Shinogi Chess Club 2: Resistance

Shinogi Chess Club 2 has it all. Tense and dramatic showdowns, memorable characters, and even self-referential humor. The story revolves around Himiko, a senior student at Yoshino High School. She's coming off a pretty big revelation and success from the first game, but there's still so many questions that were left unanswered. If you haven't played the first game, no worries there either. Theres a full rundown in game that you can refer to at anytime to make sure you're up to date on whats happening. And SCC2 wastes no time getting into solving the first games questions. While you learn more, you'll be bumping along to the awesome soundtrack. SCC2 takes a lot of what you love from the first game and just takes it to the next level. Highly recommend if you're a fan of visual novels, chess, or just a good time in general.

Such a good game! I really like it so far :) And you can tell how much work was put into making improvements from the first game! I'm still not very good at chess ( I didn't really improve since the first game lol), but I can certainly appreciate the effort put into creating a new version of chess, and making the experience more seamless than before. I'm looking forward to playing the rest of the story! Also, the game runs pretty smoothly on my macbook! I've had no issues so far, but will update in the future if I run into anything. My overall experience has been positive, and I recommend playing this if you're eager to learn more about the world of Shinogi Chess ;) I really wanted to get more Kana content and I'm definitely getting that lol I've kept up with development and she's literally my FAV <3 GO KANA GO

A huge step up from the previous game. Absolutely worth every penny I spent! I want more!

I loved the original SCC, and there were a lot of things I liked about this game too. The music is still great, I very much enjoy the humorous dialogue, and there are a lot of little touches that shine with personality and charm (Kenshi reading his haikus to the heavens, the evolving decor of the club room complete with its patented Kana Korner(tm), etc). I've grown fond of the developer's art style, too, as rough as it may be in some places. It's just charming. That said, while I was swiftly absorbed by the original Shinogi Chess Club and binged through it very quickly, I found myself less enthralled with this one and it took me quite a while to actually finish. I think there are a couple reasons for that: 1. The first two chapters (first half of the game) are really slowly paced. This is somewhat understandable for Ch. 1 since it's a (re)introduction to the world of SCC, but I think Ch. 2 was largely unnecessary. It was mostly devoted to explicitly showing events we were already made aware of through more subtle storytelling in the first game. I think about 70-80% of the scenes in this chapter could have been removed outright, and the pacing would benefit from it and little would be lost. 2. Unfortunately, some of the novelty of Shinogi Chess itself has worn off. New board variants were a good idea, but it didn't really feel like enough; the same strategies I used in the first game won every match here. In the original game, every match felt like an opportunity to experiment! Here, it just felt like another opportunity for me to abuse Rook + Pawn stacks (which the AI still doesn't understand and will happily blunder its Queen into). It feels "solved." Some sort of additional game mechanics could go a long way here in the eventual sequel. There are also some awkward growing pains with this being the second entry in a trilogy. Make no mistake, the first game ended on a cliffhanger, however it felt emotionally complete. Without spoilers, Shinogi Chess Club 2 brings some plot threads to the forefront in a way that creates significant conflict for our main character, Himiko, and changes her relationship with the rest of the cast. This is a very interesting development, and I was excited to see where it went. However, by the time the game ends, none of this friction is resolved, and Himiko is left at a strange and unsatisfying point of an incomplete character arc. That's on top of the fact that we have another cliffhanger for the overarching story. Going into this game, it felt like it'd conclude the story given the general pacing and trajectory of the first game. I'm still a bit confused on how this stretched out into three games (though maybe the pacing issues mentioned earlier contributed). If/when Shinogi Chess Club 3 comes out and resolves the remaining plot threads, maybe I'll look back and feel my complaints here were silly in retrospect. But for now, it's honestly a little frustrating and anti-cathartic. To be clear, I did enjoy this game overall. I'm just left with some grumblings that I can't really ignore.