Finished it on Warrior, first run. My thoughts....
I love this game, despite certain recycled elements being used liberally from the first NG and the technical faults it comes packed with. NG2 has enough new offerings to keep things fresh. Team Ninja was ambitious, and their hunger to surpass themselves might end up being a double-edged sword. NG2's biggest difference is found in its combat. Every fight now seems to have at least 10 enemies, and the notorious chapter 10's stairway boasts upwards of at least 8~10* more. It coerces the player to use Ryu aggressively in lieu of turtling, and this is a welcome change.
On the subject of difficulty, the pendulum has swung in further extremes. Here's the list of things that made NG2
easier:
- every save point restores Ryu to full hp once
- life of the gods/Thousand Gods restore Ryu to full hp upon usage
- similar to NG: Dragon Sword, Ryu's life bar automatically restores itself after every fight, with only a marginal portion being set aside as permanent damage
- if the player misses something (stat boosting items or weapons), the shop will sell it in the next chapter. I welcome this actually
I hate to reload a previous save if I missed something, rpg makers should take note. :lol
To compensate, the enemies are faster, and like Hurricane Pack/Black, they will throw you more often to discourage abuse of blocks. The first 4 chapters felt easy due to the dev's generous manner of giving the player so much HP to play with, but as soon as the werewolves show up, it was clear that the tutorials were over. I just have to kill that much faster to keep Ryu's health in the pink for boss fights.
The camera gives me some problems at times, it is frustrating to be hit by a fireball from off the screen during the bow's manual aim. The solution? Why, use auto-aim of course! It works both ways but the annoyance here is that the player does not get to see those winged beasts being struck by arrows but you definitely know you scored a hit due to 2 cues: the audio cue of a sharp hiss, and your karma meter shows UT 3000 for every kill. This is a poor design choice, when the lovely artworks and attack animations are being looked over in favor of efficiency.
About the latest patch, here are my observations (take note that I did not buy a single DLC for NG2):
- chapter 10 and 14's cutscenes are fine. I cleared them in one shot, without any freezing incidients.
- chapter 10's stairway with an estimated 100 ninjas appearing in groups of 10 each will definitely slow the entire screen down to about 5 fps. This has yet to be addressed.
- when attempting to kill ninjas in chapter 2 for Rod of Trials, if Ryu moves from the shrine to the stairs, "now loading" will appear often. I suspect this is because there are 2 areas there, and the stairs serve as a border. Crossing from one border to the next will ask for data from the disc, and hence the mid-loading in combat occurs.
- freezing is still present in the earlier chapters.... I didn't really take note of where and how, but I think prior to chapter 7, I had a few random freezes. Thankfully I didn't experience one single freeze after clearing ToVs 5 and 6.
It will be nice if Team Ninja is given more time to iron out these issues, but as it stands I don't think they will commit more resources into bugs fixing as the 2 freeze points commonly experienced by fans is patched. If a director's cut of NG2 is in the works, with content rivaling that of NG:Black with more optimization and retailing at a budget price, I might just come for the next party.
