/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Finished Utawarerumono: Futari no Hakuoro. Well, it was okay but in general the game felt like the original too much, been there done that and had roughly the same type of plot revelations and developments. Instead of the first long war taking the majority of the game I was kind of wishing the writer had been more ambitious and built upon the original's setting and scifi stuff more, but this or Itsuwari Kamen didn't really add anything groundbreakingly new in terms overall lore and such. Really playing it safe in my opinion, and the enjoyment probably depends on how much the player wants more of the exact same as the original for 50 hours. Thank god no other sequel hook cliffhangers though.

As for plot, there were some absolutely retarded turns; For example fucking everything to do with Tuskuru. At the beginning Kuon resolves to lead them, only for the old characters to let her go on her own again, without Tuskuru interfering. It feels like a really cheap way of making the civil war have some sort of challenge, even though they'd be able to shit on Raikou easily and they only conveniently rush to help in the very, very end when the whole world is at stake. Then Hakuoro and Eruruu willingly giving Voshisu the master key. WHY? Even though he gets defeated in the end, lending him the key led to thousands of needless deaths. No you fucking don't deserve a happy ending. Probably again a cheap way of creating challenge and urgency in the story. Let's not also forget that them waiting for any human makes Itsuwari no Kamen's war make no sense either, since the Emperor of Yamato was also human. Or in the beginning Entua helping Burai for no proper reason. There were lots of these type of convenient "quick, we need challenge and drama pronto" moments.

Voshisu himself was a boring irredeemable villain with inferiority complex and daddy issues stemming only from poor communication with the Emperor, and I already guessed he was the going to be the traitor in the previous game. He becomes even more bland after using the mask.

Gameplay wise it was an improvement to Itsuwari no Kamen. In general the game is now actually difficult on Hard, there's new usable characters and you can perform dual combos / finishers with multiple characters. As for the biggest issues, I played on PS3 and whenever Fumiriru used any attack or heal the game would always crash, meaning I couldn't use her in battles. The second last boss also had one such game crashing attack, forcing me to play that specific battle on Normal in order to prevent it from using that move.

Music was great and I'm waiting for the OST to be uploaded. There were tons of vocal tracks.