Quick Critique: Guacamelee 2

  I highly recommend playing Guacamelee 1 first, which is a-okay because it's one of my favorite PS3 games. The intro to G2 is a bit on the slow side but by the time you hit the first dungeon, things are popping off and the challenge rooms are right up there with the ones from the end of Guac 1. When Guacamlee decides to get difficult, it has an amazing ability to be teeth-grindingly frustrating while making you laugh and have fun at the same time. G1 had hard bonus rooms, but it was a fair hard because you can see what they're going for and what they want you to do, you just need to up your skills and be able to do it. For a game about tight platforming and really impactful upgrade abilities, the first new ability in G2 is pretty bad. It's not fun, it's finicky, and you don't have complete control over it at all times. The best sequences the game has are you expertly stringing together your moves to weave through intricate hazards but the new power is a fling move that's based on your angle away from the grapple point so it feels... physics-y when all your other moves are super tight. How far away you can be from a grapple point to activate the move feels random or unresponsive at the worst of times and it leaves you repeating puzzles because it wouldn't activate at the proper angle and you dropped to your doom or flung yourself too high and into spikes. G2's hardest challenge is a heavily timed segment using the fling move over and over but I died over and over because the character would grapple the air instead of grabbing the grapple point or the grapple point behind me would activate instead of the one I wanted to grab. The entire segment lacked the tension of the original Tule Tree because I felt like I was fighting the game and controls rather than the objective. You can't customize your controls and the default isn't great. Part of the problem is that there are just too many controls and combinations of buttons. You have multiple special moves mapped to the same button, which is fine and works well, but then you have a different state to morph into and that has its own set of special moves, and then there's a second special move button related to wall moves, and changing dimensions on top of that. The controls are a mess. If all they did was cut out the chicken state, I think I'd be cool with it. It was a funny joke in the first game but now that they've tried to turn it into a major gameplay element, it's just more clutter than fun. 

  The art is a mixed blessing. Drinkbox is up to some sorcery with how amazing they are at applying lighting effects to 2D objects. The game just looks fantastic and awash in colors and sparkles everywhere you look. But that also means a lot of scenes are overloaded with lights and objects fighting for your focus. You'll frequently run into hazards that are hard to pick out or get hit by a projectile that passed behind some effect or decoration and you couldn't see it until it was too late. there will be fights where multiple enemies with different kinds of shields, fire, and explosions or other VFX will all overlap and you lose track of it all and can't see your character. You just kind of button mash and hope you make your way out for a breather. 

  The new story and characters are good, but they don't have the impact of the original villains. Every member of Calaca's crew was memorable and Calaca himself was a fun really evil villain. In G2, only one member of the bad guy's crew is any fun and Salvador himself barely feels like an entity. You never see him do anything other than posture. For the vast vast majority of the game, your task is to hunt down a dying man. Yeah, he's evil and all but if you just stalled, he'd probably drop dead on his own. Not much a menacing figure. The overall story leans heavy on multiverse shenanigans but they don't have much fun with it. It just leads to lots of Family Guy quality references and doubles down on the goat guy, who continues to be just the worst. They do let you switch costumes practically from the start and you get to play as X'tabay! But her hair is tied up in a bun! BOOO! She has amazing video game hair, let it flow like the majestic waterfall that it is. 

  As mentioned, Guacamelee 2 is still loaded down with references again, but they're more heavily video gamey than just memes this time so that's... better. In the first ten minutes, they hit you with Limbo to Bad Dudes to Double Dragon to River City Ransom to Bad Dudes AGAIN. It's a really bad first impression ,but it thankfully cools down a little bit after that but there's still a steady stream of it everywhere you go. When you're free of the references, the game is actually very funny so I don't know why they're leaning on these lazy references. Guacamelee has one of the most likable  representations of Satan and there are characters whose whole bit is that they tell terrible skeleton-based puns but those bad puns are funnier than any of the TV and game references crammed in. There's a whole area devoted to mocking the players that complained about the use of memes in the first game but... most of the complaints are legitimate. There were too many memes, they weren't funny, they were outdated by the time most people played the game, and the rest of the writing was better than relying on a Robot Chicken level reference to an Internet picture. None of those complaints are invalid but the game expects you to take the developer's side and think the people telling the company to not use memes are the ones that are wrong and jerks. The writing feels less like a celebration of Mexican culture than the first game. G1 felt like it was honoring Mexican lore but having some loving fun with it but G2 falls back on stereotypes and tacos a bit too quickly. 

  I got every Trophy save for two. One requires you to juggle an enemy six times in a row with a specific move, but if you've maxed out all your skills all the enemies die before you get to six hits. The other trophy is for beating the game on hard, but... I don't know if I really want to play through it a second time. Maybe I'll get bored on the weekend and get the Platinum, but Guac 1 left me wanting more and Guac 2 wore out its welcome. I was able to beat it 100% in just under 9 and a half hours. That puts me at number 22 on the Speed Run leaderboards but the game wouldn't let me upload my time. Even though I'm connected to the Internet, it keeps telling me I'm not and prompting me to connect. If the game won't let me upload a score because I don't have PS Plus, that is some serious BS. Every dungeon seemed like you could cut out a third of it and it would be a lot better.   

  G2 is a good game, but it's not as good as the first one. That's still good praise. Guacamelee 1 is one of the best PS3 games, so for the sequel to be good but not one of the best, they still made a fine game that's worth your time. But where I'd recommend Guacamelee 1 to anybody to show why this is my favorite genre, I'd only recommend Guac 2 to somebody that's already a fan. They succumbed to the pressures of a sequel. Instead of just taking what was great about the first game and just making more of it (which is all I wanted), they added extra features that weren't as refined and the game feels a bit cluttered for it, but then the maps are so much bigger that I was discouraged from doing multiple mid-game clean-ups for chests and upgrades. You can't just make your map bigger without having more fast travel and a better way to track progress. The music is good, but all the best tracks are just remixes of the first game. I regularly listen to G1's soundtrack, but with G2 it's hard to pick out what's new and different. Guac 1 just needed to get rid of the memes, have the final boss fights not be total trash, and improve the late game combat so it wasn't just slapping shields on existing enemies and pumping up their health. For all the areas that G2 could have improved upon the original, they ignored those things and didn't fix the original's main problems.