STRIDER. It's cool! Overrated, but revered for a reason. It's a very ambitious and cinematic game, but its overzealousness causes it to fall short in its moment-to-moment gameplay. It stands to reason that a sequel should preserve the aesthetic strengths of the original while innovating and iterating on game design. And with Strider 2, they did!

But this isn't Strider 2. This is Strider II.

What do you get when you pass off the rights of an experimental arcade action-platformer to one of the worst western developers of all time during one of the worst gaming generations for western dev quality assurance, designed for the AMIGA and then BACK-PORTED to Sega's home platforms? AHHHHAHAHAHH. The results speak for itself.

Strider II fucking sucks top to bottom. Calling it a shallow cash grab on a beloved IP is a good enough summary, but I think ripping on all the atrocities it commits is more fun. We've got somehow twice to three times as much slowdown compared to the original, the most uninspired and slimy stock castle and forest environments, enemy designs that can't hold a torch - let alone a lit match, - to the original's creativity. It's an ugly and total butchering of 1 aesthetically. And y'know, maybe this could be redeemable if an attempt was made to improve the gameplay, but I'm not feeling it. Rest assured, Strider II is more 'game-y' than I - it has challenges and level design that are much more overt and follow traditional identify/execute patterns to the gameplay loop. But that really doesn't make it inherently fun. II's ideas for level design are a compilation of the most irritating mascot platformer gimmicks - stages with narrowly-timed jumps, stages with lasers that go off in timed sequences, falling platforms above bottomless pits, etc. Say what you will about Strider I, but it understands the strength of keeping your game design 'invisible', so to speak. There's an oft undiscussed strength to letting the player just go ahead and play on instinct instead of designing levels as obstacle courses, which makes for a more fluid and passively-introspective experience while giving your game's world an organic flair. By contrast, the few interesting bits of II's challenge suck because of just that; they're gamified challenges with complete transparency, no interesting window dressing, and no memorability. I'm doing homework, and it's butt-ass ugly to boot and gives me motion sickness.

Strider II sucks but you don't need to hear me say it.