Justin Hall

I normally don't bother reviewing video games, but I felt moved to do so for this one. Having come from the original, I knew mostly what to expect. Unfortunately, there are many in-game mechanics that just don't do it for me. Minor spoilers below. 1) Automatic Soul-Canon. You already can't manually save, so this now removes the option just dying and starting from the previous auto save. You have to just restart the game unless you want to lose a child. 2) Extremely limited items. Like the first game, it's impossible to upgrade your facilities in just one play through. You have to decide between relationships, upgrades, and happiness. You can't have all three. Some might consider this just a game mechanics, but it irks me, just the same. This also prevents farming and kitchen upgrades, which prevents food buffing. The devs gimped this on purpose to artificially make the game harder. Food bugs were very important in the first game. 3) Enemy life bars are all the same length, but vary dramatically in density and don't reveal any sort of numbers to the player. It's impossible to know how long a fight is about to be. 4) Enemy shield regeneration is out of control on this game. For the harder enemies you have to take down their shield, but some regenerate it very quickly. One of the final bosses does this and prevents you from immediately taking it back down until it's at full strength. Then, there's no ability (unless it's available on the 2nd play through) to take down all the shields at once. This makes it almost impossible to really lay into some of these bosses. 5) SP is extremely limited and very expensive to buy. The automatic hp and sp recovery is biased toward hp. You never get a full sp bar from the locations on the map by the latter part of the game. Even the email sp recovery costs a thousand dollars. 6) Like the first game, you can only heal during battle and you don't auto heal, ever. 7) Defending only lasts one attack. 8) Multi-hit attacks don't remove more weakness icons than single got attacks. This doesn't make any sense. In summary, while I mostly employed this game, it feels like the devs tried very hard to make it more difficult by altering game mechanics to mute their effectiveness. Some modern gamers with endless time might just tell me to gitgud, but how? The game is on rails. I can't practice. I can't redo battles. I can't train. It's a shame because the first game found a better balance, overall.

This is a criminally overrated game. It doesn't know if it wants to be fully 3D or Resident Evil pre-rendered style. The music is contemporary pop (not my thing). Voice acting is good (English). I despise the hand-drawn anime cutscenes. It's lazy. All cutscenes should be rendered using the same character models as the in-game content. Fighting mechanics feel underdeveloped. Very shallow. The storyline is flexible, allowing you to do lots of optional content, but the main story just isn't there. The is just an opinion. I know this is a very popular game, but if you want a real strong story with developed characters, look elsewhere.