So, I finally picked up LoS2 on PC and played through it beginning to end. I don’t see why it got so much hate. Things I noticed:
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huge departure in atmosphere from LoS. Gone are the sunny and beautiful landscapes inspired by LotR, Mayan architecture, and Shadow of the Colossus that took over a good first 3rd of the game. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on if you felt that took away from the atmosphere of a Castlevania title.
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the atmosphere is really dark. For the most part, it felt like a Castlevania but with a huge dose of Darksiders. The first Darksiders took place in a destroyed city during the apocalypse and this game follows in that atmosphere a good deal. Kind of a shame because I wanted to walk around a populated city full of people doing crazy shit while shifting into the inter-dimensional castle. It felt a good deal like a Castlevania once you were in the castle, and felt like Darksiders outside of it. Weird.
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the art design was pretty amazing with the exception of the mutant mooks and the hellspawn demons. Again, felt like Darksiders because of the similar themes. I wish Satan’s army was less typical hellspawn and more something else. What that something else is, I don’t know. I kind of liked the direction of the enemies in the necromancer’s realm from LoS, I think things in that style would have been more fitting. Oh well.
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the game engine is amazing, runs stable and outputs some seriously awesome graphics. I’d love to see more from it.
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the story was really good. The ending? A bit too brief, there really needed to be more, but everything up to that point was well done.
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the direction of the game was a bit confusing. I’m in one part of the city, get shifted to the inter-dimensional version of the castle, then end up in another part of the city and I have no direction of where to go other than forward towards the yellow arrow. The worst case of this was probably when I went from the Science District to The City of the Damned, which kind of transitioned at an important plot point involving finding an important item in a timely manner. It seemed like an odd detour to take, but perhaps his time spent in the castle doesn’t affect his time in the real world.
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the combat system is tweaked a good deal over LoS. It’s a bit more interesting and fun, while maintaining the style that LoS presented. However, the game is much easier compared to LoS. So much easier. I don’t know why, but it is. Perhaps not enough enemy variety.
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the stealth parts. I didn’t mind them, except that one fucking part with Agreus. Fuck that shit, that was awful. The other ones not so bad because they were short and easy.
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turning off quick time events. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hated them in the original, while they were easy, they were just inconvenient especially when you forget one is not a cutscene and you put the controller down.
So, for the most part, I liked the game. It was a huge departure from the original, I kind of wish we had some of the beautiful sunny landscapes of LoS but I understand it’s meant to take place at night and the MC is now a vampire, who has to avoid the sun. I loved the intro, it was a direct continuation off the ending of LoS and all the graphics were 100% in tact and now watered down from pre-rendered to real time. The engine improvements made were enormous. The soundtrack was once again really good, unfortunately it was as front and center as the previous one, perhaps because of the more “open” nature of the game over the select a stage style of the first. I kind of wish LoS2 had the select a stage, because I feel it would have given the game a more solid presentation of the story over figuring out where to go almost aimlessly or getting lost because reality and Dracula’s alternate reality going on at the same time. Definitely an interesting concept to explore, the castle in it’s rejuvenating state in between resurrections. Well, kind of, because Dracula was alive but seriously weakened from years of hiding, so the castle was not at its full glory. I loved all the hints to the original lore in the series, and I wish there was at least one more game to wrap up post-Satan Dracula.
It definitely had flaws, just like how LoS had flaws, yet I still enjoyed both games.
Too bad the series is probably going to be dead after this, as Konami seems hell bent on running their games division into the ground and taking their IP with them. But who cares, when you can use recognizable IP for pachinko games that gamblers probably won’t recognize?
I was trying it on that giant rotting corpse with the bugs flying around it but it wasn’t having any of the effects I’ve read about.
