_Ryu
2016
Well at least it's not as bad as X6 and X7
2006
This review contains spoilers
Samurai Warriors 2 literally made me spend hours looking up sengoku jidai stuff online to see how the historical versions of the characters compare to the ones from the game. I had no idea those characters and battles actually existed in real life, so it was pretty fascinating.
There is a pretty obvious bias towards the Toyotomi side here, given how a lot of the more developed characters (Mitsunari, Yukimura, Sakon, Ginchiyo) are in it during the Sekigahara campaign, while the Tokugawa side is mostly composed of boring one-note characters aside from Ieyasu himself. Still, I think SW2 (Xtreme Legends expansion included) does a pretty decent job at covering the general story of the Sengoku Jidai and presenting it as a complex war story with multiple perspectives. While the first game was mostly focused on Oda Nobunaga's conquest, this one goes from that all the way to the Siege of Osaka, with a bigger emphasis being put in the Sekigahara campaign, which is understandable since it was the most climactic part of the period.
That's not to say other characters and parts of the period don't get to shine, the way Koei handled the tragedy surrounding Azai Nagamasa and Oichi, Shibata Katsuie's relationship with Maeda Toshiie and the theme of passing the torch their story tackled, the build up to Akechi Mitsuhide's rebellion against Nobunaga... And many other stories, it's all pretty fantastic. There are just some liberties taken with the characters and historical events that felt weird, like Saika Magoichi being the one who kills Nobunaga, and Fuuma Kotaro being this cartoony-as-fuck villain who's evil because he likes chaos and randomly appears in battles that have nothing to do with him saying "PEACE BAD, CHAOS GOOD" for no reason, and Date Masamune is portrayed as an unlikeable spoiled brat, these two characters would thankfully see a lot of improvement in future SW games, at least.
As for the gameplay... Well, it's a musou game, you know what you're getting into if you played even one of them. This one does shake things up a little by having characters with different styles of combos, but ultimately it's still very much a musou game where you fight hordes of enemies, most of them don't present much of a challenge besides some officers and other main characters.
That being said, this is probably the musou game with the best use of the morale system, as it really seems to make a big difference when you complete the objectives in the battles that make it unfold in your army's favor. When your army's morale outweights the enemies' morale, your soldiers and officers actually start to fight better, I've seen multiple instances of allied officers and main characters holding themselves pretty well during the battle and defeating enemy officers/main characters without me having to come in and do all the work for them. I swear to God, when I played the Battle of Sekigahara in the Western Army's side and managed to thwart the Eastern Army's plan of getting Kobayakawa Hideaki to betray me, as well as completing all the previous missions, my allies were able to defeat Honda Tadakatsu by themselves. Honda Motherfucking Tadakatsu, basically the Lu Bu of this series, and they kicked his ass on their own! This would never happen in any modern musou game, or even some of the older Dynsaty Warriors titles, your allies always have to rely on you to do everything in these games and it can be annoying sometimes. In Samurai Warriors 2, though? Your army can hold their own against the enemy just fine, provided that you complete the missions in order to raise their morale, which feels a lot more like participating in a war, I love this.
What else is there to talk about? The graphics won't blow anyone away, but they look good enough, especially for a late PS2 game. The soundtrack is fucking fire, but that's a given with most musou games, even the shittier ones have some great music at the very least, so no surprises here.
So... Yeah, Samurai Warriors 2 is one of my favorite PS2 games of all time, I spent hundreds of hours playing, experiencing all the different character stories and the ways battles can unfold depending on what missions I complete or fail to complete. It was a great time by itself, but it also led me to have an equally amazing time reading about the Sengoku Jidai as it was historically. Game journalists don't like this or musou games in general, but they can all go suck a big fat wiener because my opinion is superior to theirs.
There is a pretty obvious bias towards the Toyotomi side here, given how a lot of the more developed characters (Mitsunari, Yukimura, Sakon, Ginchiyo) are in it during the Sekigahara campaign, while the Tokugawa side is mostly composed of boring one-note characters aside from Ieyasu himself. Still, I think SW2 (Xtreme Legends expansion included) does a pretty decent job at covering the general story of the Sengoku Jidai and presenting it as a complex war story with multiple perspectives. While the first game was mostly focused on Oda Nobunaga's conquest, this one goes from that all the way to the Siege of Osaka, with a bigger emphasis being put in the Sekigahara campaign, which is understandable since it was the most climactic part of the period.
That's not to say other characters and parts of the period don't get to shine, the way Koei handled the tragedy surrounding Azai Nagamasa and Oichi, Shibata Katsuie's relationship with Maeda Toshiie and the theme of passing the torch their story tackled, the build up to Akechi Mitsuhide's rebellion against Nobunaga... And many other stories, it's all pretty fantastic. There are just some liberties taken with the characters and historical events that felt weird, like Saika Magoichi being the one who kills Nobunaga, and Fuuma Kotaro being this cartoony-as-fuck villain who's evil because he likes chaos and randomly appears in battles that have nothing to do with him saying "PEACE BAD, CHAOS GOOD" for no reason, and Date Masamune is portrayed as an unlikeable spoiled brat, these two characters would thankfully see a lot of improvement in future SW games, at least.
As for the gameplay... Well, it's a musou game, you know what you're getting into if you played even one of them. This one does shake things up a little by having characters with different styles of combos, but ultimately it's still very much a musou game where you fight hordes of enemies, most of them don't present much of a challenge besides some officers and other main characters.
That being said, this is probably the musou game with the best use of the morale system, as it really seems to make a big difference when you complete the objectives in the battles that make it unfold in your army's favor. When your army's morale outweights the enemies' morale, your soldiers and officers actually start to fight better, I've seen multiple instances of allied officers and main characters holding themselves pretty well during the battle and defeating enemy officers/main characters without me having to come in and do all the work for them. I swear to God, when I played the Battle of Sekigahara in the Western Army's side and managed to thwart the Eastern Army's plan of getting Kobayakawa Hideaki to betray me, as well as completing all the previous missions, my allies were able to defeat Honda Tadakatsu by themselves. Honda Motherfucking Tadakatsu, basically the Lu Bu of this series, and they kicked his ass on their own! This would never happen in any modern musou game, or even some of the older Dynsaty Warriors titles, your allies always have to rely on you to do everything in these games and it can be annoying sometimes. In Samurai Warriors 2, though? Your army can hold their own against the enemy just fine, provided that you complete the missions in order to raise their morale, which feels a lot more like participating in a war, I love this.
What else is there to talk about? The graphics won't blow anyone away, but they look good enough, especially for a late PS2 game. The soundtrack is fucking fire, but that's a given with most musou games, even the shittier ones have some great music at the very least, so no surprises here.
So... Yeah, Samurai Warriors 2 is one of my favorite PS2 games of all time, I spent hundreds of hours playing, experiencing all the different character stories and the ways battles can unfold depending on what missions I complete or fail to complete. It was a great time by itself, but it also led me to have an equally amazing time reading about the Sengoku Jidai as it was historically. Game journalists don't like this or musou games in general, but they can all go suck a big fat wiener because my opinion is superior to theirs.
1995
Better than Sonic 06, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Lost World and Megaman X6.
What does Megaman X6 have to do with this? Nothing, but fuck Megaman X6 anyway.
What does Megaman X6 have to do with this? Nothing, but fuck Megaman X6 anyway.
2004
How the fuck did they get away with showing Tails' asshole in the intro scene?
Unironically peak 2D Sonic holy shit, I don't even care if Frontiers ends up being bad because I already have my 2022 Sonic game.
It's like Resident Evil 4, but hornier
2008
You know, it's been a long time since I got to actually replay Sonic Unleashed instead of just loading up my complete save file to play the daytime stages and some of the boss fights, or listening to the soundtrack on Youtube. I used to think this game was pretty decent and that the daytime stages were basically good enough to make up for the boring parts, but that's because I kept going back to them while the boring parts kept fading out from my memory, but experiencing a new save file brought back all those sealed memories to the forefront of my brain. It's not just the night stages, though they are boring ass pace-breakers where you basically stop playing your Sonic game so you can play some uninspired God of War knockoff, but it's also... Everything else.
Why do I need to keep going back to spagonia every time I'm done with a continent? Yeah, I know the in-universe reason, so that Professor Exposition there can tell me where to go next, but sometimes I even need to talk to him in order to unlock shit in the continents I already had unlocked before. Can't he just communicate with Sonic, Chip and Tails using a phone or something like that? Why do I have to collect these stupid medals just to progress? The night stages already take long enough to complete on their own, but you still have to go out of your way to search for every nook and cranny for medals, or else the game will just cock-block you from entering the next stage because you didn't collect enough of the damn things.
"Well, why don't you collect them in the day stages then?"
Have you seen how fast Sonic goes in those things? They obvously weren't meant for exploration, almost every time I collected a medal in these stages it was by pure accident, I was just blasting through and then oh, I collected a medal, arlight then. Plus, these levels don't have as many medals to collect as the night ones, so it's not really worth the effort, I was collecting from the hub worlds and the night stages instead. Let me tell you, I was not having a good time doing any of that, all this tedious process made me think was "Jesus fuck I'll have to do this just to get to the next day stage" instead of having any kind of fun. The hub worlds are charming and have a lot of personality, but the vast majority of the side quests you get to do in them are just glorified time attacks or enemy gauntlets in slightly modified parts of the regular stages.
Oh, and the story is mediocre at best, don't even get me started on that, seriously.
So, if most of my game time is spent doing tedious shit I don't care about while roughly 40% of the game is the part I have fun with, then why was it that I believed Sonic Unleashed was a good game to begin with? It's not, it never was, I just liked the daytime stages way too much and kept replaying them after I was done with this game for the first time, this whole process caused me to have a bit of a selective memory. Eh, I really should have just stuck with the Unleashed Project mod for Sonic Generations, it already gives me the parts of Unleashed I like without forcing me to play through the rest of the game. Yeah, I'll do that, so goodbye Sonic Unleahsed!
Why do I need to keep going back to spagonia every time I'm done with a continent? Yeah, I know the in-universe reason, so that Professor Exposition there can tell me where to go next, but sometimes I even need to talk to him in order to unlock shit in the continents I already had unlocked before. Can't he just communicate with Sonic, Chip and Tails using a phone or something like that? Why do I have to collect these stupid medals just to progress? The night stages already take long enough to complete on their own, but you still have to go out of your way to search for every nook and cranny for medals, or else the game will just cock-block you from entering the next stage because you didn't collect enough of the damn things.
"Well, why don't you collect them in the day stages then?"
Have you seen how fast Sonic goes in those things? They obvously weren't meant for exploration, almost every time I collected a medal in these stages it was by pure accident, I was just blasting through and then oh, I collected a medal, arlight then. Plus, these levels don't have as many medals to collect as the night ones, so it's not really worth the effort, I was collecting from the hub worlds and the night stages instead. Let me tell you, I was not having a good time doing any of that, all this tedious process made me think was "Jesus fuck I'll have to do this just to get to the next day stage" instead of having any kind of fun. The hub worlds are charming and have a lot of personality, but the vast majority of the side quests you get to do in them are just glorified time attacks or enemy gauntlets in slightly modified parts of the regular stages.
Oh, and the story is mediocre at best, don't even get me started on that, seriously.
So, if most of my game time is spent doing tedious shit I don't care about while roughly 40% of the game is the part I have fun with, then why was it that I believed Sonic Unleashed was a good game to begin with? It's not, it never was, I just liked the daytime stages way too much and kept replaying them after I was done with this game for the first time, this whole process caused me to have a bit of a selective memory. Eh, I really should have just stuck with the Unleashed Project mod for Sonic Generations, it already gives me the parts of Unleashed I like without forcing me to play through the rest of the game. Yeah, I'll do that, so goodbye Sonic Unleahsed!
1993
I was a bit hesitant to go back to this one because maybe it isn't as good as I remember since it's still an early FPS game, but those thoughts disappeared as soon as I started blasting everything to oblivion, it's still as fun as it always was. Some of the later stages are confusing to navigate even with the map, and the secrets can get a bit too cryptic, but at least they are worth the effort.
1993
US soundtrack is better and I'm tired of pretending it's not
2009
You can actually jump, what a huge improvement on the NES game
2002
Rapaz uepa que isso meu filho calma oooooOOOOOooooOOO pare papapapare cavalo esse é meu patrão
1999
Whenever you get the feeling that you've hit rock bottom and won't ever be able to get back up, remember that this game was created by the people who made Bubsy 3D.
2012
Tried playing this without a guide and found it to be a boring overly-cryptic slog. Tried playing this with a guide and it remained a boring slog except that I know what I'm supposed to do now. Sorry, but I no longer have the patience to keep playing stuff I'm not having any kind of fun with, which is a shame because I was digging the music, the story seemed interesting too.
Interesting concept, but the gameplay loop was way too repetitive and dull to keep my interest. Also, there's very little actual interaction with Ame aside from sending her emojis, which is fucking meaningless, and deciding what she's going to do for the day or the stream.
"It's worse than the originals because... because it just is, okay?"