Look, I'll keep it real: I don't think it gets better than this. Playing this at an arcade is sublime, playing it at home is sublime. There is not a bad time to be playing House Of The Dead 2. Play it at Grandma's house, who gives a fuck!

I don't want to say that House Of The Dead 2 improves on its predecessor in every meaningful way, as I think both are functionally perfect at what they are setting out to do. It feels being needlessly nitpicky to try and denigrate one versus the other. I will say though that going from a fantastic gothic mansion to a beautifully rendered gothic European city is what gives this series that extra bit of spice. The locales are just incredible looking, the unnamed city clearly being Venice, Italy with a thick layer of grime applied to it. It's a visually very striking game, one of the earliest games I remember seeing and it absolutely struck a chord with me.

The monster designs are still the same level of high detailed grotesqueness that HotD1 showcased. I gotta say though, they outdid themselves with some of these guys. The "Bob" zombies who appear to have an executioner's hood stitched to their necks. The "Patrick" zombies in military fatigues with a pained look on their face. My absolute favorite, the "Ken" variant of the Kaegos, with a sick metal mask and pair of claws. Sega's ability to design the most entertaining group of guys to blow apart limb from limb is some auteur shit. This is an art game just by how cool all these fucking dudes are. The way they challenge the player's aiming is also more dynamic this time around. Randys hop around madly and can move from each side of the screen in an instant, Gregory uses a giant sword that can block your shots, requiring you to carefully hit him during openings. Gregory specifically comes before a boss based around that exact strategy! Cool stuff! There is also a greater variety of enemies who throw stuff at you, often in pairs, so you have to juggle priorities while shooting. For a game that by its very nature doesn't have a lot of depth, enemy design is absolutely trying to test the player as much as it can.

The violence in this bad boy is pretty graphic though. Was this a problem back in the day? This was such an established arcade cabinet to me I never thought about how gruesome it was. I can imagine someone's mom turning pale and fainting at the sight of the legendary Booger Monster as my friends and I christened him.

Bosses are a pretty vast upgrade across the board without question. There are more of them and they are actually challenging this time. I was going to go into depth about them, but I think they are all pretty much perfect. The way their weakspots aren't always visible means you no longer have total pushovers like Chariot was in the first game. Hierophant's chest flaps means you have to actually time your shots and can't just unload on him. Strength has very slim windows you can get a shot in on his head, and he scared the SHIT out of me as a kid because of that. The Magician, my beloved, returns, because honestly when you have a boss with THAT design and THAT banging theme, you really ought to bring him back. I'm glad they did! He rocks! The final boss, the Emperor, is actually a bit underwhelming in comparison to everyone else. He isn't quite as visually stunning, his theme is pretty average in comparison, but his pre-fight speech about hating mankind is pretty fucking awesome. Classic House of the Dead shit. The boss fights being framed with G's Files showing the weakpoints against taped pictures is another great aesthetic choice for a series that lives and dies on its visual flair.

I also think the rescues require more dynamic actions from the player. Remember, I'm using dynamic VERY lightly, as the main actions you take in this game are "shooting" and "not shooting." But a lot of the survivors will be positioned just awkwardly enough you'll have to place your shots carefully, or use trigger discipline that they don't get clipped by your shots. The amount this game requires you to carefully not shoot civilians, you have to imagine this is banned in every police academy in the country.

I should talk about the voice acting, actually. I'm gonna be honest, it might be that I have heard it so much in my life that I can recite it word-for-word, but I think it's mostly just funny bad. I don't think it's ASTONISHINGLY bad like Resident Evil 1. That game didn't sound like it was recorded by physical humans. I can tell actual people voiced James and Gary, very funny people, but people nonetheless. I don't know, it's still entertaining! But you be the judge.

Which is easy to do since you can actually play this pretty easily! It's on the dreamcast, PC, xbox with HOTD3 and wii, and while none of those versions are exactly READILY available, it's still a vast improvement over HotD1 only being playable via a putrid remake that looks like a 2010 shooter. Realistically, there should be a law that this has to be in every arcade or else it's not a legitimate business, but until then, play it anyway you can! It's fun! Play it with friends!

I had read that Valkyria Revolution, a spin off to the excellent Valkyria Chronicles games was bad. What I failed to appreciate is that "bad" is only a word and the reality was simply far worse. It's so excrutiating in fact that trying to describe it goes beyond my capability to get the message across in the medium of text but I will do my best.

I played this game for maybe 2-3 hours and I use the term 'played' loosely. I think saying I watched cardboard cut outs with two animations discuss war situations with all the effort and enthusiasm of a narrator at a milk bottle collecting competition would be more accurate. 90% of this game is cutscenes so boring I feel like my soul was trying to escape my body watching them as my natural body decay simply wasn't fast enough anymore. Monotone bland voices with uninteresting dialogue and utterly forgettable characters with a tone all over the place.

I have never played a game that made me so uninterested in events so quickly as this. I read a review somewhere that stated "The whole time you're playing Valkyria Revolution you're thinking of better games" and I fully agree, simply any game would qualify.

It reminded me of another Sega gem, Sonic 2006. A compliment this is not. A cutscene followed by a loading screen into a cutscene interrupted by a needlessly long loading screen. These can go on for 40 minutes. Like why? It made me question my choices in life that led me to this moment. If the combat made up for this it could possibly make it through but it's just as tepid, vapid, boring and soulless as the writing. It's an action game that also wants to be a little stealth, a little strategy giving you commands and spells.

It's all redundent.

All of it.

Cover is pointless, everything is weak, skills are unneeded, your AI companions don't need direction. Just run up and hit things with the sword is all you need but it's not fun hitting a 3 hit combo into a few brain dead enemies. It has tutorials constantly for different things you'll never use. Even the small hub with a few stores is introduced terribly and the user interface for equipment and skills is baffling.

The visuals occasionally have some ok backdrops but the original 2008 Valkyria Chronicles looks better. That game is almost 10 years older on previous hardware. The animations are especially flat out terrible. It's the only time playing this I laughed simply because they were so wooden it made the cast feel like puppets. Speaking of which there are times where characters seemed to float or not fit in scenes or were missing shadows etc. It's a bizzarely ugly game and the character designs are painfully bland to match their terrible stereotypes.

Honestly I hated this. I would rather cover myself in meat paste and flick the testicles of a sleeping lion then play this again. It feels like a completely unfinished, unoptimized prototype that needed editing, fixing, play testing and pruning just to reach the level of mediocre.

Play literally anything else.

- Terrible writing.
- Laughable animations.
- Long pointless dull cutscenes.
- Long load times.
- Redundent gameplay mechanics.
- Boring combat.
- Boring voice acting.
- Boring dialogue.
- Boring.

So, I finally finished Kenzan. Would've finished it earlier, but I need to study for my exams so whatever.
That was good. The story was amazing, I cried. It's fun to see how many story and gameplay elements actually crossed over from here to the main series. I liked the gameplay too at first, but near the end it became really annoying. Side content sucks too, BUT! They absoluetly nailed the setting and maps. That's the biggest ammount of locations we had in the whole series and that makes the world really interesting to explore. Nature looks especially beatiful here. Janky game which desperatly needs a remake, but I enjoyed it nonetheless