SaGa Frontier 2 tells a story in a very different way than most other RPGs. Instead of taking a party of characters through an entire adventure, you follow one of two different timelines. Each timeline has a few different paths to take and certain opportunities to discover. The story of the game flows between each timeline, allowing you to discover new plot points and characters. Basically it's like playing two different adventures whose plotlines connect every once in a while.

The story, while sometimes predictable, is never as convoluted as the story in the first SaGa Frontier. It follows the life of Gustave the XIII, an banished heir to a vast kingdom. You follow his life and make decisions along the way, eventually bringing him to face his fate and return to the land where he was born, and make a claim for his rightful kingdom. Gustave, however, is not a typical goody-two-shoes character. There is much that is evil about Gustave, and that is perhaps one of the best things SaGa Frontier offers to the genre. You watch as he matures from a child to an adult, and how his actions affect those around him. It's refreshing to see a new take on the oft-overused good-guy-saves-the-world storyline so prevalent in today's RPGs. The other scenario has you following Wil, a young digger who sets out to find his fortune. Eventually you will discover how their paths cross.

As you follow the timeline of either character, you will inevitably come to points where you need to fight to survive. The battle system in SaGa Frontier 2 is your standard, but with a few pleasant twists. When you fight only one enemy, you have the choice of fighting as a team (if you have more than one character), or fighting alone. Fighting alone offers you the ability to see both your character and the enemy up close. These battle use more detailed characters, both larger and more colorful than the normal characters used in overworld/battle scenarios. In battle, you have the choice of using different weapon attacks, such as thrust, cleave, or slash. In the one-on-one fights, you have the opportunity to combine these attacks into two (or more) hit combos that can be used in the team battles as well. These attacks do more damage as well as possess the ability to be combined with your characters' Anima (the source of magic in SF2) to do even more damage.

Anima comes in various types -Fire, Tree, Stone, etc.- and provides life to the planet and magical skills to the people. Gustave the XIII, however, is born without Anima, and is banished because of it. Each character (with the exception of Gustave) has a type of Anima that they can channel into their weapon. As you practice combos in the one-on-one fights and as you gain levels, you will be able to cast magic using their Anima through the weapon.

You might expect SaGa Frontier 2's story to be told using large amounts of million-dollar CG, but none of that is used. The game's graphics are entirely hand-drawn in 2D. Most gamers will immediately want to shy away from 2D nowadays, but to do so would be missing the beauty the game has to offer. SF2 looks breathtaking; it's a watercolor storybook come to life. The beautiful and vivid hand-drawn artwork adds a lot of atmosphere to the game, which was unfortunately missing from the original. The character designs are similar to those in Final Fantasy Tactics; they are very colorful and fit in perfectly with their surroundings. One slight downfall, however, is the lack of animation in most of the characters. A disadvantage of 2D is the difficulty in displaying emotion, but the story does not suffer too much because of it.