Blossom Tales II: The Minotaur Prince

The game looks and plays almost the same as the 1st part. The game engine, graphic style and map size look the same, even most of the weapons and some of the riddles types were reused and it took me about the same time (23h vs. 21h) to reach 100% . All in all, I liked the 1st part better though as the 2nd part tends to be more grindy (fishing) and made it a bit harder to achieve 100%. Besides, there is one almost unforgivable flaw ("The bad") and most changes compared to part 1 were to the worse. But I still enjoyed most the game and therefore gave it thumbs up. The good Lily seems to have slightly less inertia than in the first game, so the "crumbling platform" parts are a bit better/easier to handle. The Sensor/Simon like melody games were removed as well as the (partly) erratic glyph stone puzzles. All in all the puzzles in part 2 are a bit more difficult with one or two where I actually had to think about a solution. Some new game elements were added like creating potions or riding a horse/pig (pretty pointless though). You can fast travel now from (nearly) every location earlier in the game. I think the map is slightly more usable than that of the 1st part but maybe I was just getting used to it. The not so good More or less everything that was lacking in the first part, is still the same: there is still no proper quest log or (side) quest marker. There graphics are still a bit too lowres and lackluster (color choices, no shading). There are still nearly no tile animations even though some grass and water tiles have very (!) minimalist color animations. Some things actually got worse: The two best attacks (stomp and fireball medallions) were completely removed. The whole combat scroll thing barely works due to bad control scheme choices. There is a dodge move now, but it doesn't work very well (too slow, sometimes not working at all). The fast travel system was changed: inside the large dungeons, there are still teleporter stones, but in the outside world you travel with a balloon from station to station. So you can't travel into/out of dungeons any more. Also, the balloon can only land in larger spaces, so while you can call it with a tune later in the game, you can't just immediately teleport from anywhere as with the teleporter ring in part 1. While creating potions is generally a nice touch, some of the potions are only needed for riddles and getting some rare ingredients (again and again) is very annoying. I think I wasted nearly an hour in sum trying to catch a specific type of fish needed for a certain potion. The whole tune concept is a bit pointless, silly and even annoying. Instead of just being able to do things at certain locations automatically after finding the according item, you have to look up the according tune, play it and wait several seconds until it's finished. After opening the 3rd door with the very same tune, this becomes somewhat irritating. More so for calling the balloon, where it adds another few seconds to the balloon animation. There are more situation and bugging enemies which make it harder not to take damage. Also the health restoring hearts seem to be much rarer. Getting to 100% is much more annoying than in the 1st part. There are some breakable walls which are barely detectable due to unwise graphics design (especially in the turtle dungeon). Also, the very same "riddle" (ghost on graveyard) is repeated over and over again, partly without hints and for each time you need a specific potion that you can only brew after catching a specific, very rare fish. Meh. The bad Even though there is a partial key configuration menu, you can't configure the keys to move forward/backward in the menus. The keys "[" and "]" needed for this are not mapped correctly in anything else but the English keyboard layout, so if you are from another country, you can't switch menus and therefore are not even able to leave the game without shutting it down externally. I.e. you need to download the English language setting in Windows and switch to the EN layout when playing the game. No need to say that this is totally ridiculous in the 21st century and actually would justify to vote the game down just to tell the lazy developers that this is intolerable. But, yeah well.