Sin & Punishment 2 [Wii]

[fuse]

Thought if I put 罪と罰宇宙の後継者 as the title people might not notice it

Just got this today and put it in for a quick blast. First impressions? Love it.

Menus are nothing special to speak of, and if anything the character select screen and the character models seemed quite... poor to say the least. However, once this is done and you're in game they seem much nicer when animated. There are 'jaggies' all over the place but I personally could care less - you might spot them in cut scenes but once things get moving you really won't be minding much.

Stage 0 sets the scene and gives you some tutorial steps to follow - basic controls, attacks etc. First notable difference from the original I spotted is that you don't seem to have a melee attack - this could just be me missing something though? There's all sorts of control methods on offer but I tried the standard remote / nunchuck combo and it felt very natural as you'd expect - nunchuck stick controls character movement, and remote gives you a pointer with which to aim. Nunchuck buttons throw your character around a bit more vigorously (rolls etc), whereas B is your standard shot, and A shoots a chargeable (hold button) bomb-type move which needs to be recharged - believe this is done by killing other enemies. The 2 button seems to do something but I couldn't be bothered trying (read: failing) to work out what the kana said when I pressed it.

Second stage gets very hectic very quick - it's very fast paced and has your character running through the streets whilst there's all kinds of activity in the background - feels like classic S&P and is great fun. Believe this one has been in many videos/screens already - whilst I'm sure in screens it probably doesn't look too impressive, it's very smooth to watch and having the camera switching between so many views and scenes makes it very difficult to get bored of the look of it.

Scoring system seems pretty straightforward so far but I am sure there are plenty more hooks yet to come - in simple terms you have a multiplier which racks up based on continuous kills, on top of a more standard hit counter. Multiplier generally seems to raise in 0.1 increments but I'm not sure of the cap - not sure if this varies at all but have already seen a couple of curiosities there. Life bar is out of 100, and your multiplier drops as well as your life whenever you take damage.

Sorry impressions are a little thin on the ground - I didn't even get home till about 11 tonight - but will be spending a lot more time with this soon hopefully.

[kryss]

How many would read it as "sora no koukeisha" rather than "uchuu no koukeisha" is a different question.

Glad to hear you like it. I was wondering how it played with the wiimote to aim. Do you think it's worth the full price importing?

[fuse]

This is probably my most anticipated Wii game since Tatsunoko vs Capcom, so I am probably a little biased, but yeah I'd say so - not having any other region of Wii to buy for means I don't have a great deal of choice, and given that Treasure games are usually first in line for price rises rather than cuts it made sense to me to go for it at launch.

[Roddie]

How's the language barrier?

[losersclub]

Anyone tried booting this on a pal Wii with the homebrew channel? Thinking of installing it just for this game as i don't think i can wait for a western release!

[fuse]

Found melee tapping the B button does it, whereas holding it for shoots.

Providing you're fine with missing out on the story there is little in the way of language barrier to get in your way. A lot of the front-end menus have English portions (so you know where to find 1p/2p modes, easy/normal/hard etc), as does the in-game interface - where it gives you lifebars / boss names etc - such as "Cock Keeper" in stage 1 - yes, I am a child.

You will obviously miss out on the dialogue of the cut scenes, but so far there's not been any other reading required once you've got the hang of how to play. Score upload prompts are in Japanese but only at the end of each stage, and if you're happy to just say 'no' then there's no biggie.

[Sketcz]

So there's no English dialogue like with the original?

[abigsmurf]

This isn't selling too well in Japan from what I gather. Curse of the third party Wii titles strikes again. If you're not a huge publisher and can't afford heavy marketing, don't expect Nintendo to make any effort to push it, regardless of quality.

[fuse]

So there's no English dialogue like with the original?

Nope although that being said, wasn't the English option only there in the VC version? I thought the N64 version was J-only...

This isn't selling too well in Japan from what I gather. Curse of the third party Wii titles strikes again. If you're not a huge publisher and can't afford heavy marketing, don't expect Nintendo to make any effort to push it, regardless of quality.

10k according to Famitsu. So yeah, fairly poor all things considered. I honestly would've thought this would've sold far better than all of the recent Cave ports but there doesn't seem to be much in it.

[Kubrick]

The original bombed pretty hard as well. The voices were English in it too, and they were awful

[Sketcz]

Nope although that being said, wasn't the English option only there in the VC version? I thought the N64 version was J-only...

The Japanese version had English dialogue, with Japanese subtitles. It was said because they'd all along wanted to release it in the west. I've not been following this closely, but had hoped for something similar.

There was a lot of voice acting in the N64 version, and while it was bad like Kubrick said, I really liked it.

[Shion]

This isn't selling too well in Japan from what I gather. Curse of the third party Wii titles strikes again. If you're not a huge publisher and can't afford heavy marketing, don't expect Nintendo to make any effort to push it, regardless of quality.

Uh, S&P is a Nintendo property, and is in no way a 3rd party title. (Treasure developed it, like the original, but it is a wholly-owned Nintendo IP.)

[abigsmurf]

2nd party then. Doesn't change the fact it's receiving very little promotion.

[Mayhem]

The original bombed pretty hard as well. The voices were English in it too, and they were awful

Weren't there only 10k copies made of the N64 S&P? Bit hard to sell well then...

[charlesr]

Hazaaa! This just arrived. Played for 10 mins before my son said it was too scary.

Classic gameplay. Rubbish menu and cutscene graphics. It looks like they started doing them on the N64 It's difficult to take it seriously from the off.

In game graphics are functional, but really non-impressive. Like a GC game really. So what we are saying here is that they could have released this 5 years ago. Wish they had.

Controls can be Wii/GC/Classic. I've only tried the Wii so far, with nunchuck and it's good, although to strafe instead of left and right roll, you have to start moving and then press a single roll button, so I keep getting hit. Will have to get used to that. For those that don't know, it's kinda on rails, but you can move the character around the screen and aim a cursor.

There's a jump button, but new: a jetpack for hover, although tbh, it looks like he has a football strapped to his back. I laughed a lot.

If you liked the first one, you'll like this a lot. I'm not going to get much chance to play this week, so more impressions next week. And a review after that.