its nothingburger plot and open-endedness make DD2 feel like a blank playground. a more fully realised version of the 'skyrim without fast travel' playthrough everyone conceptualises and fizzles out on, it didn't take a huge amount of time for me to eventually yearn for convenience for conveniences sake. the game design quirks at the start of the game eventually became annoyances, the combat eventually became dull, the enemy variety that i swore to myself wouldn't be an issue became an issue to me. the game world remained fascinating and exploration stayed as magical as it always was but after enough queries to google.com of "is the game broken or am i doing something wrong" and "fps boost dragons dogma 2" i figured that I'd had my fun.

a game that felt unequivocally not for me

" Alright we're in charge of localizing this, what's the story like again? "

" The world in the near future reached such a stage of late unregulated liberalism that 2 companies have more power than every other nation combined, and they declare war against one another because they would rather destroy half the world than not have a total market monopoly. "

" Hmmm how about we change that so that capitalism is good actually and there's a shadow government manipulating those companies who are innocenet and don't know any better (also their leader is named Aurora, thats important), and when you beat them... you achieve eternal world peace? "

" Sure. "

A lot of good deaths in this game. It's a game about a drug that turns people in to bros. Bro soldiers. Dudes who love killing the enemy and high fiving one another. And it's about revealing the subsequent horror of the reality both to
the player and the character. And I think it delivers that message most thoroughly by making you bare witness to these incredibly overly dramatic and yet relatively genuine feeling moments of these men as they gasp and cry and die. The big villain's final words are don't tell my mum what I did which reflects a boyish innocence hidden beneath. It's kinda corny but also a kinda rarity for me to see in a war shooter and also something I felt was genuine.

Didn't love that the game decides in its dying breath to completely undercut its anti capitalist underpinnings to paint the south american "rebel" leader as yet another sneaky opportunist instead of maybe someone who is also genuine in their desires. Seems like a "gotcha" moment for the sake of a one, a symptom of the post south park "anyone who believes in anything is a dumbass and all sides suck" mantra that was (and still is) popular to peddle to teenagers and the idiots game publishers think every gamer is.

Glad I read ed smith's essay on it in Shooter. Forever wrote it off as that game no one player whose cover was everyone's avatar in the early ps3 lifecycle days. Think it deserves a better legacy than that.

i went in to mega man legends 2 cautiously optimistic. legends didnt play very well, but its charming characters, innovative art style, and intriguing worldbuilding and story elevated it into being something memorable
and for the most part, and despite largely feeling like an expansion of the first game, legends 2 manages to keep whats great about legends 1 and actually made the game fun to play. dualanalog goes a long way in a third person shooter like this. it controls better, the levels have some variety to them, youre not stuck on just one island anymore, instead going to various points across the world on this globe-trotting journey in the search for the mother lode, the very thing the first game was building up... and then it ends. im sure you all know how. but its a very abrupt cliffhanger. it makes me realize that its a problem both legends games have. they spend each game building up to this big thing, with all these dangling threads, teasing us, and then ending the game before we get any conclusion. it makes the experiences feel less fulfilling as i dont feel like im getting a full package, even though neither game is very short.
there are also some rather glaring flaws in the game. no matter how high your attack is, you rarely seem to do much damage (i used speedup a LOT in this game), you earn a ton of zenny but eventually the prices in the game begin to skyrocket to ludicrous amounts that you'll need to grind a rare bird in order to make any money late-game, which leads into the next problem, weapon upgrades cost an insane amount and its impossible to know which weapons you should stick with because some of them suck and if you upgraded them thinking that they could be good when improved, like say, the machine gun, well you're shit outta luck because you just wasted all your money on that. oh you got the energy sword from either getting 100 questions right in a row, or by forking over an insane amount of zenny? well using it launches you into the enemy youre trying to attack, damaging you before him somehow and if you wanna upgrade its range, you cant begin to comprehend how much thats gonna cost. doesnt help that some special weapons are the only reliable way to damage bosses, so if you chose one thats not great, then youre in for a slog of a fight. the balancing of money and damage in this game needs a serious overhaul. also you can spend money upgrading a weapons "special" but you have no indication on just what the hell that even means. and if you die in a dungeon its game over and back to the menu, which i find is a bit unreasonable even for the era, especially given how much progress you could lose, and how annoying the dungeons can be to navigate, and how bad some bosses can be.

i wish legends 3 happened, i truly do. but if legends were to ever come back, these games should probably get remakes first, because a collection wont really fix the problems rooted in these games.

I think it's the definition of an "ok shmup" -- has some fun stuff going for it, including surprisingly solid fundamentals, but gets dragged down by a million little annoyances.

Let's start with the good: the scoring system on Original mode is fun! It's a medal collectathon with a few twists--all enemies release tiny gold nuggets that increase your multiplier just a little; bigger enemies (when killed with missles) release larger ones that increase your multiplier a good amount; and each stage has a few secret triggers that turn all medals into little demon guys, which increase your multiplier by a lot. The incentive to kill big guys with focus shot for reward is tried and true, secrets are cool and not too difficult to uncover, and I think all of the bonus opportunities (destroying certain boss elements, keeping shields through the level, no-missing, etc.) are balanced decently well.

That and the aforementioned solid fundamentals (ship speed, fire rate and pace of the game all feel good) are where the positives end.

I'm not going to dwell too much on negatives because, frankly, it's death by 1000 cuts here as opposed to a few fatal flaws... but for a few examples: stage backgrounds often have a design that implies a physically restrictive hallway when there actually isn't one; certain objects have allowable collision that you just kinda have to figure out by trial and error; enemies shoot obscenely annoying, super-fast revenge bullets at high rank that destroy the any sense of flow or stage design; and certain levels present spams of collision dangers and bullet spewing enemies simultaneously in vomitous fashion.

I don't think a small team like this should have attempted an STG with not 1, not 2, not 3, but *4* different game modes, each with their own unique scoring structures. Just focus on a single one and do it well! Iron out every wrinkle! This is such a detail-oriented genre, and enthusiasts crave entries that are an inch wide but miles deep quite a lot more than the alternative. Feel like if they funneled all the dev and testing time into Original it could've been actually really great.

There's something genuinely special about how Wattam presents itself. Children of all shapes and sizes, coming together and understanding each other through the impromptu act of play. Not even a language barrier can prevent them from settling disagreements or making friends. As it turns out, fun is a universal language.
The game just wants you to have enjoy yourself. It even refrains from dropping achievements until you've closed the game, so as to not take your focus away from the experience.

That experience...sure is something.

The controls feel like the biggest obstacle to this being a universal experience. Climbing is initiated by hugging up against another character, something that can happen purely on accident as you're just trying to move around, or is almost guaranteed to happen when you're surrounded by other characters. Selecting other characters is mapped to the right stick, an awkward choice that always had me swapping two or more times before I finally reached the one I wanted to control. This also means that camera control is mapped elsewhere, on the triggers specifically, and limited to the x-axis. Holding hands is a seamless action, but getting everyone together for a big hand-holding circle is understandably cumbersome. None of this detracts too hard from the laid-back nature of the game, but it did get on my nerves a couple times.

The presentation has "Keita Takahashi" written all over it. Everyone's got the same, simplistic, doofy face, and soft rounded edges. You greet everyone in this game with a tip of your hat and a KABOOM. The circle of life is self>fruit>poop>self. Flush yourself down the toilet if you want to become golden. I don't make the rules, Keita Takahashi does. Every single controllable being has their own weird bio to read in the collection, and dynamically adds their own little melody with their own instruments to the background music while you're moving them around. The jaunty piano and acapella vocals of the title theme provided the most welcoming atmosphere I've experienced in a game in a long time.

It feels weird to say that the story is probably the highlight of this game for me. Its lessons are simple, but easy to forget, particularly by today's society. It can be hard to apologize, difficult to forgive, and impossible to forget. But it's important to cherish what we have. You can never anticipate when it might up and leave your life, or if it'll ever return. These things may never truly be the same, but we still move forward regardless.

And that's how I'm ending this review: by moving on, and keeping the good memories close to my heart. Looking forward to "To a T", and whatever else comes out of Keita Takahashi's head after that.