Me and Idea Factory! Have a rocky relationship. They make a lot of games I want to love. Quite a few times this ends up happening, Fairy Fencer F was a surprisingly great game for example. And even the first Death End Re;Quest was a lot of fun despite some fairly notable flaws. So now here we are at the follow-up, and while there is a lot about this game I liked it was a constant fight to try to look past the problems I had with it, and in the end, the negative won out.
The first thing I want to say is while this is technically a stand-alone story you can follow along without having played the first game, it kind of feels like you need to have played the first game to understand certain aspects of how this world functions. When you learn that some people came here because they thought there were 'bugs', for example, there is no context in this game as to what that means, but if you played the first you would understand. That said, it creates a weird moment where the lead character, Mai, who doesn't have knowledge of what that means just kind of goes along with it and seems entirely unbothered by it. It's awkward but does mean you will have more of an understanding of what's going on if you play the first game.
That means I am going to be very minimal in how I talk about mechanics and refer you to my review of the previous game, and just say that this game has a couple of different aspects to it, strips out some of the aspects of the previous game, and overall comes out about the same in terms of quality, if not a bit more repetitive.
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Looking purely at the story, it's frustrating to have a great lead character with Mai. She was a very abused child who was pushed to the brink and ended up killing her father in self-defense. After some counseling, she is sent off to Wordsworth to learn and live at the orphanage with the others. With such a gruesome opening to the game, you expect that to carry through and to a degree it does. Strange horrors begin to happen at Wordsworth as Mai looks for clues to what happened to her sister who apparently came here. The problem starts to come in when the secondary lead and love interest, Rottie, is insufferable throughout the entire run of the game and she is always there.
The romance angle here is forced, and while I do like my pervy humor Rottie just seems.... kind of molesty. And it's all the time. It could be funny from time to time but at a point, it's just awkward. I don't think these characters have much chemistry together, and honestly the emotional crux of the story kind of relies on that. There is a bit more when Liliana enters the picture, but even if she's at least a decent character it's nothing that adds much to the plot.
I will give the game credit for some pretty solid visual designs. The actual level design gets repetitive and dull, but the visual scenes of the horror are fantastic and atmospheric, and there are a lot of great enemy designs that fit the game's themes very well. They are designs that deserved a much better narrative.
Where I think the game really fell behind is there is something the first game had that helped you to overlook the flaws, and that was the passion behind it. There was a kind of insight into the mind and love a programmer has for developing a game that came through in the themes, but this follow up just does nothing even close to that. The game just didn't' feel like it had something to convey like the last game, so it feels like a big step back.
The worst part about all of this is I can't say what exactly it is without spoiling it, so what I will do now is say I do not recommend this game at all and just say that pretty much nothing that happened seemed like it matters. That said, if you want to hear what I have to say keep reading, otherwise if you are at all interested in playing the game I suggest skipping the rest of this review for spoilers.
So, as it turns out the demonic gods of this world are easily duped. Rather than making six hundred and sixty-six sacrifices, effectively someone just put this place on a time loop and keep re-sacrificing the same people over and over again. And, for reasons I don't understand, they brought in Mai to be another one even though this trick seemed to be working perfectly fine. The only people that are alive here are Rottie, yourself, Shina, and Lilliana. You know, the only people who matter. There is also Arata, who was one of the main characters along with Shina from the last game, but both he and Shina die here. But he left behind the 'World Key' for Mai as a last resort, allowing her to rewrite the history of the world and fix all of this. The problem? He already had the World Key himself, nothing was stopping him from just... fixing everything himself and saving everyone. If Mai was able to win without the World Key, something he saw as a possibility, he and Shina would have just remained dead. Just... use the key yourself. All of this game happened because Arata decided to be a fucking moron.