OG2 - Beat this! 35 masteries. Frue final I found substantially easier than the previous form. Less durable, less accurate, and I had a much easier time gaining Will due to the fact that the grunts had 5-12k HP instead of 120k. And no Alfimi to beat up first also helped. Strange design choice there.
Overall, the game improved on OG1 in most meaningful ways. Plot was ridiculously awful but increasingly the game designers seemed aware of this, what with the fourth wall breaking and whatnot. Favourite characters were Archibald, Lee, Vigagi, and Axel, because they are ridiculously over the top and silly as far as villains go. Favourite moment of the game was either Lee/Katina interaction or the immensely silly scene in Chapter 36 Earth which I already documented. <_<
Still don't think it's a good enough parody to actually get any sort of points for this, but I guess it could be worse. Unfortunately, parody or not, there's just plain TOO MUCH plot, with no sceneskip to go with it. I never really figured out what the hell the point was of giving oodles of plot to various political factions who never really were at all important to the main plot. Eh, whatevs.
Gameplay is of course what this is all about, and it's still pretty cool. OG1 had a decent enough base, and while OG2 didn't address one of my main concerns with it (GIVE ME MY DAMAGE PROJECTIONS) it did at least up the challenge a -lot-. While occasionally the challenge was of the poorly-conceived cheesy variety (ninja reinforcements and suddenly changing battle objectives suck) generally it was cool, fighting much better enemies. Quite a few of the boss fights were suitably epic, even if they generally just boiled down to some variation of Alert spam.
Music is excellent pretty much throughout. Battle themes are great, actually having boss themes is great, map themes were much better this time, too.
7/10 area probably, think it does miss the cut for 8's which are getting into elite RPG territory for me, OG2 is pretty clearly not quite in that territory.
