Recently, Final Weapon had the opportunity to interview Shinichi Tatsuke, Producer of Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven. With the game’s recent release, we dove into the inspiration behind the remake, the transition from 2D to 3D, and more. Tatsuke previously served as Producer on the 2020 Trials of Mana remake. We hope you enjoy this exclusive interview, and we’d like to thank the wonderful teams at Square Enix for making this possible! Enjoy!
One of the first things I noticed when Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven was announced was how the art style is quite different from previous SaGa games. Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song used chibi versions of the classic art, while Emerald Beyond features a different artist from Tomomi Kobayashi. What made the team decide to update the art style?
Shinichi Tatsuke: The SaGa franchise has had a following of loyal fans for a long time, but with this title, we wanted to explore a different art style in the hope that it could appeal to even more players. Before working on this project, I was the Producer for the 2020 Trials of Mana remake, and the same development team is working on this title. The decision to use 3D graphics was very much influenced by our experience working on that game. However, because the world of the Mana series and the SaGa franchise are different, we made an effort to increase the head-to-body proportions and to make the background look more realistic. For the actual art itself, we referenced the original illustrations by character designer Tomomi Kobayashi and the 2D pixel art to create a modern 3D style.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is a 3D game, unlike its original 2D counterpart. It’s probably difficult to adapt all of those 2D maps into environments with depth and breadth. This surely needed a lot of layout work and some imagination. What were some of the challenges you faced when reinterpreting the world in 3D?
Shinichi Tatsuke: In turning a 2D background into 3D, we changed the entire structure of the map. For example, in a 2D town all the houses are facing south on the screen, but in 3D they have been reconstructed to face more natural directions. We’ve also designed dungeons to have areas with different elevations, giving them more three-dimensionality. Additionally, with events scenes, speech bubbles and simple movements by the pixel characters were used for expressions in 2D, but to do the same in 3D would, of course, make it feel strange. So, we needed to supplement the scenes with additional character animations and camera movements, which the players would have imagined when playing the original game.
The new quality-of-life features and tutorials are sure to help ease new players in, while the additional content is sure to delight fans of the series. Were there any contemporary games or other remakes that you took inspiration from when deciding how to remake Romancing SaGa 2?
Shinichi Tatsuke: We were very influenced by OCTOPATH TRAVELER, which is also a turn-based RPG. That game was already similar to SaGa in terms of having multiple main characters, but battle systems like striking enemy weaknesses and the timeline served as a major reference. Furthermore, we took inspiration from current open world games for notifications you get from objectives displayed on the field, the appearance of new locations, when new equipment developments become available, and so forth.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven painstakingly recreates the original game respectfully, modernizing some aspects of the original while keeping it as faithful as possible. Did you ever toy with the idea of possibly making a more radical departure or altering the content?
Shinichi Tatsuke: In general, we preserved the systems that were characteristic of the SaGa franchise, like the worldview, story, Glimmers, Formations, etc. These are what give Romancing SaGa 2 its identity, so I did not want to change them.
Being the producer of both Trials of Mana remake and Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is quite impressive! With two legendary and influential titles under your belt, what’s next? Would you like to produce another remake of a classic title or a new game more?
Shinichi Tatsuke: There are no set plans at this time, but I hope to eventually work on some new titles and not just remakes.
