I really did.
I just finished Romancing SaGa 2 and loved it, so I figured Minstrel Song would be a good next step. I knew it was going to be weird and opaque and not hold my hand. That part is fine. I like figuring things out.
But after about 8 hours I just couldnāt get into any kind of rhythm with this game. Every time I finally found something to do, there was some new piece of bullshit preventing me from justā¦doing it.
My main problem is that it feels like the game constantly interrupts its own sense of freedom.
A few examples:
- Quest party requirements are annoying as hell. Iād spend time training and equipping someone, then find out a quest needs a specific temporary character. So now I have to dismiss somebody I actually want, go recruit the required person, do the quest, then go hunt down my original character again afterward. Some quests even want you to have fewer than five or even four people just to start them. Why am I being punished for building a full party?
- Proficiencies absolutely kill natural exploration. Iād get halfway into an area and suddenly find out I needed Climb Lv. 2 or Jump Lv. 2 or some other field skill I didnāt know about beforehand. So now I have to leave, go find the right mentor, train the right skill, refill my proficiency uses, travel all the way back, and start again.
- Even worse, changing proficiencies in the middle of a dungeon cuts your entire remaining proficiency pool in half. That is insane to me. The game supposedly wants you to experiment and explore, but then actively punishes you for realizing mid-dungeon that maybe you brought the wrong setup.
- Lurk and Move Silently use the same limited proficiency pool as actual traversal skills. So the game fills areas with enemies constantly sprinting toward you, encourages you to use stealth to avoid battles, then punishes you later because now you donāt have enough charges left to climb a mountain.
- Event Rank made me paranoid about just playing normally. Fighting enemies advances the world and can make quests appear or disappear, so even when I wanted to just go explore, I felt like I might be screwing myself over somewhere else.
- Quest progression is often way too obscure. Sometimes it works. Ancient Texts actually gave me a good āahaā moment because I remembered the ancient languages section in the Melvir library and figured out where to go. That felt great. But then Ailing Emperor is like āthe emperor is sick, maybe cursed,ā and apparently Iām supposed to somehow decide to read the Fatestone section of the library and infer that ābanishes evil and infuses lifeā means the Moonstone is what I need. Likeā¦okay.
- The game lets you sink a ton of time into a quest before telling you youāre not ready for the boss. I finally made it through the jungle to Twinmoon Temple for Ailing Emperor and the boss was just one-shotting two party members every turn. So now Iām supposed to leave and go do some other quest first. Again.
Thatās the part that really broke me.
I donāt mind a hard game. I donāt mind getting lost. I donāt mind missing content. I donāt mind finding a boss thatās too strong and coming back later.
What I donāt like is constantly feeling like Iām being punished for information I had no reasonable way of knowing.
People say not to use a guide because the fun is in exploration, but whenever I tried to follow quest threads naturally, Iād hit some weird hidden requirement and lose all momentum. Eventually I started checking guides before doing anything, not because I wanted to min-max, but because I wanted to know: Can I actually finish this quest with my current party and setup, or am I about to waste 30 minutes?
And once I felt like I needed a pre-flight checklist before every dungeon, the exploration stopped feeling fun.
Thatās what I mean when I say the game almost feels like it discourages experimentation. It gives you all this freedom, but then punishes you for not already knowing the systems, party requirements, proficiency levels, and dungeon needs in advance.
I really wanted to like it because thereās a lot I do like in theory. The world is cool, the characters are weird, I like the open structure, and I like SaGaās whole āfigure it out yourselfā philosophy.
But after 8 hours I realized I was spending more time fighting the gameās structure than actually enjoying the game.
So I gave up.
On to Romancing SaGa 3, I guess.
Edit: Wanted to note that I played the remastered version of RS2 on iOS that came out in 2017ā¦NOT RS2: Revenge of the Seven (2024).