After really loving the first game, I went into this game expecting to love it, and was initially disjointed that it was SO much of the same, but after a little while, I found the things this game in particular has going for it, and came to love it equally along with its predecessor.

Mechanically in terms of how your character moves and how battles generally work, it's exactly the same as rocket slime. You hop and jump around and fling yourself into enemies and items to pick them up and send them back to home base on all of the oodles of rafts and train carts lined across the world. Vehicle battles are still cases of collect the things and put them in cannons while sometimes fighting off intruders/invading their vehicle. Game design, however, is what this game has going for it over the original.

In terms of presentation, it's very silly just as Dragon Quest spin-offs tend to be. The story is about your troupe of friends (who only happen to look exactly like the group of friends from the last game but aren't the same slimes) who sail around the world on adventures. But when the 7 power orbs are stolen by the tail-gang, you're sent on a mission by the king to get them back. It's all just silly fluff and very kiddy: Don't expect to get any engaged by it. It's just glue to hold the stages together. The graphics are also a LOT of reused assets from the last game. Almost every character sprite, aside from the new enemies (about 50% more than the last game had), are reused, although all of the environments are in 3D, so they're all new.

Also, as a side note, the world map is modeled off of Earth, and the racist stereotypes of the bigger stages you go to, especially on the bosses you fight, had me in stitches. The jet-powered flying Statue of Liberty that says things like "Yes I Can!" and "FREEEEEDOM!" and "You've extinguished the flame of freedom..." is probably the reason this game never came out in America XD

Where all of the tank battles in Rocket Slime (2) were story based until the end game (if I recall correctly), Mori Mori Slime 3 has an overworld where you can sail your ship around and get into ship battles with other enemy ships you meet on the map. You sail around this world to the different towns and stages where you do the on foot(?) sections. Another new thing this game has is on-foot bosses, which in turn drop another new feature, super-weapons. When these are fired from your cannon, they bring up a huge animation on the top screen. If they hit, they do tooons of damage and you get another cool animation, but they're fairly easy to deflect, so you've gotta time when they're fired carefully. With the normal very powerful weapons still in the game though, in the very-very endgame, the super-weapons do become a bit obsolete, although not completely.

One of my favorite new features is the new balancing changes that have been made to the battle system. You can customize your ship to get slightly more HP or damage or firing speed, but the biggest part is changing the hull. A new hull means a new layout when you walk around the ship in battles and also different amounts of item dispensers, granted the new ones might be further away. The cannons tend to be a bit more cramped, so you're closer to the cannons more often, especially if you're in the enemy ship harassing them to keep them from firing stuff. However, knock-back is also increased, so getting knocked back into the cannon is much easier, especially with the smarter AI (they actually dodge attacks now). This make the best strategy from the last game of just immediate, constant harassment obsolete, so you HAVE to have actual proper ship battles now.

Several overpowered items have been nerfed as well. No longer do Metal King Shields travel very slowly like normal iron shields. They still absorb 5-hits, but they travel much faster, meaning they burn out quicker and don't provide the incredible defense they used to. There're also more items which just clear out the air through explosions or through weaving through the air between the 2 air-lanes. There's also a new lane: Because you're at sea, you can fire torpedos! They don't add too much because a great majority of items are air-based, but it's one more thing to keep track of. Allll of these ship changes combined with the increased enemy amount (and thus more possible crew-members with unique strengths and abilities) make for a much more varied and fun vehicle battle system which I absolutely love.

The game does have a bit of grinding if you want your ship to be the best it can possibly be, but if you're willing to just collect most everything you come across on foot (which isn't really a hassle) and are willing to retry the harder ship battles once or twice as opposed to just upgrading for more HP or damage, you shouldn't have too much trouble. The end-game content which I'm working my way through now however, is REALLY REALLY hellishly difficult, and requires a lot of grinding to get your ship to max abilities and really kitted out with the best ammunition.

In summary, it's a great sequel that builds well on the previous game's strengths. The only part I'm most sad with is that it does require a pretty good knowledge of kana and vocabulary (thought not Kanji) to understand, and it's a shame that it'll probably never come to English speaking territories for most people to play.

Trying to figure out why this game feels so uninspired when I loved the previous Rocket Slime so much. For one thing it's maddeningly repetitive; every non-"level" location in the game has the same exact layout. Got about ten hours in and realized I was still doing pretty much the same exact stuff I was doing the first hour, with the only variation being how each stage looks. The large-scale fights are still pretty fun but...I dunno. Aesthetic changes aside (a graphical upgrade, and you now fight with boats instead of mechs) it's really just kind of more of the same, with minimal tweaks or improvements. I remember there being a "town restoration" element in Rocket Slime that made for a good hook to keep building toward; the only driving force in the time I spent on this game was a bog-standard "collect all the crystals before the bad guys do" plot. Kind of a bore, really.