Enix RPGs returning from another dimension to vengefully smother brand new Square Enix RPGs at birth. That said, the original Revenge Of The Seven never officially released outside Japan, so this is effectively a new game for my money. I’m moderately keen.