A Beginner's Guide to Romancing Saga 2

This Is Not An Easy Game
Less of a game play tip and more of a cautioning. Romancing Saga 2 can be a fairly challenging game for a lot of people more used to other RPGs due to ease of which enemies can easily kill your party. A single enemy with the right AOE attack, if not properly shielded or burst down, can ruin your day. (i.e. Earth elementals can cast stone shower, which is deadly during the early game stage)

Don't Be Afraid of a Party Wipe
Romancing Saga 2 operates on a succession system, where if you die, you immediately get to pick a new one. (With the exception of the Leon and the Final Emperor, that is.) This was intentionally done to help make sure that a bad encounter or one bad party wipe doesn't destroy your progress.

Try Different Emperors
Non-standard characters (characters that you don't have access to in the beginning) can teach you new formations in the dojo and are critical to your ramping up process. In addition, new emperors will bring new skill levels to the table if it is higher than what you're inheriting.

Invest in Different Skills Early
Your starting party has a heavy focus on swords and it is tempting to keep doing that but it is highly recommended that you start building your other skills early, especially magic. Magic's utility is so great in this game that it deserves it's own section. However, it is also important to explore other kinds of weapon skills too as swords are not always the most optimal weapons to use. Spears, while not always as effective as 2-hand swords in DPS, is relatively easy to get good gear for and a lot of special spear weapons have AOE techs that can be very handy in wiping up mobs. Short Swords are choke full of useful utility techs that while are not DPS heavy can be useful in disabling enemies in a fight. Mix and match your party skill sets early can help you develop these techs in all directions to give you options.

Invest in the Magic Research Center early
As said earlier, magic's utility is game changing in RS2 and is something every player needs to invest in early to get the most out of. However, the only way to get new spells is literally through the magic research center and so it should be the FIRST improvement you try to get. To get it, your emperor needs to have 25 MP and you need 1 million crowns. If you use Leon's light ball early and get the fireball spell from Ruby during Gerard's time alone in the beginning of the game, you can easily get up to 25 MP fairly early by the time you can build improvements. And 1 million crowns, while it seems like a lot, can easily be obtained if you grab and save every treasure chest in the early game.

Do not forget the power of status ailments
While in most other RPGs, status ailment type attacks tend to lose their usefulness early, in RS2 they can be viable consistently throughout the game. Your starting light magic spell, light ball, for example, can help you through pretty much ALL of the early encounters all the way through the Canal Fortress. Therese is actually a very important character for this reason. She comes with the ability to lay on stuns and confusions statuses early.

If you're stuck, go explore the map
Early in the game, you will get a lot of quests directly given to you by your ministers in Avalon. However, past the early stages a lot of quests are locked away in locations. If you get stuck and don't know what to do, just go explore around and talk to people in remote villages. You might uncover something!

Don't be Afraid to Fight Encounters
The game scales your enemies by the number of battles you have fought. This has led to a lot of players to be afraid to fight battles. This is NOT something you should be concerned about. The only time you can over level is if you don't do any R&D stuff and just grind. As long as you don't grind early and neglect your development stuff, you'll be fine. Most dungeon crawls you might fight a dozen or so enemies tops.

Do NOT rely on the defense number alone
RS2 has a strange design where the defense value shown in game only covers ONE defense type. In RS2, there are EIGHT defense types: slash, bludgeon, pierce, range, heat, cold, electric, and status. The number displayed in your equipment screen ONLY shows slash defense. Since the defense value between physical attacks don't fluctuate nearly as dramatically as magic attacks, it's fine to use the number as a proxy value of your physical attack defense, but for your magic related attacks, you will do far better with accessories and shirts.

Double Cut
Double Cut doubles your standard DPS off of a 1-hand sword user and serves a powerful boost to the early game. Too bad you will never spark double cut. It's a legacy quirk from the original game, but the main reason is because the game gives you the tech early, and your standard 1-hand sword users in early game do not spark the tech. And as a result, the tech, having never been sparked, never gets registered in the dojo. To fix this, you need to seal the tech and then respark it. You can accomplish this by sealing the tech early and then giving James a one-hand sword. (His spark type is Greatsword Generalist, which is one of the types that sparks double cut) The question is when you want to do it. You can that either before you fight the goblin king, or before you fight Kzinssie, or after that and grind a bit.

Status Ailments usage
Therese does NOT do a lot of damage early on. Her short sword and bow just aren't very powerful. And that's okay because that's not her role. her primary role in the starting party is to do things: feints, haphazard arrow, and id break. Feints can lay down stuns and against a slower enemy can serve as a good way to stun lock early enemies from acting. Haphazard Arrow is an easy way to dispatch groups of mooks with an AOE attack. Id Breaker can lay down confuse statuses 3 times, which can also be useful to lock down some of the stronger enemies with low resistance. (i.e. All the boss enemies in the Canal Fortress can be hit with confusion) Gerard, at speed 20 (which is faster than Therese), can also be an effective stun locker with his knee split tech. In addition, Leon / Gerard's light ball can blind enemies and reduce their accuracy by a large margin. A combination of using light ball, id break, and feint can help you lock down a lot of the early boss' attacks. Do not neglect to use them.

Imperial Cross Aggro
Bear, from your starting party, occupies the vanguard position in the imperial cross formation. This means about 60% of all attacks will go to him and he gets an auto-block status before and after his actions. Bear also starts with the heaviest armor, a shield, AND can spark parry, the 1-hand sword tech that nullifies certain physical attacks. (can't do range and magic, obviously) This means that Bear's most effective role could be to just use parry and tank the damage.

Armor slows you down
If you want to use a stun lock strategy, speed is the most important thing to optimize on. However, every piece of gear you wear adds to weight, which imposes a penalty on your character. There is a scale in your storage room for a reason. Use it when you outfit your party.