The game is relatively freeform once you land in Amahara - you arrive dishevelled and starving, and a little mute girl (lovingly referred to as "No-name from Amakaze" by her friends and acquaintances) gives you a rice ball to perk you up. The biggest problem initially is that helping people is just not entertaining. But while WotS2 builds on what went before, it seems to have inherited the problems that afflicted the first game wholesale, developed its own niggles, and padded out the rest of the disc with other elements that fail to capture our interest. The original was certainly rife with problems, although in general we gave them the benefit of the doubt because we enjoyed the experience overall. So where did it all go wrong? Well, first of all, there's the question of whether it was all right to begin with. In fact, here's a better one: it's short and it's not very good. It's also horrifically badly voiced, visually archaic and painfully scripted and contrived. It's more or less the same approach that the original Way of the Samurai took, except that where that game - released in Europe on Eidos' ill-fated 'Fresh Games' label - managed to contribute a fairly interesting and compressed little yarn, quirky characters and tricky combat, WotS2 is neither interesting nor challenging, and the choices it lets you make are neither here nor there. You can help or hinder the people you meet, side with the goodies, join the local gang, or just cause mischief until your time is up - either after ten days, when you'll see one of the game's endings, or sooner, should you happen to die beforehand for whatever reason. The idea is that you - a wandering ronin with no particular place to go or task to perform - have stumbled into the feudal Japanese town of Amahara, where you will spend ten days in whatever manner you see fit. That's The WayĮxcept, in the case of Acquire's latest - distributed by Capcom over here - the trade-off for the tedium of having to start over each time is meant to be the element of choice. Assuming you'll accept "about playing something else" as a substitute for "half an hour ahead". Remember the days when, every time you fired up your favourite game, you had to start right from the beginning? Remember that same, tired, first handful of levels that you'd seen hundreds of times before? Remember the peaks and troughs along the way to the new stuff? Remember the inevitability of dying at least once or twice performing a really simple task, because your mind was already thinking half an hour ahead? That's roughly what it's like to play Way of the Samurai 2 beyond your first go.
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