This game is criminally underrated especially when it seems like the first game gets all the attention, and personally I find this one to be a massive improvement in every regards, from writing, to characters, to gameplay.
I have to say I'm in love with the setting and atmosphere the game brings to the table, every idea from the first game feels expanded upon as well as progressing the setting making it feel like such a good sequel to the world and F&H

everything feels more fair and balanced while still being a brutal dark fantasy rpg, the battle royale premise does actually intertwine with the gameplay and allows players to make choices how they want to play this game, while also having an underlying plot beyond both what happened in the town the game takes place in and the nature of the death game.

having characters die this time around feels like much more of a consequence because of how likable they are, not saying I don't like the ones from the first game, but I feel there is more depth and quality to the characters this time around.
especially the women characters who get to be way more cool and not just an add on to the important man character I feel. but those consequences come back in that keeping characters alive and trying to save everyone route isn't what everyone will go for, you have options how you play the game and who you play as, each character having a different playstyle which makes replay-ablity a strong feature like the last game but you will see events you haven't seen before it's great, even if you are not killing the other characters they can still die from other monsters or story events if you aren't careful. it intertwines good narrative and characters with player freedom in ways I wish games would do more without sacrificing the writing.

id say also unlike the first game I can recommend this one more due to the nature of the sexual imagery being more tasteful this time around, that's not to say its perfect or for everyone and personally I would keep a lot of the sexual imagery because it is good body horror but that's what it should feel like rather than someone's fetish or as a bad end in the case of the first game.

I can see why people like the first game more, either the setting or how short the first one is if you know what you are doing, even if Termina can be as well, it boils down to my preference of how the writing is handled as well as all the gameplay improvements that I feel make the game more a fair and balanced challenge rather than hard for the sake of being hard.

overall really solid horror rpg that mixes narrative and gameplay in a fun scary way and is still getting updated.

CW: Depictions of extreme acts of violence towards children, suicide, mentions of sexual assault, gore.

Estimated read time: 10~ minutes.

We (Laika) hear from our daughter (Puppy) over the radio that cousin Poochie, her best friend, has been crucified with his own guts by The Birds. No more than a minute later or so, we see cousin Poochie, as described.

Fuck.

...Now our friend Jakob is going after The Birds for revenge, what a fucking idiot. A total suicide mission. Fuck. Gotta catch up to him.

Fuck.

That's the very start, the intro. Yes, the content warning precedes this too in-game (I merely added the gore warning, though that should be obvious if you saw the trailer); I thought about expanding it even more, honestly, but I feel that would be spoilery. Anything more than explicitly labeled in the CW is never on-screen anyways, but at a few key moments it made me choke up.

Laika: Aged Through Blood really doesn't hold any punches, save maybe one, but it's the difference between dealing with extremely heavy themes and piling on so many that nobody's going to touch your game. I still think for many the game is too much to deal with, when the barometer for "heavy" content to most consumers of media is "saying goodbye to a friend" or "maybe we question why we shoot people sometimes".

Mechanically it similarly doesn't really hold many punches, sort of, it's a rather demanding game while also being extremely unique to actually play. It's ultimately a fusion of sidescrolling driving with twin-stick shooting, emphasis on momentum and careful angling; weirdly precise aiming, though with a somewhat generous aim assist, which feels weird at first but after a bit I stopped thinking about how it works. I'd say after my second real boss the game's general movement also truly clicked with me, and in that regard it's one of the most satisfying games I've ever played to perform well at, it just looks so sick when you pull off weapon swapping to deal with a whole group of enemies in the span of one jump, calculating your target priority and executing on it... It's the balance game designers toil with endlessly and it's something I feel Laika: ATB more or less nails immediately, with only occasional hiccups in some awkward encounter design. The bosses themselves are frankly kind of whatever, but thematically they all kinda nail it. It has what I could only compare to "bloodstains" in the form of "viscera sacks", whereupon dying to an enemy or falling off your bike (falling into a death pit or similar doesn't drop one.
It's worth mentioning that I think a certain boss in particular is easily the worst part of the game, about halfway through, lol; got stuck there for an hour+ but when I beat it I felt like I could take on the rest of the game without any real troubles.

And that soundtrack... God, the soundtrack... I know for many they'll find the lyrics insufferable; a lot of people don't even like having em for credits sequences, and normally I'd say "SAME!"; but you know what? I love the OST. It makes it feel so much more grounded, the mixing is wonderful too, can hear the actual slaps on drums, or the breathing; just very organic ya know? The way you acquire tapes as you progress through the game also seems fitting relative to the location they're found in for the most part, not all of them hit but most are bangers.

Major spoilers from this point on, until closing thoughts.

"Fuck me if I care."

Getting to this point in the game struck my heart with a twinge of pain, if you know you know. I gush about the game mechanically but for me it's the symbolism and pure vent energy behind everything. Laika's angry, I'm angry. Laika's sad, I'm sad. Some friends you know you'll be seeing for the last time. Other things are more systemic. Sometimes you're given a choice, one that likely would do nothing for the long run, yet immediately after I felt genuinely awful for acting in anger during Closure; I felt as though I'd failed my own moral compass, because I was immersed in Laika's suffering, her anger, her tug of war between apathy and empathy. I let apathy win once and felt like shit. I need to clarify the game never forced me to. More on this later.

There is a revelatory moment late into the game that explains a very specific enemy behavior that confused me and other people: The birds who don't attack, that's not a bug. It's deliberate. They are effectively committing suicide in protest of the war, feigning their positions as much as possible and willingly being mowed down to fulfill their own moral and philosophical code, even after we desecrate their religious and cultural center in revenge of Poochie; because they leave their long history behind as it's been repurposed as the heart of a new eugenics advocacy and research program. Sounds familiar...
Also, at the religious center, the person who's the only reason we're able to get in isn't a bird, but someone who willingly became a slave to them so she could get closer to their most treasured history; as an archeologist and historian, to her it was worth it. After helping us demolish all of it, we find her having hung herself in guilt of destroying her passion. She did it for what in her eyes was a righteous mission, but the weight of destroying culture was too much to bear.

At one point, Puppy asks her mother if she'll be like her one day, Laika responds by recounting her experience inheriting the curse. She explains that it is hereditary, that her body felt like death, eating itself from the inside out and like being on fire, until she bled out; her memories played back instantaneously as she revived, taking the curse away from her mother and into her. Puppy doesn't seem too phased by all of this, but also says little.
Later it is revealed Laika has lost two daughters who bled to the curse but failed to actually survive the process, thus permanently dying; all this Laika omitted telling Puppy, whom she didn't try to become too attached to for fear of experiencing the same pain all over again. In a subquest, we follow Laika go through PTSD of one of these deaths. It is revealed later the curse is not exclusive to Laika's family; the foreigner at the bar, upon finally figuring out what she's saying, talks of her own home, how there existed a woman with the same curse of immortality. She bled too, but rather than become a pawn for her village, she threw herself off a cliff, and the body was never found.

The big thing here is that the curse, reviled by the carrier, is sought after by those looking to turn them into permanent soldiers. The birds who are adamant about eugenics want to abduct one with the curse to study it, in hopes of becoming immortal themselves. This culminates in Herman taking Puppy out to hand her off to someone, to get rid of what he considers a target to the village. We confront him at the bar, detailing excruciating torture that will be inflicted if he does not reveal where our daughter is. After he tells us he handed her off to someone at the bird city, we dome him, then head off after Puppy.
We track them down to a bar, where the "someone" is a singer who we confront with a shot to the liver; we explain they'll be dead in minutes if they don't explain where Puppy is. They explain they gave Puppy to a bird named Trook, who was going to use her as his Ticket to Heaven. We shoot the singer as well, before heading off to find Trook and Puppy. We find Trook in a dumpy little hideout with Puppy who's tied up on a bed, and we try to barter with him, explaining that Puppy does not actually have the curse, and that we will literally kill ourselves to give him some blood if he lets her go. He considers it for a moment, hesitating, then says he doesn't trust us, and begins pulling his gun out on Puppy; but we intercept this and dome him immediately, rescuing Puppy and taking her home.

(CW for paragraph: rape)
While out in the world I noticed some new NPCs about halfway or two-thirds through the game, one of which was this older man asking for us to return his young daughter home. By this point I was pretty set on doing all of the sidequests, so we tracked her down to Where the Waves Die. There we find her corpse, and her diary. The birds killed her on-sight, and the diary, quite unusually from most other items in the game, is not read back to us directly by Laika; she simply remarks. "Fuck... I wish I could un-read that."
When we return to the man to tell him the news, and confront him about what's in the diary, he plays dumb; we press him further, and he cracks, simply saying that "she was the only love in my life." It's heavily implied that the man was molesting and raping his own daughter. The sidequest is completed, and, much to my surprise, you can execute the man on the spot with no punishment. Fuck him.

"More on this later": Poochie's killer turned out to be a child soldier not much older than Poochie, who did so in rage after ceaseless mockery and abuse from his fellow soldiers; given the title "Kidgutter". In Closure, we find him wallowing in an abandoned warehouse, slowly starving himself to death in guilt and all but asking us to kill him. I hesitated, but only briefly, before pulling the trigger. I sat there for a while thinking about what I'd done, the quest was completed already before that; I never had to pull the trigger. Would Laika have pulled the trigger? I thought so in that moment, but when I became unsure, I felt genuine guilt and not the kind that's easier to answer past an "I don't know". I think the action were automated, Laika "could" have, but given the option not to, I have a feeling she'd find it in her somewhere to spare him. To have him starve to death instead? Maybe, or maybe she'd set him down a path of redemption as an ally to help bring an end to it all. I don't know. I'm sorry.

...

In the finale of the game, we learn that the Ticket to Heaven was to go to the new bird city that flies in the sky nearly perpetually, and work with an inside agent who opposes the bird regime. We board the flying city, and with their help, continue to shut down critical components that let the city thrive, and we confront their leader, a pure totalitarian dictator literally referred to as the Two-Beak God. After a straightforward battle, we defeat him, but the birds in a last ditch effort to commemorate their leader follow through with dropping "The Egg", the second nuke. We immediately dive after it, while getting calls from Puppy who is sick; her body about to be bled, the curse is taking its toll on her, all while we skydive chasing after this bomb in an attempt to save the world. More and more birds fall after us, diving to their own deaths for the sake of fulfilling their leader's vision in an attempt to stop us, but we keep going. Puppy radios back, informing Laika that she has bled, and lived, and has the curse now.

That's.. great, Puppy...

And with tears welling up, we take one last shot into the bomb, destroying it mid-air and being engulfed in flames, along with the destruction of the city-regime.

Fuck.

Closing thoughts.

Laika: Aged Through Blood, while I think rough structurally (gameplay-wise), is an unbelievably poignant allegory for womanhood, specifically the systemic mistreatment of it; the entire "curse" is the game's namesake, to be aged through blood, as that marks the end of being a girl and the beginning of being a woman, sought after to produce an ideal offspring, or more pawns for war, or simply glorified servitude in the house; completely disregarding the person of the woman and dehumanizing her as much as possible into her utilitarian and traditional role extremes. The entire game feels like a vent piece, soundtrack and all, and my lord it feels utterly cathartic to me; it rides a line that I appreciate a lot more compared to most "Art Games" that love beating you over the head very literally and directly with what their message is, though those have a place in my favorites as well. I cried.

In a word: Mother.

Favorite tracks:
Mother
The Last Tear
My Destiny
Lonely Mountain
Trust Them
(main menu)
(whole album's on Spotify btw)

I honestly could say a whole lot of shit about Kingdom Hearts as a series but especially the first game. I've been playing KH1 very specifically pretty much since the original game released back in 2002. I have so many fond memories, so many hours spent wandering the levels, getting acquainted with the worlds and their gimmicks, platforming and ideas.

There's something tangibly there in KH1 that really doesn't particularly permeate the rest of the series. Like yeah, the combat mechanics absolutely improve, the series finds its identity in a lot of differing ways but there's something about the raw experimental edge and janky nature of this first entry that really isn't felt in the rest of the games.

The atmosphere here is almost uncannily eerie at points, especially in locations like Destiny Islands, Traverse Town, Hollow Bastion and End of the World. A kind of unsettling hint of darkness that unsettled me more as a kid (that Ansem in the cave scene genuinely scared the fuck out of me as a child I hated that shit lmao I always used to think that dude was like hiding in my closet about to call me a stupid bozo who didn't know anything) but some of the visuals, haunting gothic styled architecture and offness isn't felt to me in a number of later entries like it is here. Like some games do get closer to it again (0.2 is MAYBE the closest in years with 1 section in 3 getting a little closer too) but it's not really to the same level and degree that I feel this game really nails.

Like I adore the implications with stuff like the secret boss cutscene being really fuckin creepy and weird and off! The game is full of moments and ideas like that, the false Destiny Island in the end with the dead palm tree and no waterfall, the secret experiment room you uncover, all of Hollow Bastion and its gothic tones. It's so fuckin cool!

I like how this game integrates the Disney worlds with the actual overarching plot generally rather than just being flat out recaps most of the time (Atlantica having King Trident know what's up and shit talk the MC's is genuinely fantastic), I dig how this lays the groundwork for the rest of the series to build its world and concepts and ideas off of (even if they don't always work out the best in some of them DDD I'm looking at you).

I dig the gameplay systems and what they were going for with magic being more of a resource you have to build and manage, encouraging you to be more aggressive in order to build it back up. Though I do wish that being a purely magic focused build/character was a little more doable but whatever. Final Mix does add good additions like a camera that makes some goddamn sense and having Triangle be for opening chests and stuff like some of the moves you unlock like Sonic Blade and stuff to more reflect games like 2 and what they were going for more there. Though a Final Mix change I don't particularly enjoy is the color changes to the Heartless, I think the way its handled takes away from a l o t of the atmosphere and art direction of this game specifically and some just aren't good recolors like LOOK AT THIS

Potential hot take as well maybe possibly or maybe I have 2002 brain worms but honestly I really love the platforming in this game. I love how much they kinda messed around with it and while a bit slippery at points felt like something that could've been built upon or made a bit more interesting to do! Maybe made more interesting challenges or anything with it but I feel the series kinda just gives up on that aspect after this and that's kind of a shame. I really find it fascinating how much of that identity and idea permeates a loooot of this first game and how immediately 2 does away with pretty much the rest of that, with some lightly coming back in bits and pieces as apart of fights and some light exploration but otherwise nowhere near the same degree as explored in 1. I feel like that does make 1 stand out a little more in the kind of shit they were throwing at the wall to try out and everything too, same with the colored health bars idea that I honestly really fucked with!

Also something specific with this HD edition is I think some of the music is slightly just a little worse than the original. Like the original Night of Fate has a particular intensity to it that STILL to this day gives me fuckin goosebumps. The new version of Night of Fate does NOT hit in the same way at ALL. Something about it feels almost dulled? Like parts of it just aren't mixed how they originally were and I think it massively dulls the impact and effect of the track. Multiple songs in this version are like this and its kind of a bummer that there's still no kind of option like in the later releases of the Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster that let you choose the OG OST if you prefer that. I know the remaster process for this was a bit of a mess due to supposedly all of the original assets being lost and having to essentially remake it all from scratch but I feel like the music out of all of it would've been the easiest to reimplement. But maybe they didn't have the original files of the tracks or something like that who the fuck knows. It's a bummer to me either way!

Overall though, this game will always stick with me, I will pretty much come back to this game forever for the rest of eternity. I could completely burn out of this series or hate some entry or whatever and still be all into playing KH1 all over again because it's so utterly special to me. I could go on and on about little strats for fights or what worlds can be completely skipped or how to get through world's quickly or fun facts about certain inclusions and ideas within the game itself. It's a personal heartfelt favorite that makes me feel a lot of things and I absolutely can talk about to absolute fuckin death man.

Kingdom Hearts opened my mind to the possibilities of what video games could be. More than just the Mortal Kombat 2's and Super Mario 3's of the world. It was the first game to really get me into its narrative, to really hook me and never really let me go. Even now I'm still invested in this series, its characters, its secrets, its fun goofy nature and its heartfelt messages and ideas. I love Kingdom Hearts for everything it is and while I wish certain elements of the series were carried forward in ways I am still happy overall with where things have gone since 2002.

I'll be real. As a kid, I always thought the first Shinobi game was kinda arse and just poorly designed. It's hard to fault Sega when it was made in 1987 and the blueprint for a fun action platformer wasn't really something they could just copy yet. However, as someone who tremendously enjoys the first Castlevania, Mega Man, and of course Ninja Gaiden games, it's important to note all the ways Shinobi 1 dropped the ball compared to those games, and why it didn't make such a cultural impact.

The player dies in a single hit. There are cheap as hell enemies spawning left and right, so that coupled with the previous part means the player must slowly inch their way across the screen and use the bomb right before dying whenever possible. The player cannot move around like a badass ninja at all. There are 3 different powerups, but they all behave exactly the same way with only animation differences for some fucking reason. The levels are balanced around rescuing the small ninjas for powerups, but each ninja can only be rescued once which makes stages exponentially harder should the player lose any life. Yet, the best way to progress in many stages is to continuously retry them after killing the boomerang enemies since they are the only enemies who don't respawn.

It's just a nightmare of a game! As far as ninja action platformers go, I've beaten every Ninja Gaiden game, every Strider game, every Shinobi game, Hagane, etc and even done challenge runs for a lot of those. I am not shitting on the game just for being hard; I am shitting on the game for being the wrong kind of challenge, the one where every single enemy is equally dangerous in an action platformer.

However, after the recent Shinobi 4 announcement, I promised myself I would replay every single Shinobi game. That meant starting with 1. I had heard some inklings about the SEGA AGES version, so on a whim I decided to play it for my replay and, well...

Wow! They made Shinobi 1 fun!

The SEGA AGES port rebalances the game in various ways. There is now a turbo button, which makes Joe's attacks far more reliable for both the bonus levels and hitting fast as hell enemies. Joe wears his iconic white costume now, which looks way better than the completely generic costume in the original game. Speaking of things that are now in line with the rest of the series, Joe can actually take a hit before dying. No longer are levels balanced around saving the ninja girls since the powerups are permanent; now the player can actually move more freely around levels and feel like a badass ninja.

It's really the little things that help. The original arcade version had a copyrighted picture of some famous actress. On Switch, it was hacked and changed to an Altered Beast ad. Very charming! I also really appreciate all the extra options. There are options to fit the screen to be pixel perfect along with a solid scanline filter.

Perhaps my favourite change however is the melee mode. The player can now use melee attacks whenever with the click of a single button, as opposed to the original where it was context sensitive. Coupled with the vibration option, it feels really smooth. Definitely in line with the 6 button mode of Shinobi 3.

Also I loved the ending omg! The twist that the villain was actually Joe's mentor who wanted to bring about a great civil war since he wanted ninjas to be important to society again would have been mindblowing if I played this in 1987. It wasn't quite as shocking as Fantasy Zone's ending which left me thinking about video games as an artform, but for a silly ninja arcade game it was insane.

So yeah, my thoughts are the AGES version elevates the game from maybe a 4-5/10 to a 7ish/10. You're still left with an all too short game that isn't the most visually memorable nor does it have the best music. However, the levels are a lot more fun to breeze through than ever thanks to the improved gameplay mechanics, and it's a short and sweet experience with a great ending. If nothing else, it laid the foundation for Shinobi 3 which is definitely a top 20 game of all time for me at the very least. The SEGA AGES version knocks this from an experience that can take hours to master to a 15 minute ride. Definitely check it out any way you can.

I look forward to replaying and reviewing the rest of the series!

I just find it amusing that the classic Sonic game with the time travel gimmick is so chronologically confusing. Due to being developed at the same time, Sonic CD was released after Sonic 2 but takes place before it, and seems a lot closer in graphical style to the original game!

Anyway, this makes a really interesting foil to Sonic 2 because it tries a lot of different ideas both for better and worse, the most obvious one being the time-travel mechanic. Being able to travel backwards and forwards in time means lots of additional content (four different variations of each stage!), and the optional goal of destroying machines in the past that will change the future for the better adds some replay value to what is actually a pretty easy base game. Through this format, Sonic CD casts itself as a time/score attack game, where each individual stage is short and relatively easy but you're encouraged to try them again and again, and rewarded with different content and a slightly different ending once you get good enough.

However, the execution is slightly off here: playing simply to get through the game is a pretty bland and frictionless experience, while trying to get the good ending requires tedious combing through levels trying to find the right machine to destroy, and there is very little middle ground between these two experiences of the game. By contrast, Sonic 2 lacks any such overarching gimmick but has much tighter level design, more interesting zones, and offers an experience with just the right amount of difficulty (except for Metropolis Zone, screw that).

Sonic CD does have one aspect that it excels in though, and that's the bosses. They're far more creative than anything in previous Sonic games, and almost none of them fall into the category of "figure out attack pattern, hit boss X number of times, profit". The two highlights for me are a pinball-themed boss (Sonic Spinball without the fluff and with better physics!), and a thematically-appropriate straight-up footrace against Metal Sonic which you simply win by getting to the end of the stage first!

I'd personally rank this slightly below Sonic 2 but it's still firmly in the "very good" category. However, the fact that Sonic CD was by far the best-received and best-selling game on the Sega CD was perhaps a warning sign that foreshadowed Sega losing more and more ground in the console wars with each successive generation. Oh, to find the right machine to break in the past to save this franchise from the bad future...

There is absolutely nothing like Illbleed.

Illbleed is an absolute achievement. Bonkers. Wild as hell. Absolutely unpredictable in everything its doing. Designed to entertain and fuck with you to a degree I haven't seen a horror comedy joint ever really quite do and only really in the way that a video game can.

Illbleed is a reminder of the kinds of things only video games as a medium can do in the ways in which they interact and interface with the player and the way the player interacts and interfaces with the game. You could adapt The Last of Us, Dead Space, God of War and Final Fantasy XV into a series or film or something. You could NOT adapt Illbleed into anything else.

You could not remake Illbleed and get the same result. You could not make a sequel to Illbleed and have it work the same at all. This is a culmination of absolutely deranged ideas all culminating into a beautiful package at one specific time by one specific team at one specific moment. This shit is special.

Illbleed frankly is fuckin peak. The more I played the more I fell in absolute love with it. It trolled me, it baffled me, it knocked me on my ass and every twist and turn had me waiting for where the fuck this thing was gonna go next.

Sorry to be vague but you should really just play it for yourself and see what this has to offer. I want people who experience it to have the raw experience I had with it. I really wish there was some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type procedure so I could wipe my memory and play this shit fresh cause it is such a transcendent and wild experience. I will absolutely never forget it. Don't be afraid to use a guide if ya need to, it's absolutely worth experiencing.

Make sure ya invest in them worm stocks alright?

knew I was deep into touhou when the most hype moment of a game I played this year was seeing aya from shoot the bullet show up as the boss of stage 4

bomb mechanic is iffy (as it often is) and I miss grazing, but everything else here's lovely so it's hard to complain. there's a celebratory whimsy and playfulness that's above and beyond even perfect cherry blossom; the kind of joyful bombast that just feels cozy and makes it easy to sink into effortlessly

the bosses are as good as ever, the backgrounds and portraits are better than ever, and the soundtrack might be the best one yet, but what stands out most to me is how much zun's honed his talent for giving even the smallest, faintest moments their own charming flourishes. little swerves like hina's introduction or nitori fleeing from her own initial midboss encounter before it starts are delightful, and tracing the lines as the series gets more and more confident with conveying personality thru mechanical and structural means has been an absolute pleasure; nearly every frame of a character's presence — thru danmaku, dialogue, or lack thereof — being used to fullest effect by this point, leveraging elegant, iterative design perfectly

it's time to admit zun's the most accomplished auteur in the medium and it's not even close

Yeah, "comprehend"...

I could talk in depth about the soundtrack, or the artwork. It’s all excellent.
But I’d rather talk about what the game is trying to say.

It's a game about a descent into a new age.
It's a game about how the internet affects our view on storytelling.
It's a game about believing the net.
It's a game about the strive for perfection and cleanliness in modern day society.
It's a game about killing your past.
It's a game about how the ignorant masses turn a blind eye to things that don't align with their worldview.
It's a game about saving the life.
It's a game about crime.
It's a game about forgiveness.
It's a game about necessary evils.

Ultimately,
I think it's a game about comprehension.

Once you have observed all this game has to offer, do you get it?
I like to think I “got” what it is about. But I doubt I’ll ever be sure.
But speculation and the opportunity to draw your own conclusions is what makes this game tick.

I went through a couple of ideas whilst writing up this review. But scrapped a bunch because they were too pretentious or didn’t really highlight the games’ strengths.

You just read the final review I came up with. Could you imagine how pretentious the other ones must’ve been?

Bravo Suda

Devil May Cry at its worst is still better than most of the shit I played for fun as a kid.

Real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2, I’ve heard, so I figured it was high time I actually took a look at it for myself. I’d heard for years — decades! — that this was one of the most historically impressive pieces of shit ever put to market, and so I avoided it like it was a nuclear waste disposal site. This was not a place of honor, the signs warned me, and I wasn’t about to go digging for treasure against their advice. But now, with all of the pretentious gamethinker wind at my back, I wanted to see for myself how it really was. I actually started thinking that it would be immensely funny if it turned out to be the greatest game I’d ever played, so I could come on here and parade the fact that I liked it in front of all of you stuffy sheeple, all of you blindly following the opinions of whoever told you it was bad.

That was wrong of me, and I’d like to apologize. Devil May Cry 2 is bad.

But it’s not that bad, and that’s kind of where the problem is. You compare this to Devil May Cry, and it’s really bad. You compare it to Devil May Cry 3, and it’s unforgivable. But we live in a world where, somehow, this didn’t completely kill Devil May Cry as a series. I legitimately have no idea how it survived. Better games have killed better franchises for less. Even so, when something this bad exists but it doesn’t murder the series, it becomes kind of hard to really hate it. Capcom released three more mainline Devil May Cry games after this one, and they’re all ridiculously good (Devil May Cry 4 haters need not respond). You’ve always got the option to not play this one, pretend it doesn’t exist, and just experience the rest of the series without noticing anything different. If Devil May Cry 2 got It’s a Wonderful Life’d out of existence tomorrow, nobody would even think to ask if there was anything different. You know that joke about releasing three pigs with the numbers 1, 3, and 4 painted onto them, and then watching everyone freak out when they can’t find the fourth pig? I know the person who came up with that joke wasn’t a big Devil May Cry fan, because nobody who cares about Devil May Cry ever gives a shit where Pig #2 went. Hell, we even got a fifth pig a little while ago, and everyone was more than content to continue pretending this one didn’t exist.

But I stuck it out, because real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2. I saw the Stinger animation and ignored the saliva that filled my mouth, warning me that I was about to puke. I beat the Infested Chopper by spamming the square button so hard my thumb went numb. I swung at the switches to open the sliding door and auto-focused on the flying enemies instead and I promised the universe that I would keep going no matter how much I was starting to hate myself. You know, if you force yourself to play Devil May Cry 2 for long enough, it actually kind of starts feeling like a Devil May Cry game. I know this is just me eating the grey slop from The Matrix and pretending it’s a juicy steak so I can keep it down, but some of the small-scale, tightly-packed room fights feel remarkably complete. It’s no secret that this game only had about six months in the oven, if that, so it’s mostly a mess. Even so, you can still get a pulse every now and then to remind yourself that both you and the game are still alive.

Anyway, after slogging through the boring encounters and the frustrating level layouts and the way that Dante lifelessly stares into the camera during cutscenes with those indescribably weird eyes, I managed to get to the final boss. Unsurprisingly for a game rushed out the door this quickly, the final boss is actually a boss rush, followed by a piss-easy final form that gets completely blown apart the second you press the Devil Trigger button. Unfortunately for me, I took my very first death on this boss fight, and decided that I would just start the level from scratch to avoid incurring a continue penalty. The game asked me if I wanted to continue. I said no. The game asked me if I wanted to go to the main menu, or if I wanted to save. I didn’t want to save. I wanted to restart. I went back to the main menu. I was then prompted to load a save. My last save was about forty minutes before the final boss. I decided that it wasn’t such a bad thing to lose to Devil May Cry 2.

It would probably reflect worse on me if I’d actually taken the time to beat it.

We have no record of who the original director of this game was before Itsuno took over.

Pulled all the way through this time after initially running out of steam around world 6 about a year ago. The fundamental gameplay alone is certainly a home run, but the playful music and atmosphere further enhance things and give the game an oddly comforting and familiar feel for me. It might be that it's very reminiscent of games I'd download free trials for off Nick Arcade as a little kid (such as SpongeBob SquarePants Obstacle Odyssey). Either way, really good stuff all around. I can see myself coming back to this several times in the future.

It's not without its hiccups, though. Launchers and Arthropod, for example, are insanely egregious and difficult for the first half of the game's standards, creating a really weird bump in the otherwise smooth, steady difficulty curve. Similarly, in the last world in Story Mode the design philosophy completely changes and noticeably becomes totally obtuse. They're not even necessarily harder than the levels in the previous two worlds, but it's a very jarring shift that doesn't really result in any enjoyable levels out of those last ten.

Would very strongly recommend this game, but definitely don't let your guard down. It gets a lot harder than it initially lets on.

This is both tje most objectionable and least recommendable game I've played and top of that it has a really bad ending. It's one of my fav games I've played this year.

What can I say? Modern living sucks and makes us go insane ✌️

Y2K would of been a blessing.

I kind of hated this. The aesthetic, art and music were great, but oh my god, the writing is such a drag. So much exposition with meaningless back-and-forths that never kept my attention for more than a few textboxes. The dialogue was stilted, with so little flourish or character, where even reading aloud did not aid my engagement. I read books and visual novels and have never had this much trouble. I ended up button-mashing through the third route and a good portion of the second route because I realized I wasn't feeling or retaining any of it. Who knows, maybe I'm not the intended audience (despite being a chronically-online trans person who loves Evangelion and writing) or am missing some cultural context. Whatever, I got my 100% acheivements, but the reward was not worth the 4 hour chore.

so my "rampage" themed set bombed at the last comedy club I played at... an audience member said it made them want to ralph

laughter

I mean, the only thing those freakazoids are destroying... is my wallet

extremely laughter

the only "rampage world tour" i want to see involves millions of dead cops

adorable!! i have no clue how i didn't know about this before i just randomly saw it on backloggd but this is right up my alley. also unbeknownst to me before starting it but halfway through i found out this is based on an anime done in the same boxy 3d style so now i know i HAVE to watch it now.

this game is such a strange mix of genres as a stealth, puzzle solving, horror, comedy game effortlessly bouncing between different ideas and moods while never feeling like it's inconsistent. it reminded me of a lot of other games (luigi's mansion, animal crossing, parappa the rapper, silent hill, and a bunch of other stuff that i'm sure i'm just forgetting) but always felt completely idiosyncratic because of the atmosphere it builds and maintains over the course of its short runtime. the best part about the game is simply exploring the crafted world and getting to know all of the strange inhabitants, each new character introduced just filled me with joy at getting to find out each of their quirks and personalities. if anything, the game is worth a try just to live in this world for a few hours alone.

but the gameplay is no slouch either! the characters in the game keep to consistent schedules and in order to gather the souls from each of them the player must eavesdrop on conversations by looking through keyholes in order to find out their weaknesses. some of them can be more obtuse than others, and i'd be lying if i said that i didn't consult a guide a few times just to figure out what to do for certain characters, but trying to keep yourself hidden by swapping between looking into rooms and looking down the hallway that you're in to see if you'll get caught can be absolutely nailbiting at times, and though it's not particularly scary the tension is definitely there. a few frustrating moments of trying to keep to a specific time in order to get a particular character interaction to take place, or waiting around for something to trigger can make the game feel somewhat lacking in execution compared to ambition, but a lot of very surprising moments regardless and trying to keep track of everyone's schedules as the cast grows and grows can be a really compelling challenge. also i will say it's definitely all worth it for the spectacular ending the game is able to pull off, even if the final boss fight is maybe a bit too simple compared to how much work is required for the rest of the game.