Just released a video about this game too if you'd like to support my YouTube efforts!

Mega Man Legends 2 is a fascinating game. The moves it makes going from the first make sense, going bigger, more cinematic for the time, pushing the animation and graphical power of the PS1 pretty far quite honestly and impressively!

However the problem for me lies in how quite unsatisfying the entire experience is. Like yeah, it plays better, but the pure gameplay wasn't why I came to Legends in the first place. It was for the sense of place, the thought put into Kattleox as a location, the ways it gets you attached to it so specifically, the way it makes you feel apart of its world.

I could care less about the world of 2. Each location doesn't get much to it, the side quests that are there aren't really always the most engaging, the NPC's aren't as interesting or memorable as a lot of even the smaller minor NPC's from the first game. It feels like a game that scales up but doesn't expand the depth of its world to reflect that change of scale accordingly.

The story also takes quite a hit in this as well because of similar issues. What starts with quite honestly one of my favorite game openings ever with how it sets both the stage and its tone in such a razor sharp and crystal clear manor falls into quite a lot of meandering, empty plot threads and wasted time by the time all is said and done.

The few scenes that do pay anything off feel like an oasis in the neverending desert of constant setup that seems to only exist for another game to pay off which......

I'm bummed I feel so harsh on this game. Legends has become such a special kind of experience to me, so seeing that this is how 2 turned out is quite honestly a massive bummer. Like maybe 3 would've retroactively justified it in ways depending on how that went, but something about the world and this setting and all the cool mystery setup in Legends just feels like completely wasted potential.

It's not like the worst thing ever, but while I can accept The Misadventures of Tron Bonne being fine, this one honestly hurts more because of both what it could have been and where it could have continued to go given the chance.

They couldn't even get him off the moon in spirit man.

It’s very weird to see a series that has until now had such a small, tight team with a very clear authorial voice jump in prestige so that we’re now several rereleases out and firmly in the realm of originally unintended sequels and spinoffs. I didn’t realize that Apollo Justice actually preceded this game in release or I WOULD have played that one first and even now that I’ve committed to cleaving the series in half by trilogy with this little stop off in Investigation town in between. my brain is beginning to itch a bit. But it’s a neat exercise to get such a hard break in style from the original games and this one, which sees Takeshi Yamazaki (who came onto the series during the DS rerelease period and seemed like mostly an odd job guy before getting a planning gig on Apollo Justice) as the scenario writer, working closely with relative series newcomer Motohide Eshiro in the producer role to innovate the gameplay quirks that define this subseries. The fresh writing alone gives the game a very distinct vibe from its predecessors for better and worse.

The shift towards investigating with the intent to prosecute crimes places a greater focus on the methodology of the acts you’re looking into, and cases are generally speaking really complex in this game, and less structured, which I think is good. Investigations are more dynamic to begin with just by virtue of moving a little guy around a usually pretty limited screen, which drastically reduces pixel hunting – but they also only go as long as they need to because you’re not inhibited by the two-or-three day long trial system. It leads to a more natural progression. Edgeworth’s special logic minigame where he pieces together little bits of information in his mind as he collects them is unfortunately simple the whole time but it doesn’t ever stop being satisfying in the way that getting an answer right in these games almost always is. That’s the saving grace of the game – the act of playing Ace Attorney simply feels good.

The grace needs to be saved because the PACING is completely dreadful the entire time. There’s no punch, no drama to any of the cases here. Not even one time do you nail a villain at the end of a chapter with a big drop of a huge reveal or a satisfying click of a puzzle piece coming together. More than once I was caught off guard when I finished a case because I didn’t realize that the small, mundane piece of information I’d just revealed was going to be the clincher. This is at its worst in the final case, which might be the longest finale in the series, or maybe it only FEELS like it is, because it is so deeply tied to the previous case and it completely solved all of the emotional arcs of every major character roughly two hours before the game ends. Yeah you wrap up your spunky teenaged sidekick’s traumatic backstory, you earn the respect and friendship of the interpol detective who hates prosecutors, you solve the decade-old mystery of the phantom thief that’s haunted the game.

But what’s this? You have to catch the guy who runs the smuggling ring! Who killed….some guy! And it’s SO easy. Not once in this sequence did I find myself unable to immediately guess the correct answer to a riddle fifteen minutes before I was allowed to present it, and we are CONSTANTLY being interrupted by new characters storming into the room not to save the day but to do comedy bits. It doesn’t really spoil the mood though because there’s NOT really a mood to spoil because like I’ve mentioned nobody really cares at this point beyond the basic principle of not liking asshole murderers getting away with it!

On the subject of Too Many Characters, this is a place where the game strikes me as particularly insecure. This game is a nonstop parade of guys I Did Not Need To See Again. Why is Maggie Byrde making her third appearance? Why is Officer Meeks here for one scene? How do we, as a polite society, keep letting Wendy Oldbag have bigger and bigger roles in these games even though she continues to have One Joke and it Sucks Ass??? It’s tough because it sucks in both directions. On one hand, everybody involved in this series (including Shu Takumi, he is not innocent here) should be tried in a criminal court for the character assassination of Larry Butz, who in the first game was a kind of mean and stupid guy who is unlucky in love but ultimately has a heart of gold and is a key person in the lives of both of his friends and over time has become a moronic creep who will try to fuck any child he meets and doesn’t understand most of the things that come out of his own mouth. On the other hand I would love to spend more time with Ema Skye, I would love to check in with her, see what she’s up to, hear all about what she’s got going on. There’s a lot of potential for that character, especially free from the shadow of her big story in the re-release of Ace Attorney 1. Why is she only in one screen of the entire game?? If she’s gonna be here she should be here. It feels weird and desperate, like they’re scared I won’t like the game if they don’t constantly jangle keys in the shape of guys I remember in front of my face.

It’s a shame too because I do think the original characters are the actual best part of the game. I like Ema but I think in her original appearance she’s way too much of a Maya clone, distinguished mostly by having a Different Gimmick rather than a different personality. Kay Faraday is a completely different genre of spunky teen sidekick than either of the previous girls, and I find her endlessly funny and charming. Aggressively weird and goofy and cool and with a very fun gimmick that she clings to based on a series of genuinely affecting tragedies. Everyone in her orbit rocks too, Callisto Yew and Detective Badd both hall of fame Ace Attorney guys. Lang’s drama is not convincing to me but his connection to Shih-na is and his reactions to how their relationship evolves salvage him for me, and his affection for his subordinates is by far the funniest joke in the entire series. The original stuff here is consistently the best shit in the game. I wish it felt like they knew that.

For the first game that as far as I know had zero involvement from the series creator, it’s really interesting to see how it feels the same and how it feels different, and where it’s successful and where it’s not. I think the flaws are desperately glaring, and they are unfortunately mostly play-related, but the moment-to-moment act of Doing Ace Attorney is maybe the best it’s ever been. I just wish it was remotely as impactful as it ever had been in the past.

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

Bonus Definitive Edition content:
Limited Run Games is genuinely one of the most poorly managed companies on earth and I will never forgive them for giving me a PS5 copy of Cthulhu Saves Christmas instead of what I had actually ordered, a System Shock boxart poster. They also keep sending me extra copies of Jeremy Parish's books. Please, I do not need three copies of Virtual Boy Works.

Space Quest offers an interesting stylistic counterpoint to King’s Quest. Designed by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, guys who have prior Sierra credits as a programmer and an artist respectively, with Crowe in particular being something of a superstar who seems to have done sprite work for essentially every major Sierra franchise release for like a full decade.

Both series sit in a kind of moderately successful space between serious homage to their chosen genres and loving parody with that 80s style of MST3K-esque attitude that is inescapable in works from a certain flavor of 80s nerd culture, but Space Quest feels moderately more sober much of the time. The narrator may be as sardonic as ever, the joke may be that you’re a janitor tasked with saving the galaxy, but there’s still a great deal more mundane death and terror here than is typical of its contemporary Sierra stuff, the villains really straight laced and scary, the danger imminent and prowling. Maybe it was a conscious decision around the time - King’s Quest III would see a similar tonal shift with its slave narrative and wizard villain only a month after this game’s release.

That’s not to say there’s no humor - there’s quite a lot of it, but outside of the diner set piece and a couple of interactions with NPCs that play more like easter eggs than meaningful bits of story, it’s mostly limited to narration and fail screens. My understanding is that this becomes The Comedy Series much more explicitly than King’s Quest does so this was a bit of a surprise for me.

Space Quest feels like it carries an ambition to genuinely thrill the player, to push the limits of visual interactivity in adventure games. There are so many cutscenes in this game, so many sound effects and cinematic screens and animations. Stuff that’s genuinely breathtaking on the hardware this shit runs on, in the year it came out. This would have been thrillingly realistic stuff. It’s still cool today.

I wish it was all in service of a game that was a little less dull. Space Quest is a much more linear affair than any of the three King’s Quests I’ve played, or Colonel’s Bequest, which is fine, good even. But it did also mean that it was rare for me to find myself in a situation where I was genuinely teasing my brain, too. Environments being so closed, with so few characters to interact with and so few ways to investigate problems meant that solutions were usually immediately clear, or revealed after a relatively quick moina of the available space. This does, interestingly, mean that there’s a greater reliance on player dexterity - limiting your movement by having you be pursued by a killer robot for a quarter of the game, or a bridge that comes closer to collapsing every time you cross back and forth over it, or asking the player to avoid physical death obstacles via character movement rather than puzzle solving. These things feel somewhat artificial in the way they impede the player’s ability to progress what might otherwise be a too-simple series of puzzles, but if I were to look at it more generously, which I am always inclined to do, I would say they also feel like a young company trying to figure out fresh ways to stretch the legs of a still pretty new genre. Adventure games certainly weren’t new, but ones with GRAPHICS were, and the idea of the player character’s little avatar really having a presence beyond picking things up and putting them down properly was news! Which sounds wild but norms have to be established! This game is interacted with via a text parser.

And to its credit also I would rather a game be too easy than too hard. I think there is only one truly, genuinely evil moment where this game makes itself unfinishable, where you need to pick a piece of invisible glass up off the ground like an hour before you need it and you don’t need it until after crossing a threshold you can’t return from. This piece of glass is located somewhere I would say is only moderately intuitive to investigate, and if you don’t grab it in a very specific timeframe it becomes basically impossible to retrieve even before you can’t return to that screen.

But that’s the only one. There are other ways to fuck yourself but I think they’re much more player-faulty. It’s fine to let the player dig their own grave, I think, and these games encourage keeping like nine saves to a degree that I don’t think having these kinds of situations is really all that big of a deal - recovering progress goes quickly once you know the tricks.

I think writing about this has made me like it more, which is always a nice feeling to have, but I’m still kind of taken by a feeling of apathy, mostly. Now that I’ve tasted how much Sierra will be pushing the envelope only a couple years from now, I can’t help but go to sleep thinking of Roger Wilco, and dream of Laura Bow.

Demonstrates in perfect stride how this series has never had any clear idea for what they want Haruka to be, in such a way that it almost entirely uproots this whole story for me. My experience was more positive on this entry overall than it was with Yakuza 5, largely because its runtime is less than half of that game's torturously bloated length. This is a series that is at its most effective (to me) when it narrows its scope and focuses on the micro stories of its world’s inhabitants, rather than the endless vortex of clan warfare and revolving door system for cloak & dagger. It was honestly so refreshing that this was as stripped-back as it was. I see a lot of people almost rightfully decry the large swathes of Kamurocho being blocked off for what I’m assuming to be development timeframe reasons. It’s a shame not to see the Champion District in the shiny new Dragon Engine, but I’ll take a few bites out of a world map if it saves me tens of hours of playtime at this point.

Since much of the appeal of these games remains to me in its stunningly realised period piece virtual tourism, I’m always happy when they jumpscare me with an entirely new locale. Hiroshima’s gotta be my favourite in the series I’ve seen yet! It’s such a stunning portside town, coiling up a mountainside. It adds a level of verticality unseen in these games before, offering an incredibly scenic look into sleepy rural life in the Japanese afterglow. I’ll never personally have the funds to justify a trip to the country - so this series is about the best I’ll ever get, and it just doesn’t disappoint.

Alongside the Dragon Engine came some shifts to the gameplay I found very welcome (autosave 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯). I’m surprisingly keen on the revamped eatery system, better encouraging exploration and dining wherever possible for stat gains and tourism points. They fixed the rhythm game so the tracks aren’t bizarrely varying speeds. Also kind of hilarious to me how busted the dropkick is. Yaku 6 will throw so many mobs at you that it’ll almost feel like a musou game at points, and that attack felt like a Lu Bu finisher or something. The ragdolls are insanely fun too.

But yeah, the story was a miss for me. Broadly speaking, I’ve come to learn that you’re best off taking everything the Yakuza series says at absolute face value without an inch of scrutiny, because its platitudes about honour and family and determination tend to fall apart under even a non-prescription lens. It is so insane to me how Haruka spends 95% of this game in a vegetative state when she’s played such a pivotal role in setting the stage. As I mentioned, this series is terrified of scratching the surface of Haruka’s autonomy and growth into adulthood, god forbid she leaves the “Pure & Perfect Daughter” box she’s been bolted into. God forbid we see the romantic relationship between her and her partner blossom, her demonstrate her independence and stop being a mom for five minutes. It felt as though she learned next to nothing from her experiences in Yakuza 5 outside of the events in its final hour, once again sabotaging any attempt the game makes into having her stand up for herself and stop doing exactly as told. She’s stern but in the same way a Weeble is. And while Kiryu’s final letter demonstrated a touching degree of self-awareness w/rt his effect on the people around him, where he stands on family, etc, it was addressed to Daigo while Haruka was in the room lol.