Product Description
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An epic struggle between good and evil ignites the kingdom of
Varuna as the peaceful realm falls under the control of a
sinister baron. You are Flint, a renegade sman seeking
revenge on the pirates who killed your mother and now flourish
under the new regime.
You must wield your through this land of unsuspecting
danger and adventure. Can you successfully explore and survive
this intricate story wrought with bizarre characters,
brain-twisting puzzles, and wild games? Beware! An even greater
evil is about to be revealed.
Review
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Few games reek of the grasping, guileless profiteering that goes
on in the game industry as much as Alundra 2 does - it's a sad,
uninspired attempt to turn a mildly popular game into a mildly
popular franchise. Lifeless exercises like this game are cooked
up when companies are concerned merely with name re and
branding, and quality comes in a distant second to marketing.
While it's definitely playable, it's mediocre in almost every way
and begs the question - why would you even consider it, with the
plethora of titles on the platform? In this new adventure you'll
be playing as Flint, the typical disproportionate, red-haired,
cute-faced anime hero of whimsical RPGs. Pirates have killed his
parents, you see, and there's a price on his head. You'll meet up
with a dashing princess, the weasely pirates, and the oddly green
and malevolent Mephisto, a sorcerer bent on world domination via
the bizarre method of inserting clockwork keys into people and
animals, turning them into android killing machines and slaves.
Alundra 2 dispenses with any and all ties to the original game.
This time around, Contrail - creator of the Wild Arms series and
Legend of Legaia - has the chief creative duties on this game. Of
course, the term "creative" is used very loosely here - because
Alundra 2 isn't particularly original. Basically, we have a
by-the-book experience, the endless banality unsuccessfully
obscured by inane minigames. Gone too is the title character,
Alundra, and any graphical, artistic, or thematic references to
the original game. The gameplay, too, is absolutely nothing
original or inventive. The game employs endless standard
action-RPG methodology - you have a , and you must smack
things with it. Of course, magic is on the horizon as well. The
control implementation is not the best either, and Flint will
overshoot his targets in a desperate leap and get smacked upside
the head in the worst scenario. Of course, getting smacked upside
the head is more common than ever in Alundra 2, because
Activision's almost flawless localization is marred by the
increased "normal" difficulty level. The enemies do otherworldly
damage in this mode. Thankfully, they have left "easy" - the
original difficulty level in the Japanese version. Alundra 2
dispenses with its prequel's 2D graphics, which while basic, were
functional. Instead we've got hess pointy, jagged, and seamy
polygons flickering and clipping their way through a universe of
warped and pixelated textures. This game would've been
graphically mediocre in 1997 - but for the occasional decent
texture . Soundwise, Alundra 2 is much more reasonable - while
the music is fairly derivative of the work of such mainstay
fantasy composers as Final Fantasy's Nobuo Uematsu, it's handled
with complete competence and serves as a desperate, valiant
background to the floundering mechanics and jagged graphics. The
character voices are lively, and the text is grammatical,
occasionally amusing, and pretty natural - Activision's
localization team has done a great job. It's a shame that this
effort was wasted on such a mediocre title. Hopefully, the
company's marketing department will see beyond branding next time
and acquire a more interesting game. Alundra 2 suffers most from
the fact that there is no real reason for it to exist. Fans of
the original adventure will surely be disappointed with this one:
Being suckered into buying a game that's a purported sequel and
then receiving a product that bears no resemblance to the
original is a frustrating experience. This game sold extremely
poorly in Japan, so the prospects of a true Alundra sequel are
dim at best, unless it's a smashing success in the USA. While
it's true that almost all games are created as profit machines,
some transcend - Alundra 2 is an unkind reminder that pulls us
back into the base clay.--Christian Nutt--Copyright © 1998
GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in
part in any form or medium without express written permission of
GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
- ALUNDRA 2 A NEW LEGEND BEGINS.
