er fan-service is a powerful force. It's why a lengthy turn-based strategy game like
Project X Zone 2's story
justifies the presence of its multi-franchise cast of characters by
throwing them into a conflict rooted in a war between Shinra--a secret
government organization--and a rival organization known as Ouma that
causes chaos in the world by opening up dimensional rifts. All the
while, mysterious golden chains have started to sprout from the surface
in other worlds, commanding the attention of the heroes from each to
fight under a unified cause. This setup is as silly as it sounds, and
the game spares no effort in addressing it further.
The
game's premise is enchanting, especially if you're familiar with each
respective franchise it crosses over. With an extensive roster that
includes notable faces--such as Tekken's Kazuya Mishima, Resident Evil's Leon S. Kennedy, Shenmue's
Ryo Hazuki, and much, much more--it's difficult to ignore the charm of
seeing all these characters appear in a single adventure. It even digs
deep into each publisher's' lesser known properties, pulling characters
from series like God Eater, Star Gladiator, and Sakura Wars.
And it's when these characters come together that the game becomes
euphoric. Words can barely describe how I felt when a young Heihachi
Mishima--who had just uppercutted his way onto the scene as the intro
music for Tekken Tag Tournament
blasted in the background--saved a distressed Phoenix Wright from a
swarm of demons. He wanted to hire him to be his defense attorney. In
the 30 seconds that this lasted, the game was able to consolidate the
best aesthetic qualities from each of these characters' respective
franchises into a single ludicrous, fan-serving instance.
Moments
like this occur often and do well to heighten the thrilling and
eclectic nature of fan-service that Project X Zone 2 utilizes. For
everyone else, these moments may offer little. There's a specific
audience being catered to here, and if you're not a part of it, you're
likely to be left out of the excitement. However, even if there are
characters you're not familiar with, important details are often relayed
to bring you up to speed over each character's respective background.
An in-game encyclopedia accessible between missions also helps, clearing
up any leftover essential need-to-know details.
While
Project X Zone 2's crossover moments are fantastic, its actual narrative
is a nonsensical mess filled with excessive padding and repetitious
encounters. This issue occurs halfway through when your party is
constantly forced into battles with the same alternating round of
villains. The process is as follows: villains appear, your party is
shocked to see them, you beat them, and they flee. But before each
villain escapes, they each give you a snide remark about how there's a
larger scheme at play that you don't understand yet. This is repeated ad
nauseum during the entire second half, making it difficult to care
about what's going on as your party attempts to uncover the conspiracy
behind the golden chains. The narrative is content to tirelessly dangle
the reward of knowledge in front of you in this manner even up until the
60 hour mark. It's unfortunate since when crossover moments occur, the
game's appeal instantly picks back up. But when those take a backseat
later on in favor of its lacking plot, Project X Zone 2 loses its charm,
offering little emotional return in its storytelling.
Project
X Zone 2's combat fares better. Like its predecessor, the actual
turn-based strategy component of the game doesn't sport much strategic
depth. Units once again lack clearly defined roles and you're rarely
challenged to consider their positioning on the grid-based battlefield.
However, the game's action-focused combat system is where its true
strength lies. During a mission, you're given a handful of units to take
into battle. Each unit consists of a Pair Unit and a Solo Unit that you
can call in to assist in battle. When you order a unit to attack an
enemy, you're thrown into real-time combat where you can strike an enemy
a total of three times with a flurry of attacks using specific button
inputs.
This comes together through the new Mirage
Cancel ability, which lets your Pair Unit cancel an attack mid-animation
to initiate a fourth attack. It doesn't sound like much but when
combined with the Cross Hit mechanic--an attack state that temporarily
freezes enemies in place as consecutive attacks build up for even higher
damage--it creates a degree of complexity that requires you to consider
which attacks combinations to use to better optimize your damage
against enemies. This is ideal during later game missions where it's
encouraged to eliminate enemy units in a few turns as possible, since
enemies have high HP and defense and are more plentiful in numbers,
which makes it easy for them to swarm you.
Mirage
Cancels and Cross Hits help you inflict high damage, but pulling these
moves off can be more difficult than it seems, especially against
stronger opponents. As a result, you often need to consider which Solo
Units you assign to your Pair Units, as each have different attack
windows and status effects on enemies. For instance, combining a Solo
Unit that launches an enemy into the air with a Pair Unit that
specializes in ground attacks reduces opportunities to efficiently
utilize these techniques, much less connect a viable combo. Plotting
your attack strategy to take advantage of these mechanics is satisfying,
and when they come together in perfect synchronicity, the impact of
their execution is enhanced tenfold.
Much
to the detriment of Project X Zone 2's combat, missions are fairly
repetitive. Objectives tend to involve clearing a map of its enemies,
which becomes tiresome when there are dozens of units to dispatch at a
time. This downplays the reward of combat, exhausting its mechanics
rather than elevate them. Fortunately, new objective types are
occasionally introduced that do help to diversify the experience. One
mission challenges you to diffuse 6 bombs scattered across a map within a
10-turn limit as you deal with enemies, while another has you defending
four areas on a map from enemy capture as you fight against an
onslaught of others. These additional objective types are refreshing,
but are so few and far in-between that they fail to alleviate the tedium
of combat at large. For every new objective type you get to experience,
you have to endure numerous hours of repetition, and by the time you
overcome that, it barely feels worth the grind.
Project X
Zone 2 understands the appeal of bringing together its massive roster
of characters. It celebrates each iconic franchise, joining them
together with others to create a multitude of memorable instances. But
when it has to drop these moments to focus on telling an actual story
with its characters, the delight of this crossover wears thin. It
provides little satisfaction for sticking to its narrative, constantly
reiterating on its plot and combat system to the point of exhaustion.
And with limited diversity in its mission objectives, there's not enough
to keep Project X Zone 2 fresh across its 60-plus hour campaign.
Project X Zone 2 is at first promising, but not even its fan-service can
save it from continually faltering in the face of its drudgery.