izigame.me

FOREWORD

I type this with a decent amount of hours into the game, three runs, full knowledge of the original and a full set of achievements, this is not mindless contrarianism, it's the honest opinion of an old fan who gave this remake a serious chance but was ultimately let down.

WHY WOULD YOU NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME?
Long story short, a remake should be something that surpasses the original game, or at the very least fix most of the issues while leaving the core elements untouched, this remake not only does neither but it does a 180° and makes the game worse outside of some minor QOL improvements.
Since the list of grievances is far too long and this isn't really the point of a review I'm gonna keep this orderly and give you a quick rundown of the major issues

WHAT WENT WRONG

Not only did the game not receive any sort of mechanical update, the people at XEEN arbitrarily changed longstanding mechanics of the series in favor of turning this game into Octopath Traveler with some vestigial SaGa mechanics that have also been greatly tampered with.
RS2 was a great, but fairly unbalanced game with lots of mechanics that should have been fixed if not replaced by more modern and better versions, we all know that completely invisible armor values weren't a good idea, the people at XEEN disagreed, however.
Instead of making armor values visible they're now gone entirely and regressed to rudimentary physical&magical defense values, sparking weapon techs now requires a minimum proficiency level, and so does inheriting techs in the dojo which adds a lot of unnecessary grinding, speaking of which they nerfed all the core functions such as debuff or counter accuracy only to tie them to switchable class passives which, guess what, also require you to fight a grand total of 60 FIGHT PER CLASS (Different genders have different passives so in most cases 120 fights!) only for your counters to work, and this is also locked behind the main story progression for some reason, not to mention it makes classes less unique as well since even the four elementals lost their identity entirely (and in the Nereid's case, her tail) now that everyone can gain their elemental gimmicks, even Coppelia no longer has her customary mecha immunities as an inherent part of her identity.
I could go on and on but expect all of the major mechanical flaws of the original to be here as well, more often than not in a worse and somehow more obtuse form, but the thing that irks me the most is how entire mechanical layers have been removed altogether, the Class personality system, which gave each class unique reactions and options to quests is gone, and only some vestigial elements survive in the form of the Comroon Strait and Miles route of the Landship quest being the only quests that still have the original class unique interactions, even the exploits like grinding the Guardian in Eirunep got worse as now that BR does not change enemies you can beeline for Lake Wyringa and grind Albions immediately at zero risk or investment.
The bosses have been turned into mindless damage races, with the final boss being the most insulting one as it's completely different and now designed on a timer where nothing matters but simply using Rapid Stream and frontloading as much damage as possible before it nukes you, how they managed to make something worse and more rudimentary than a 30 years old SNES game is beyond me.
The "difficulty" setting are abysmal as the only thing they do is bloat enemy HP and attack even further to the point it's impossible (and worthless) to play on Romancing as you unlock it as it forces you to grind through Expert first, and the lack of NG+ options in terms of carryovers makes it clear this was intentional since the only "strategy" there is to this game is charging your OD gauge, using Berserk and/or Shadow Servant and nuking anything in three turns even on Romancing.

The design philosophy of a game that tried its best to distance itself from generic, lazy JRPG conventions is also gone, now every single place in the world is sprinkled with generic treasure chests and shiny MMO drops that make zero narrative sense, a lot of dialogue makes no mechanical sense either now as the emperors and your annals claim that you eradicated goblins out of their hideout but if you go there 1000 years later they're still full of goblins because XEEN wanted generic JRPG grinding spots, now I'm supposed to do my smiths' work and go around the world gathering materials for them, making them look like incompetent idiots who can't do their job, and why in the world would an Emperor waste time on dozens of nonsensical JRPG quizzes in the university they funded? The original quiz made sense narratively and was a fun moment, having dozens of those is pointless bloating for the sake of having generic JRPG minigames.
Even the series longstanding tradition of free saving is gone now, and this game regresses to save points for no logical reason, with some egregious Dark Souls 3 moments with two save points next to each other.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Most zones look okay and clearly some efforts have been put in keeping the game in line with the original for the most part, some zones like the Melu desert have been overall adapted to modern standards in a satisfying manner, but in many parts there's now Xenogears tier platforming that does nothing but annoy you due to the exceedingly slippery and floaty movement and the needlessly large environments.
The campaign content is, for the most part, largely unchanged, outside of some aforementioned annoying limitation, the Ninja and Diviner classes have been integrated in the main game now that the Maze of Memory does not exist anymore, and the story moments have been adapted in a good way, the ending is still as good as the original, but the new stuff about the Seven heroes is handled terribly and characters that needed more content, like Sagzaar, received absolutely nothing.
Kenji Ito being the only returning member of the original staff has delivered a fantastic OST, but outside of two new tracks for the Dread Queen fight, the OST leaves something to be desired as again, the game needed more content on that too, especially since normal bosses still reuse Kujinshi's battle theme for no good reason, Minstrel Song and the DS remakes got this right, this game did not.
The japanese VAs delivered a very good performance, despite this game's awful localization which unfortunately happened due to the series' localizer being on leave, the cast is really good and they clearly had fun and put a lot of effort in their performance, not to mention many of them like Sugita and Nakamura are fans of the series so you know they gave the characters the respect they deserved.

CONCLUSION

As a fan, I do not know who this game was made for, the unicorn of the "wider audience" the producer mentioned surely made this game more popular than the previous releases, largely because it's not really a SaGa game anymore and because the executives decided this deserved more budget and advertisement than the others, so what we're left with is a Guilty Gear Strive situation where the original fanbase gets a fat middle finger in favour of pandering to people who never cared and probably will not care outside of this game.
Is it worth it to utterly bastardize and dumb down a beloved game series for money? Only time will tell, I can only hope Kawazu and the actual team will know better and that we never see something like this again, I know for sure I won't buy another "remake" of this kind.