When I played the first Garten of Banban, I likened it to the kind of experimental project one makes when figuring out how to implement some ideas to clean up later. The kind of thing you wouldn't even call an alpha, more like a rough draft, a sketch. For some reason, be it naive optimism or just a general belief in others, I thought maybe, just maybe, this sequel would be at least somewhat of an improvement. I mean, surely they would have at least fixed the fact that pausing the game doesn't pause the game, right? Especially now that they're charging money to play it, right?

Right?

Garten of Banban 2 runs about as well as, if not worse than, its predecessor. Not a single improvement over the first game's mechanics, aside from the fact that you can now color and add hats to your drone. I wouldn't doubt it for a second if it were discovered that all the code and assets from Banban 1 are here, completely unchanged. They didn't even fix the pausing.

But what is different? What sets this new, premium title apart from its free-to-play older sibling? The quality of the game may be unchanged, sure, but they didn't skimp on quantity. Several unskippable cutscenes? They got em. Gameplay sections designed specifically to waste your time? They got em! I'd comment on the devs voice acting, but I've also done unprofessional VA for a game I worked on in the past, so, glass houses and all that (granted, it was for a game jam and released for free). In fact, I'll go so far as to say the voices are charmingly campy, I enjoyed them.

Unlike the mercifully short length of the first game, this one is a bit of a trek. Thankfully, my dear friend and mentally ill cohort also joined me for this game, so I at least wasn't suffering alone.

In fact, beyond moral support, they also saved my ass during a couple sections, because believe it or not an overly long and tight platforming section with zero checkpoints is incredibly difficult to get through when your framerate is in the single digits. Perhaps you may be thinking, "PJ, you can't blame the game for being unplayable when your hardware is outdated!", and I'd concede if this game didn't look worse than something I should be able to run on my GPUless family computer from a decade ago, but I digress.

There's so much more I wanna complain about, like the absolutely tiny hitbox for everything you need to interact with, the fact that some of the graphics settings made my monitor crash, which I didn't even know was POSSIBLE, or the STUPID BULLSHIT GODDAMN FUCKING BABY BIRD SECTION, but I've spent long enough writing this as it is. You get the point. This game is bad. It's very bad.

Won't stop me from playing Banban 3 though.