THE GOOD:-Some minor gameplay improvements
-CG movies are pretty cool
-Some graphic improvements
-Survival Mode is better than in the first Sengoku Mousou game
-Characters' special moves instead of bow attack is a good idea
-Masamune Date character is remade for the better.
THE BAD:
-Cheap and stupid "difficulty"
-No Japanese voiceovers
-Most characters' stories and endings are very uninteresting and silly(with the exception of a couple really)
-The game has much less "soul" in general
-No Kunoichi, no Goemon
-Ranmaru & Okuni are for free mode only
-Oichi character is remade for the worse
-no second costumes
-no equipment items
-no alternative endings.
SUMMARY:
I played KOEI games since DW3, and I am a big fan of the genre in general. I really liked the first SW game and looked forward to the sequel. Unfortunately, the second SW not only is not an improvement over the first game, but even took a few steps backward and is a big letdown in general.
My first and biggest complaint about this game is difficulty and AI.
KOEI games always had some stupidity in terms of difficulty, and this game continues to be a KOEI-style tactical action. Consider this, you fight a battle, defeat ALL of the enemy generals, then enemy reinforcements come, you defeat them as well(btw you must do it like the wind, or all of your generals will be killed),then you finally get to the enemy main camp and start to fight enemy commander only to see in the middle of the fight with him a message "your commander was defeated, the battle is lost". If you've played KOEI games before, you know what I'm talking about. There are a LOT of such battles in this game. Not every one, but the majority of them. Enemy generals AI is cheap and blocks like mad, it manages to evade your mousou from behind by rolling away. Yes, previous KOEI games had such things, but SW2 manages to even enhance all this stupidity and cheapness.
My second complaint is characters of SW2.
In this game KOEI added a lot of new playable characters, like Musashi Miyamoto and Sakon Shima. Unfortunately, they also excluded some old ones completely-Kunoichi, Goemon, Yoshimoto, and made Ranmaru Mori & Okuni only playable in free mode. And while excluding Yoshimoto can be considered a good move(never was a popular one),it was definitely a bad one to exclude all the others. Okuni,Keiji & Goemon story was great and hilarious in the first game, Ranmaru & Mitsuhide story was also done pretty good in the first game, So why not have it remade in the second game as well? And I find it pretty stupid to exclude Kunoichi. She played a big role in the first game, just because she was a fictional character? This game has Mitsunari Ishida running around the battlefield with a fan, and Ieyasu Tokugawa jumping like a character from some anime with a boomstick, though there's a female ninja character in this game, called Nene, They could make Kunoichi vs Nene story, would be good actually. By the way, I must add that this game has much worse characters' stories in general, and much less relationships and character development in general, with the exception of a few.
KOEI completely remade two characters in this game-Date Masamune and Oichi. They are no longer kids in this game. I liked that they made Date an adult but Oichi is not good at all. She is no longer a cool tomboy, now she is a *ahem*"proud wife of Nagamasa Azai"*ahem*.But this is my opinion really.
My final big complaint about SW2 is the replay value and extras.
SW2 has a LOT less replay value than it's predecessor. First, the game does not have the alternative endings and branching stories. This is stupid and I really can't see why they did this… then, there aren't any items in this game, then-there aren't any alternative costumes… is a DVD disc too little for this game? SW2 has one new extra-the Sugoroku(Monopoly) game..why even make this in a hack and slash action game?..well,in any case you HAVE to play it against the computer and win one time to unlock Okuni character, only to have her in free mode. Now think for yourself how good is this extra..
Speaking of things that I enjoyed in SW2 more than in it's predecessor and improvements (sadly there are very few of them), I can mention the survival mode. The infinite castle is a lot more fun and cool to play now. There are some pretty fun missions and they removed silly traps. I can say that it is the only aspect of this game that I really enjoyed, in fact I spent most of my gameplay in SW2 in Survival Mode. Well, and also they replaced useless bow with special moves-that's a good thing too.
But honestly, I can say that I really do NOT recommend to buy this, in general crappy KOEI work.
This is not a "Samurai Warriors 2"..But much like 2005's Dynasty Warriors 5, it's the same old game, even flawed. Game series have to improve and move forward, you can't do the same for five years.Yes,Playstation2 has it's limits, but Konami doesn't release a MGS every year...
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