you have in Scarlet Nexus played through both campaigns twice? could in persona 5 say all the dialogues and know every Musou banger of the last five years by heart? Then maybe it’s time you Dusk Diver 2 to watch. The sequel to the indie Japanese role-playing game from Taiwanese studio Wanin Games is something like the River Cola to Scarlet Nexus-Coke. Tastes good, but far from the original.
Here, too, you are a supernaturally talented teenager in a dark parallel world and beat the souls out of hordes of foul monsters. The story ties in with the events of the first part. Still wielding the power of Dragonvein energy, which allows her to unleash devastating lightning bolts, our heroine Yumo is now a college student. She divides her time between her part-time job at the Tumaz Secret Store and trips to the parallel dimension Youshanding, where chaos beasts have appeared again through a crack in the dimensional structure. A story like from the narrative basics for role-playing games, with the Dusk Diver 2 now really does not win an innovation award. Conversely, this also means that the brief review at the beginning of the game is enough to bring you up to date and you can easily get started with Part 2.
The strength of the game is not in the story anyway, but in the combat system. It’s fluid and doesn’t overwhelm you. String up a combo chain with a series of Light and Heavy Attacks to fill up your Special Meter, then unleash a powerful Super Attack. The biggest change in part 1 is that you no longer fight alone, but are actively supported by your AI colleagues. You can also switch between them at the push of a button and can, for example, first shoot away a monster’s armor with pistols and then attack again in close combat.
This has its charm at the beginning, but soon degenerates into hollow banging. Mainly because the unimaginative monster hordes of wolves and robots can usually take far too much beating until their life bar finally drops to zero. In the end, the game lacks an identity of its own. It’s clear which titles were the inspiration for the mechanics, but from the combat system to the open world, everything just seems like a copy: clumsy button tapping instead of fine blade ballet and simple cliché figures instead of memorable characters. Anyone who likes beatings will still find a good stopgap here, everyone else is better off playing the reference.
