SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered Review (Switch eShop)

Families, huh? They can cause us all manner of headaches. Sometimes they invade your personal space or take your favourite shirt without asking, and sometimes they get banished as a child and return home to try to take their rightful place on the throne. Between all of the turn-based combat and extended cutscenes, SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered is all about family, and, just like family, we found ourselves frustrated with it at times and couldn’t always understand what it was trying to do. Still, we stuck with it till the end, because that is what families do.

When Nintendo casually dropped SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered release announcement during the March 2025 Direct, it was a surprise to all of us. The game was well-received upon its release in 2000, but this was a chance for fans who didn’t pick up the beloved but often overlooked JRPG classic.

Even when it was first released, it felt decidedly retro; despite launching on the Sony PlayStation, its visuals would have been right at home on the SNES, for example. Compared to Final Fantasy VIII, which came out the same year and for the same console, SaGa Frontier 2 feels scaled back. There is no open world to explore. The story progresses in a very linear fashion as you explore two seemingly separate but interconnected stories.

The good news is that SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered's story is where the game shines. There is political intrigue, a bit of romance, and drama to keep your interest. One storyline follows Gustave XIII, a young man born to rule the kingdom of Finney but banished because he lacks any magical talent. The other storyline is mostly about Wil Knights, a digger who is out to find out the circumstances of his parents' deaths.

These two stories are mostly unconnected until the final arc, which can feel a bit frustrating, but watching the two tales come together at the end is where a lot of the enjoyment comes from. You can choose how you approach each story, playing one through Gustave’s story to the end and then going back to follow up with Wil, or you can approach them in chronological order. The freedom to play the game how you like makes this one of the better remasters of classic JRPGs we’ve played on the Switch.

The visuals and music are also a standout. The game has a lovely watercolour style of art, which gives it a sort of timeless feel. The Switch remaster has the option to stick with the classic look or to turn on the updated graphics. This update doesn’t have a huge impact; the updated look gives the sprites a slightly thicker outline and smoother colours. We found that the new look was slightly better on the TV while the classic mode was better on handheld, but the difference was mostly negligible.

The other big change that came with the Switch version of SaGa Frontier 2 is the addition of new story moments. Most of these were purely supplemental, fleshing out characters and their relationships a bit more than we got in the original. You have the option of playing through the classic version of SaGa Frontier 2, forgoing the new material if you wish.

While the story and the visuals have aged well, the combat and exploration were a bit of a stumbling block for us. There are three types of battles that you’ll encounter over the around 35 hours it will take to complete SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered; team combat, a one-on-one duel against monsters, and tactical warfare involving massive armies.

Both the team and duel combat systems are turn-based, with characters gaining levels with different weapons and magic types as they use them. It is a solid system that rewards using characters in specific ways in your party, but it can get a little stale after a while. Because weapons degrade over time, grinding to get new levels is an expensive process but the rewards just don’t feel like they’re there. We found ourselves dreading some of the combat-heavy sections more than actually enjoying them.

There is plenty of depth to the combat and levelling systems if you go looking for it. Likewise, you can just engage with the surface of the systems and manage just fine, which makes the game feel accessible even for those who don’t want to commit a huge amount of time. The biggest issue we had was that the game doesn’t do much to teach you how to play it – you have to experiment and explore a bit to figure out some of the systems.

Between battles, characters can explore regions. Many of these exploration sections also act as puzzles. Sometimes this means trying to figure out the logic that the developers used to set up the game’s story, which can be baffling and involve lots of backtracking over and over again. These could be frustrating at times and felt like they were designed to inflate the relatively short playtime of the game.

Even these squabbles didn’t detract from our enjoyment. They make it feel like a product of its time, certainly, but they also highlight just how good this era of JRPGs was. The game has just enough unique moments and mechanics to it that it feels fresh more than 25 years after it first came out in Japan. Even with our complaints about the combat and exploration mechanics in the game, we still found SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered to be a great game that didn’t just rely on nostalgia to pull us in.

Like every family, it isn’t perfect but we’re still glad we have it in our lives.