Dusk Diver 2

Dusk Diver 2 delivers a much-improved sequel. Though its story takes some time to get going, its execution bears weight, especially in the second half of the game. With great exploration and combat, which allows you to take control of all your party members this time around, Dusk Diver 2 provides a steep challenge with plenty of content to sink your teeth into.

By expanding the roster of playable characters and the number of fighters that can be dragged on the front line, the guys at WANIN International have endowed Dusk Diver 2 with a pleasant strategic component completely absent in the first episode. However, instead of conceiving a new growth system reasoned and designed specifically for the team, the studio has kept the leveling system of the original, which allowed you to manually intervene on the parameters of the Yang Yumo alone. Being shared among the various members of the gang, the experience points accumulated through the clashes are not sufficient to simultaneously improve the fighters available to the player, who is often forced to focus on one or two heroes to cope with a balance of difficulty to be reviewed. at most, neglecting the remaining three. Compared to the progenitor, Dusk Diver 2 has in short made some appreciable steps forward, but the road to perfect the formula of the saga and express its full potential would still seem long.

If you’re a fan of the original Dusk Diver, there’s plenty here for you to enjoy. Better combat and more time to hang out with the delightful staff of the Tumaz Mart is sure to please, but it's a shame that both the story and many of the side quests are fairly forgettable. Overall, this is a fairly solid hack-and-slash adventure with some really creative dungeons to explore, but it does have a little bit too much busywork and not enough variety.

Dusk Diver 2 shows a notable improvement over the original by adding a second playable character to switch between in-battle at any point, but doesn’t improve the formula enough to be a must-have for anyone who didn’t love the original. The combat system has been beefed up, but variety is still in short-supply and the same environments being used throughout dungeons hurts things. The overworld exploration is the most pure fun the game offers up in its current form and it’s a shame some streamlining wasn’t done to dungeons to make them less laborious and more fun to complete.

Dusk Diver 2 offers the idea of cool systems and a fun combat system, but never really delivers on it, despite some wonderful waifus and husbandos. [Issue#19, p.90]