The second half of the story of the Dark Hunter game that my partner and I played last week. We played the first half, and it ends quite unceremoniously, so we obviously had to carry on to finish the second half as well. Just as with the first one, she played on emulated hardware and I watched her, but the actual “gameplay” is so simple that I felt it more than adequate to call this one “beaten” for myself as well once we hit credits, and it took us a little over 2 hours to do it (as this game is a fair bit shorter than the first half for reasons we’ll get into later).

The second half of the story of our three unlikely heroes (the school girl, the vengeful loner, and the secret agent) fighting against the interdimensional invaders trying to take over the world via a remote Japanese high school. While I do say second “half”, that’s not strictly true. As our playtime implies, this chunk of the story has dramatically less content than the first part, though only part of that is gameplay related. This would more accurately be described as the last third, or even the third act of the story, and it honestly suffers for being so short. We really exhaust most of our narrative momentum in the first part, and this part of things mostly just feels like a long walk to the end. Granted, we do get some hilarious moments here and there with certain action scenes and the performances of the actors, but we found it overall less entertaining than the first half.

The gameplay is still more or less the same, though there are still some very notable changes. So far as things being similar go, we still have our English-language education-focused presentation. You can still switch between Japanese and English for your subtitles and voiceover, and you can still also rewind things however you like. The actual value of this as an educational tool remains just as dubious as I felt it was in the first part, but at least it hasn’t gotten any worse XD.

There are still some video game-y parts as well, but they have mercifully been tuned down significantly compared to the last one. The dreadfully long and poorly constructed first-person adventure sections, in particular, are thankfully completely absent from this game (and that’s another big reason for this being so much shorter than the first game to go through). We still have the non-light gun sections, a bit of outright English practice, and some reaction time tests, but it’s all inoffensive and pretty quick to get through. Strangely enough, a large amount of the fights that happen aren’t even mini games you get to partake in. While I wouldn’t call the fights “fun”, per se, it’s yet another thing that robs the ending of its climactic nature because you don’t even get to do the fights against our big foe we finally meet up with. Would it have massively improved the game had we gotten to do those fights? Absolutely not. However, I think it would’ve at least made the climax more memorable rather than the wet thud we’re left with in the version we have.

The presentation is just as amusing and funny as the first game. Japanese VA continues to be quite good while the English VA continues to be hilarious. The translation also continues to be good while the animation continues to look very uncanny (and very funny). The music (of what there is) is very forgettable, and the 3D animations also look about as rough as you’d expect for ’97.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you played and enjoyed the first half, then you’ll find this half worth playing through as well. Despite the worst of the mini games taken out, I still find this one underwhelming compared to the first game, however. While I certainly would’ve preferred a better put together conclusion to the game, it’s at least short enough that you can treat it as a slightly interactive B-movie to laugh at with a friend, and at least in that regard, I think that’s the least you could ask of it.