A look back at: SaGa Frontier 2

Ah yes, another SaGa game. Another moment of momentary frustration with regards to gameplay, dealing with highly damaging foes, only limited HP, weird stat growths, and scaling gameplay. At least both SaGa Frontier games tried to work well with their Western releases in regards to difficulty, but they are still among the hardest RPG games for the Playstation.

SaGa Frontier 2 may actually be harder than the previous SaGa Frontier. While it can admittingly be easier to learn new skills in battle, via those duel battles, those are a double-edged sword depending on what you duel. And a game over for just one character going down isn't fun. Then there's the dilemma that I've had regarding the SaGa's enemy scaling: should I continue to grind my ass off to ensure my characters are super powerful with great skills learned? Because doing that will end up with the enemies being just as strong, if not stronger. Or should I try to speedrun through areas avoiding encounters, fighting through easier enemies? This of course becomes an issue when it comes to boss time, as those bosses would have tens of thousands of HP and either take forever or result in total party kills.

And then you have the overall nonlinearity of the game with quite a lot of discrepancies. This is something I didn't enjoy. Certain party characters don't show up for lots of scenarios in general, making grinding these characters an afterthought. Only Ginny's party by the end of the Knights scenario was worth grinding in any way. I also noticed that many parts of Gustave's scenario are entirely cutscene-based, and I finished with his scenarios way too quickly. Would it have made the game better to have more playing involved with his scenarios instead of giving characters offscreen deaths all the time? And the idea of fake Gustaves, ugh. The Knights family scenarios are more gameplay-oriented and often make a lot of sense, although the main villain being this "egg" is also a bit silly. So yeah, this is a silly game that will throw you for many, many loops.