I won’t lie and say it’s not a little disappointing it doesn’t run better, and I would like to see Swery work with a better team than Toybox seems to be, but from what I’ve seen of the story, characters, music, etc, and even changes to general gameplay, I think most people who were fans of the first game still may be impressed. I doubt I’ll hate it in any way unless there’s just some huge aggravating game breaking bug that hasn’t been mentioned.
I'm hopeful the other game he's working on, Good Life, is a little more polished. Are Toybox also working on that? I backed the game, but honestly haven't followed closely.
I think The Good Life is just made in house with Swery’s own company, White Owls. I’m not sure why Toybox is involved with Deadly Premonition unless it’s something to do with who has the rights to the IP
Deadly Premonition 2 makes Shenmue 3 look like Uncharted 4 by comparison.
I hope they can iron out the performance issues though. I really enjoyed the story of the first game even if it was pure torture to play for the most part.
Toybox made all of the DP 1 versions / ports besides the two original versions.
Access Games - Original Xbox360 and japanese PS3 version
Toybox - Directors Cut on PS3 and Steam and Origins for Switch (they never really fixed any of these versions)
It seems like Rising Star Games and Toybox are developing and publishing partners.
Origins for Switch was not published by RSG, it was directly published by Toybox.
So they must have some kind of deal with DP. Swery isnt the owner of the IP, exactly like he isnt the owner of the D4 IP.
Swerys other team is already working on The Good Life,
so there was probably no other choice than Toybox. Otherwise chances are very high
that DP 2 wouldnt even exist.
It's already out on the jap switch store.
EDIT: bought from South African account.
EDIT2: Strong start.
EDIT3: First crash when saving changes to sound, so be aware.
A couple hours in so far, not much yet to fully judge since it seems to start slower than the first but so far I like it despite glaring issues - but as I’ve said, they were sort of expected at least as a possibility.
I think the main thing that will be hard for me are some design changes, whether good or bad, which really come down to preference. The removal of the agent honor system and even the floating agent honor kind of loses some charm in favor of straight monetary bonuses. Also I grew to like how the bad driving was which I will miss, but the skateboard seems pretty fun and not as bad as I have seen others make it out to be.
After finishing the first chapter and playing a little bit of the second:
- Yeah, the open world framerate (and framepacing) is pretty bad, I tried both docked and handheld, but even if there's a slightly better framerate on the TV it's more noticeable than in handheld, and the whole game looks a lot worse on the TV due to the low resolution, the jaggies and the depth filter used to create the silhouettes of the world, it just look like smudge (though the cutscenes do look great). I've seen on youtube that the game runs around 18 fps (and there are some freezeframes probably due to garbage collection).
- The game in handheld looks quite good.
- The writing seems to be a little bit more verbose than the first game, sometimes it's great, sometimes feels long winded. But overall I'm enjoying quite a bit.
- The world map seems as boring as the first one, but there are now a ton of collectibles to get thrown around, and animals to shoot (yup). So I guess it's a little bit better.
- The game is divided between present and past (though most of the game is in the past for now), I'm enjoying quite a bit the present sections.
- The characters are all good enough, but they don't click with me as much as George, Emily and Thomas for now (and not close). The main story seems interesting enough.
- The cutscenes look somewhat better, feel less janky while still being janky enough, but there hasn't been any good cutscene as the reveals of the deaths as in DP1 for now.
- The outer world scenes (just played one), seem a little bit streamlined with a boss at the end, the first one was pretty short. But it's just as boring as the first one (if not more so), the boss wasn't anything to write much about either. Playing a wonky game, with wonky framerate is just not enjoyable.
For now I'm enjoying the game quite a bit, the first one did take a while to ramp up and make you warm to it, but in this one I don't have that "am I supposed to get this game seriously? Is this intentional or is it not ? am I laughing with the game or at the game?" that made the first one such a fresh experience, but it's definitely worth a try.
Yeah the framerate is really bad. Like the average framerate in buildings is 25 fps (it doesnt even reach 30),
outside in the middle of the town the average framerate is 14 fps,
in the outskirts its 18-20 fps. (docked mode)
+ little freezes while shooting and other micro stuttering
So if you are sensitive, like if you get sea sick because of low performance, if you think that even 30 fps is bad,
than you should not play this game on the Switch.
It really depends on how sensitive you are
Well at least from their Twitter pages it looks like both Swery and others have said they will look into what they can do about a patch and for people to contact the publisher at least.
Personally, I’m fine with the fps in the indoor areas I’ve been in so far. The outside in some places can be a bit awful for me but I guess I’m just more immune to feeling any headaches from it. I do find part of it depends on how fast you’re traveling, and that slowing down a little on the skateboard mitigates it a little and still gets you places relatively quickly.
What I find a little stranger is the draw distance in some places. Mostly seems fine but I’ve notice up by the northern bridge it can cut off pretty close. I guess it brings into question some design decisions to me that I suppose were just unfortunate for the locale and maybe complaints about the first game being too large and empty.
Greenvale was big with long stretches of scenery but could hide a lot of ugliness by virtue of being set in the northwest with tons of trees and mountains, etc. Le Carre does definitely emulate that feeling of being on a vast plane of nothing like others in the south or midwest but there’s a certain point where it kind of breaks the illusion of being a game.
Haven’t been to an otherworld section yet, though at another place I’d accidentally seen a spoiler about how many there are that I didn’t want to know. The first game probably had too many as it was, but I’m thinking that from what I know about the difficulty and how combat functions, I’m not certain it will be better here. At the very least, I’m glad to have slightly more competent aiming and firing.
Lastly, as for the tone of the story so far, one review I saw I’m not sure I agree with seemed to frame it as a possible deconstruction of what the first game was, not too unlike Twin Peaks’ third season. Apparently there’s some True Detective in there as well, but I haven’t seen that. I do feel like Swery is definitely portraying both Zach and York differently; Zach being definitely obvious, but York is a bit more subtle where him turning the movie references and odd details up to 11 seems like it could just be fan service, or it could be expressing that perhaps he is not exactly a reliable narrator. Even so, I’d rather not have something that shits all over the iteration from the first game where he was just a good guy with some issues(looking at you LOU2...). Hopefully it’s not totally a downer at the ending.
Well, finished it, somewhat dissapointed, the story is not very good compared to the first one, the characters lack depth, the gameplay is just boring, the dialogue becomes repetitive, the plot twists are pretty meh, the motivations are wonky.
I cant say too much about the story yet, i saw about 18 hours but a lot of that was side content.
But one thing is very clear to me, i think the original Access Games team did a way better job with Deadly Premonition 1
in terms of small town feeling, unique or memorable character designs, a more unique dark / mystery vibe, things like colors,
camera shots, little details, the profiling mechanics, the intriguing story experience.
To me it feels like Toyboxes DP 2 is a step down.
Deadly Premonition 2 feels a bit like they had a team (+budget) that was only capable of reproducing
that quality about 50-70% and the result is that it has "well, they tried" feeling.
More like a spinoff where you think yeah its alright but its not the original.
I still love York as a character and its super cool to see him in a new story
but i dont really like the feeling of the game. The flat cel shading look, these Unity assets, the kind of friendlier vibe,
characters are completely stiff (like they didnt gave them any animations),
all of the little shaving, calling etc animations are gone,
always the same otherworld look,
the town feels super dead and looks like a fake thing in a amusement park, so far the story has a weird pacing
where the thrilling highlights dont feel thrilling at all. Even the gruesome moments were all pretty tame.
Thats one thing the original Access team did way better in my opinion.
I'm still looking forward to see the whole story.
At almost 20 hours, would have finished chapter 2 but had to go to work while in the middle of the otherworld section unfortunately. Hoping I can get that done tonight and have the next three days to binge the game.
I’m not sure I can agree with anyone about the story and town feeling(so far, not knowing about the end). There are so many things that are just flat out different it seems like a much more deliberate choice. Not that one can’t be better or worse, but that it’s hard to say that one should definitively strive to be like the other.
As far as story goes,it definitely feels more like a whydunit than a whodunit, given the circumstances so far, as well as a fresh look at the protagonist that turns it and the whole framing on its head. As far as specific characters and details go, there was a bit of a good feeling of closeness to Emily, Thomas, Polly, the Ingrams, even George, etc. but I do feel that not having so many outwardly close companions in this game makes it easier to suspect everyone of something than just pointing fingers at Nick or Diane or Harry.
The town for sure feels smaller, but I also feel it’s meant to be more vast and it seems harder to death that without so much “fake” space between areas.
Sidequests I’m torn on because many are more dynamic and rely on others but also some are extremely obscure or require RPG levels of grind.
I don’t think Nintendo takes refunds unfortunately. It is a bit disappointing to see so many whiners get their way(again) who tend to tell other people they are racist or sexist for not liking Last of Us 2 or games or movies like it.
I bought this game to see Swery’s story, regardless of what it is or who it might offend. I didn’t buy it to have the story changed retroactively. Hoping I can at least finish it before any such updates happen.
Having finished chapter 2 last night, so far there is nothing wrong with anything done yet and I would say might even be more interesting cases of “representation”. Thing is, with the complaints being as shallow as they are, it’s like Thomas from the first game all over again. They aren’t happy unless the trans character is some shining perfect hero with no negative qualities or nuance. The most asinine tweets I’ve seen about it are that you should never ever under any circumstance call anyone by the “wrong” name or pronoun even if you are talking about them before their transition - these people are incredibly delusional and would not know a thing about good writing either.
I'm not a fan of censoring or changing stuff just to avoid any kind of trouble (in the entertainment industry)
But i think in this case its not about censoring things or something like that.
Swery is and always was pro gay, pro trans, etc you will not get one single bad word out of him regarding this topic.
So i think this is not about Swery changing things completely to satisfy other people
but "optimizing" things because he didnt know better.
This is a extremely small studio, Swery is not a native english speaker, the whole script was written in japanese
with the mindset of a middle aged japanese guy.
I'm 100% sure that if someone else would have told him about these things while writing the script,
then he would have changed it back then immediately. 100% guaranteed.
It was never his intention to trigger pro trans people with this character in any form.
So now hes simply changing some small details so they match his original intention.
You know, hes not changing it because hes afraid, hes changing it
because he learned that his script doesnt match his intentions.
And i very much doubt that they will change any scenes or story outcomes,
they will just change how characters are talking to / about this specific character and thats it.
Again, normally i'm totally against this stuff, a creator should be able to do / tell / show whatever he wants.
But in this case its more about Swery realising that his script could be seen in a way that doesnt match his intentions.
I dont know if it makes sense to you but i can kind of understand it.
The story overall will be the same after the adjustments.
Welp, I finished the game a lot sooner than I expected. For whatever reason I thought there would be more. Either way, it’s going to take a while to figure out how I really feel about the game as a whole. It started off strong, but, the entire ending just feels a bit off, like maybe they planned something different that had to be cut down due to budget. Maybe I’m just way off but right now I feel like the first game had more involved twists and turns and used more interesting characters within the main story.
Honestly I think that they were going for the same beats than in the first, but it just didn't work.
the first 2 chapters are like 75% of the game, the other 2 are 25%, the motivations would be OK, but they tried too hard:
The trans lost son of the rich guys wants revenge, ok fair enough. But then they tried to match the whole goddess/semi mythical approach of the first, and it didn't work for me at all. "we need to resurrect the goddess of fertility" why ? when? WHAT? Like the main thing about FK is that he is kinda an entity to spread the red seeds, what does pumping a person full of the drug fits in it ?
It also speaks of a "big plan that got cancelled" by doing what ? Not killing patty ? Honestly I'd understand that Lena didn't want to kill her daughter and it makes sense in the "just want revenge" plot, but on the "master plan" why does it matter ?
Then they tried to have another twist with Melvin, trying to do the same beat they did with Thomas in the first one. But honestly... what did that even accomplish ? Oh, he really liked Lena because he was very muscular (?).
To tie in with the old game they just did a "yeah, the retarded guy kidnapped patty, York was naive at that time", to then make a pretty random FK appearance. It was OK, but I don't think it was any mastermove or gave anything to the game.
But overall I think that the game is just worse (even on performance lol). The main missions have a ton of good dialogue, but the missions themselves are just boring (how much of the actual gametime was doing that fetch quest for the doctor ? 1/15th?). The crafting mechanic tries to give the open world some use, but it falls flat, it's not fun and it feels like mindless padding. not pointing out the side missions really make it more of a chore, the skate was a good idea, but eh, just traversing the world isn't fun (specially since you'll get repeated commentary all the time).
The moment by moment writing is creative and interesting (though sometimes it overstays it's welcome), but the overall plot did nothing to me.
And that leads me to the main thing that I didn't like about the game, it's just not as well written as the first.
The first one York was an eccentric guy from the city in a rural town with some quirky characters, but mostly played straight, except for a bunch, York was really the one that was the "weird one".
In this game all the characters except Patty are the weird ones, and are written as pretty much as one joke type of characters, even York, like 1/3rd of the dialogue is him talking about movies while in the first game it was just to make the traversal of the game more enjoyable, this time is all day long.
The first game had that lynchian tone of "it's all normal, but not quite right" that gave the game that ethereal/surreal feeling of being dreamlike.
The investigation in this one is pretty much "york gets clues out of nowhere" that made it feel less like an investigation and more like a deus ex machina, the first one was weird enough to make you wonder about York as a reliable narrator, he was always a suspect in the player eyes. And they did a great job of actually giving reasons for why those segments played the way they are.
Also, the whole action sequences I found them even worse than in the first one. Maybe in the first one they were more infuriating, but in this one they are just boring, it could be randomized, it doesn't matter, all the same, few enemies, all plays the same, and it's just boring. The first one at least tried to mix things up having chases, puzzles, and hiding. It always felt interesting to see how the "real" part of the game was after completing those segments, and how those visions fitted in the whole narrative.
There are tons of scenes I could point out in the first one that were greatly done, all of the murder scenes did have a paint-like quality, they were all impactful, this time it just wasn't.
I don’t think FK is entirely random here, depending on which parts you mean. He’s certainly the one spreading seeds around and all, and I think his plans in particular are just to cause chaos and suffered on a large scale indiscriminately. True the whole thing about the goddess of fertility seemed kinda convoluted, especially Melvin, but I think a lot of that was playing on a similar idea to making up stuff about the locket to George. Just some nonsense to get them to kill.
As for FK in the present, none of it is explicitly stated, but I get the feeling that with the red seeds as a metaphor, FK was able to appear in Zach’s mind again as a mental representation of him being more prone to nefarious thoughts, as being a person who tended to the saplings. As to whether he was actually *real* here, who can say, since he did seemingly control Aaliyah. But I think it’s kind of implied this version had to do with Zach specifically, leaving an eye behind that seemed to be from the wound he had left him with.
I think they could have done with more, whether it was adding more events between going from 0 to 100 or maybe going at a bit of a different angle with the Clarkson “family tree” and all. But it seems maybe they just ran out of time and budget sadly after putting more focus on the world and NPCs and things like that. I thought I remembered Swery saying he wanted to release it sooner rather than later due to covid, so maybe that had an effect on development.
There’s definitely more supernatural stuff here and I don’t think it’s entirely unnecessary, but gives a very different feel, especially with Houngan. The coffee premonitions felt like there was a bit of the whole tea leaves thing where York was really just using subconscious intuition and there was nothing magical about the coffee, whereas this guy is entirely mystical. But who knows, it could just be reflected from York’s own preconceived notions about what voodoo is and that’s why he’s only ever in reflections - because it’s actually him.
The framerate, repeated dialogue, and no marked quests do put a bit of a damper on trying to do everything. The crafting was neat on the surface but didn’t help much. World design was flat but there’s not much that could have been done being in Louisiana imo. There were still plenty of quality of life improvements otherwise and more mini games having rankings was nice at least.
Otherworld stuff, well...I think that in some ways it’s better but in others it’s worse. Samey level design is definitely a no go. Crouching under things seems very useless. Only one weapon feels lame sadly. Enemies I feel are more creative but the engine just doesn’t do well to make any of them or the atmosphere scary. At least most are relatively short and it’s cool that many have bosses at the end now.
First game definitely had way too many that were way too long, and a lot of the time feels like filler. Definitely had creepier feelings to them though, and each was different. Thing is, you say they spice things up, but when it’s only three different things for like 12 levels it still gets stale. So it’s hard to say really. I’m almost thinking they should forgo combat in lieu of making more dynamic investigations but I doubt there will be another one.
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