I figured I'd give this one a try as an introduction to the SaGa series despite the mixed reviews because it was pretty cheap on sale and I read somewhere that this series took the leveling system from Final Fantasy 2 and further developed it, as well as that it was a pretty open world game that did not really hold your hand at all and just let you do whatever you wanted in whatever order you wanted, plus the whole gimmick about playing as a series of generations of characters because perma-death is a thing in this game sounded interesting.

I have to say that, just as Final Fantasy 2 turned out to be much better than its reputation, RS2 was also pretty good and nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests based on the reviews. Is it often unforgiving and punishing AF? Yeah, it is. But that's part of the point of the game. Is it needlessly obtuse and hard to figure out, both from its systems and story's p.o.v.? Yeah, it certainly is, and though I understand if someone would hate this (I often hate this kind of thing in other games, myself), I was actually surprised by how these flaws interact with the actual story progression because it results in several different ways to approach a given scenario/mission depending on your characters' skills and/or the moment in time you try the mission.

As an example (mild SPOILER), I got stuck at some point because I didn't know how to find a strategist to help my character come up with a plan to help some NPC's storm a main bad guy's moving fortress, and I ended up abandoning that mission and trying something else, which led to me being tricked and captured during what I thought was a completely different side-quest and ending up as a slave working at said moving fortress's engine room, so now I had to escape and beat the boss dude despite having lost 100% of my gear and having to rely on barehanded attacks and magic. To say it was tough is an understatement, but I ultimately managed it.

Later, I was consulting an online guide to understand how to learn new skills more efficiently and I came upon an explanation for that mission and I found out that if I had waited until they had finished building the university in my capital city (I had already paid for it) and joined it as a student myself, I would've been able to recruit a visiting foreign scholar who was the aforementioned strategist and would have allowed me to storm and break into the moving fortress with all my gear, making that mission many times easier instead of panicking when I found myself captured and thinking I had soft-locked myself into an unwinnable quest because all my characters were solid melee fighters and mediocre mages/martial artists.

A quick glance in that guide showed that this is the norm and many of the quests/scenarios I had already beaten also had alternate routes, such as joining a rebellion during a civil war in a neighboring country, which was a scenario I had beaten a couple of centuries later during a different generation by laying to rest the ghosts of the original rebel princes, and so on, because the game forces you to do time skips within a generation or even change generations after you beat a certain amount of missions and many of the smaller scenarios that make up the bigger narrative scenarios are time-sensitive, so if you don't do them and wander off to do something else the window closes. I'm actually very impressed by this level of detail and thought put into such an old game.

Judging from the map I've unlocked and made part of my empire and by the amount of Legendary Heroes I've defeated so far, as well as how many generations have passed (four generations across roughly 500 years, not including one empress who died stupidly during a random encounter and then I accidentally overwrote my last save instead of re-loading to avoid my screw-up), I'd say I'm currently done with a third of the game, which is interesting because I feel I've played A LOT, so this is definitely a long game with a lot of content.

I haven't encountered any bugs and my only complaint is that, except for your main character and each subsequent recruitable NPC's main skill that seems to be tied to your main character's own level in that skill, every time you skip a generation you have to "start all over again" and your party loses all their progress in different skills they had, though the game allows you to retain all techniques and spells learned up to the previous time skip at the dojo and magic tower, which means that you can re-teach your crew pretty much whatever you want, but it's a bit annoying because it takes a some time to re-equip and re-teach what you want to have on hand, and their level in spell schools drops to zero unless they're mages.

If this is the worst Romancing SaGa available on Steam, after RS3 and the remake of the original, I'm looking forward to beating it and playing the other two, as well as the upcoming remake for this one, which looks pretty awesome. Long live the Varenne Empire!

Edit: I made it all the way to the final boss after unlocking most character clases and doing almost all side-quests except for the one with the mermaid because I either missed its time window or it didn't spawn due to a random bug. Other than that I loved my time with this game despite the fact that it does a lot of things I usually hate in other JRPG's. My only complaint, and it's totally my fault, is that I saved just before fighting the final boss only to find out my party was way too weak and/or didn't have the right skills/spells/gear and now I was unable to leave and come back fully prepared, and my most recent alternate save file was a generation before. Oh, well.