While a few other games have dominated my time and I'll likely not go into full blown investment until much later, Ihave been playing a bit of Romancing SaGa 2 and it's a really interesting change of pace from the rest of the series. The LP mechanic is introduced in this game but serves a unique function. Health is completely restored after every battle except for LP, but since this is a generational story, if your MC's LP reaches zero, they die and you switch to their successor. Due to this LP=true death, you have a crap ton of characters to choose from to be in your party since anyone of them can die permanently so characters are less story focused and more class focused. It's still too early to see where it will go, but the Sim-lite empire building aspect of the game has some interesting potential as well.

My major gripe from combat in the first game has been removed, any skills your character learns from using a weapon stays with them instead of losing them when you switch out equipped weapons. The rest of the game plays out a bit like the original from there, but there is a group of advisors in your castle that spy for you and give you a heads up about what quests are available, which is a neat time saver instead of having to chat up every NPC you meet. You also have two different bank accounts, a personal one you carry around to buy stuff in shops, and one for the empire which can be used to research new weapons, armor, spells, and formations.

You also unlock unique classes and characters through these events, a very early one is a Thief who plagues the citizens at night. Once you gain the ability to switch to night time, you can encounter her in the city and do a minor quest that eventually ends with you recruiting here to your cause. I'm not sure how all of this will translate once we start to seriously jump through time skips. I'm only on Gerad, the second emperor, and the one seen in most of the official artwork.