PXZ2 - Wherein the leader of the Imperial Assault Force is almost as Heroic as pudding.
So, sadly, it looks like the Ylisseans are almost the last ones to join. Got them in Chapter 20, though there's still the Tales folks who haven't shown up yet. That said, they do get a pretty cool intro as it looks like you're going to have a rescue mission, and instead plot happens and they simply show up and save the day. Outside of Phoenix and Maya, most of the folks I was looking forward to made a late appearance. Granted, this is mostly because the late appearances are the Sakura Taisen folks, and I really liked the Gemini/Erica team from PXZ1. Sadly, neither team quite works as well as that team did, but when all four of them are together Gemini does get some good snark off on the love triangle.
I am also amused that one of the scenes felt like something out of Desmonds and Dragons. Namely, Captain Commando really, really makes me think of the friend who plays Alexander, and well, Alexander himself. There is also the quintessential merchant, Sylphie or something like that. Super opportunistic, super capitalist, totally goes where the money is. Because the team works well with her, Captain Commando tries to recruit her by appealing to rightness and justice. She, kinda shoots him down, hard, because that isn't profitable and would force her to neglect all of her more morally flexible customers. However, she is willing to give us all a free ride not to where we want to go, but where we need to go. And completely coincidentally, a lot of our enemies manage to very quickly find out, from a mysterious informant they all paid individually, separately, and handsomely, where the party happened to be.
Love that merchant so much.
Finally, gameplay. the gameplay is kinda braindead easy right now. Only buying one of each weapon and armour each map, which seems to be more than enough. Game is actually less threatening than PXZ1, but it's also going by a lot faster too. Notably, in spite of the hardcap on attacks, enemies are dying faster. At this point in PXZ1, mooks were still killable in one chain, but nothing else was. Here, mooks are killable by support+solo attacks. With a back attack, a good weapon, and a Super, I can still kill most bosses with a single Pair chain. Which is insane. Also insane are the damage numbers getting pumped out. I've managed to rack up 60k damage in a single attack sequence. That's a good score for PXZ1 endgame. And because you're fuelling skills with SP instead of XP, you're a lot more likely to spring for marginal/situational skills, since they won't detract from pumping out supers anymore, which means you can get your attack boosters a lot easier.
Also interesting is something I missed until halfway through a level. Heck, I might not have even noticed if it hadn't hit Aty (I enjoy both her attack sequence and Holy Prama is a nifty skill) and Phoenix (yeah, all about the attack sequence. I get a kick out of Maya's killer confetti). They've made it so not all the maps use all of your people. In fact, from about 15 onwards, it feels like if they haven't split your party or are doing something special you'll be benching some of your units.
To end this off, I've only caught one reference to the Street Fighter movie thus far, but it was honestly inevitable that this one would be referenced. That said, despite Bison effectively being the co-big bad at this point with Saya, he has nothing to do with it.
