Wait, Terry’s not a chick?! Mind. Blown.
This review is seriously overdue, since I finished this game months ago. This is, of course, having the game sitting around in my inbox for several months before playing it...which just goes to show how much the story of these games, engaged me.
First, the plot is decent and decently written, but it never surprised me. Even with this supposedly big cliffhanger at the end of the game, I can pretty much make up my own ending and not be too far off what’s going to happen. The only thing that did surprise me was all the pointless meandering the main quest had. At best, the writing is cute, but needs some serious editing if it wants to be in the big grand epic it’s trying so hard to be.
The commentary from the previous game is back again, with the varying degrees of success from before. There were moments I found myself laughing, while others I found myself rolling my eyes. There is no better example of the latter than this weird Princess Bride homage that brings the story screeching to a halt. I wouldn’t have minded it so much if the plot didn’t say that the protagonists were on a time limit, and if the homage was, for lack of a better word, good. It completely misunderstood what made the scenes in the Princess Bride so good to begin with. Fox—the character you play as during all of this—acted completely confident and cocky the entire time, meaning there was absolutely no tension over whether or not he was going to succeed. And the scenes of the Princess Bride that were all but ripped off, were so poorly done I could go on for another couple of paragraphs picking this one quest apart. Seriously, I could. But I’ll cut to the chase: this quest probably wouldn’t have bothered me if it were a Side Quest. However, its inclusion in the main story line feels like pointless filler.
Actually, a lot of the meandering would be fixed if these irrelevant “key quests” were made into side quests. They could still be available at different points in the story, but making them optional would change how I felt about them. The game DOES have optional side quests, but a lot more of the key quests should have been made into side quests to get rid of the monotony and change my mindset about a lot of them. Example: THE STUPID MURAL PAINTING PUZZLES WITH THE DWARVES AND FAIRIES! (Yes, this is an actual quest.)
After being so negative, I just want to take a quick moment to say that I love the little details in this game. I mean, the level of polish is admirable. The bed animation was pretty cute. And the fact that whenever Lilly has an item equipped, you can actually see her holding it…little touches like that are great. I also appreciate the new banking system. Now I can horde money! :D
Okay, I wanna take a second to talk about Viper again. Thankfully, she’s absent for most of the game, which works in this game’s favour, but I’d like to add some new insights that I didn’t have when I wrote my review for Curse of the Immortals. Now, before I begin, I’d like to say that my definition of a Mary-Sue isn’t based on any concrete definition, but rather on a gut feeling. If a character trigger’s my internal “Mary-Sue Alarm” (for lack of a better way to put it) then I consider that character a Mary-Sue. If they don’t, I don’t consider them one. With that said, one of the weirdest things about Viper was that she never set off my Mary-Sue Alarm. No matter how much I disliked her as a character, no matter how well she played the part, I just couldn’t bring myself to call her a Mary-Sue. Naturally, this confused me, especially since there were no other Mary-Sues in sight, but after playing this game, I finally understand why Viper never set me off. That’s because Viper wasn’t the Mary-Sue; her mentor, Fox, was. (Well, technically, he’s a Gary-Stu, but same thing). The reason I didn’t pick up on this sooner was because he barely appeared in the last game. Here? There’s a specific part of the main quest where you cannot progress unless you fall down a hole and have Fox swoop in and save you. Egads, that was obnoxious! I mean, at least Viper was allowed to be disempowered and made mistakes. Fox, on the other hand, is always portrayed as “cool”, smart, strong, is always one step ahead of the villains, and saves our heroes on two separate occasions.
Also, quick side note, there is some blatant favoritism for the Thieves Guild in these games. The Fighters Guild is full of militaristic elitists, the Magicians/Mages Guild (can’t remember which) is downright corrupt, yet the THIEVES Guild takes in orphans and always comes to the rescue. Um…what? I would be fine with this if it was some sort of commentary, but the Thieves Guild members never actually steal anything on screen—for the orphans or otherwise. I mean, Viper’s an aspiring playwright (for some reason) and Fox is an alchemist extraordinaire/ninja/2-cool-4-u guy. Why is it even called the Thieves Guild if they never do any thieving?
As for the other main characters…well…they’re good ideas for characters, but none of them are ACTUAL characters. They are all very one dimensional and flat. Lilly wants to save her sister, [spoiler]Sasha is being possessed by dark forces, [/spoiler] Griffin doesn’t like the ideologies of the Fighters Guild, Enoch is one with nature, Dak-Ho is a monk who wants to beat people up despite being from a pacifist society, etc. The only real exception to this rule is Viper, and she’s annoying because she’s two character traits mixed together that don’t mesh well. These aren’t characters—these are motives, and, at best, starting points for real characters. But, I will say that I liked Skye, even though she also suffered from lack of development. She replaced Viper as a Party Member, and while she wasn’t anything to write home about, she felt the most like a real person out of all of our protagonists.
Next, I want to touch on something that really annoyed me in this game specifically. See, throughout the game, you’re going through dungeons, trying to get things before the big bad [spoiler](demon possessed Sasha)[/spoiler] does. Not only do we cut to exactly what the big bad is doing throughout our quest (and thus killing the potential suspense), but after traversing through a dungeon for hours, nothing is more frustrating than sitting through a cutscene where the big bad breaks through the wall of the last room, and steals the treasure right in front of you while the Player is powerless to stop him[spoiler]/her[/spoiler].
That’s not to say that the dungeons were all bad. I mean, there were a couple of dungeons that had really fun gameplay mechanics (snake flutes, snake whips, wheeee~), and quite a few of the puzzles that weren’t nearly as hard as the last game. While there were some puzzles that were really annoying (see dwarves’ mural paintings), others were quite creative and pleasant. Nicely done. Credit where credit is due.
I guess one of the most frustrating things about these two games is that I can SEE the potential they have for being great stories/fantasy-epic-games. But they feel more like a programmer trying to tell a story rather than a writer trying to make a game. I know that having an awesome programmer and an amazing writer isn’t always an option, but finding a story editor really wouldn’t hurt.
Despite all the negatives, it's a good game that I sort of recommend. It's just a shame that it isn't better. Again, these games feel like they should be one long game, not three separate games. (I would tell you to get third game if you want to find out what happens, but if you're anywhere as story saavy as me, you won't need to.) If you enjoyed Curse of the Immortals, then you're going to enjoy this one too, since they both share the same strengths and weaknesses as each other. But, if you're anything like me, you might wanna give it a pass.
