izigame.me

Longer is not always better.

The first game could be beat in around 4 or 5 hours in a single sitting. This one is over twice as long, and not for a good reason.
IMMEDIATE DISCLAIMER: If you care about story and respect your time and want to feel like your decisions matter, you probably won't like this game. If you don't care about any of these things, then feel free to play it for its music or combat. Otherwise...
God, this is conflicting. I wish there was a mixed recommendation. I shouldn't feel so mixed about a sequel to my favorite indie RPG. I'm a massive fan of Everhood, the first game was literal perfection to someone like me. This game's demo was pretty wacky and lacked the spiritual/existentialism of the first game so I was a bit worried. But then after buying and playing, the first 6 or so hours are genuinely a blast. There was a moment in the middle of the game that genuinely had me on the brink of tears. Yet... Afterwards? The remaining half of the game just completely plateaus. I remember stopping after that emotional moment and telling my friend "Dude, I'm glad I was wrong about the demo. This is so much better than the first one and I'm only halfway through the game." Only for the rest of the game directly after that to sort of drag me on for no rhyme or reason.
First half of the game felt like Everhood but MORE Everhood. Great. Amazing. Love it. But then, like I said, it plateaus to complete and utter stagnation. I felt like one of those cans being dragged behind on a "Just Married" car. Clanking around and just begging for it to end at some point. People complained about the drawn-out ending to the original, but it didn't /quite/ overstay its welcome, I say. This one however, most certainly did. Because some battles towards the end were more insanely annoying, I was going about 2 to 3 hours between the last save point and the credits. I REALLY wanted to do something else but couldn't because I was just being pulled into back-to-back "yeah I'm the final boss" "no I'm REALLY the final boss!" "No, I AM!". The first game did this, but only once. I was so tired by the end of the game that I genuinely couldn't tell if it was over or not.
Oh, not feeling like reading all of that? Well here's a list of the goods and bads.
+ Combat is an overall improvement, I'd say. Nice to see them change up such a basic formula and somehow make it more satisfying, okay sure.
+ Still feels like Everhood. At first...
~ I'm not sure I like the RPG-ification of the game or not. Especially since enemies and bosses seem(?) to scale with you. What's the point?
~ I can't tell what decisions I'm making actually effect anything. At least in the first game, you basically had no choices to make until halfway through the game, and those choices VERY CLEARLY effected some sort of outcome.
- The music is overall worse comparatively if you look at the "good songs to total songs" ratio. A few highs of the soundtrack are about the same, but the lows are much lower. Seriously, why is every song in this game just some kind of breakcore percussion garbage? Why does nobody have any unique music? Everhood 1 had a song for just about every genre, it made it fun and caused me to wonder what was next. I saw somebody say in an unrelated stream for another game "At least this has a better soundtrack than half of Everhood 2's." And I thought to myself "What?! Surely they're just joking." No, they're right. I literally only remember ONE song from this game. The mushroom god dance-off. That was such a vibe.
- The repeat enemies make each encounter feel less meaningful. There's enemies in areas that are now genericized. In the first game, each encounter felt personal.
- The game completely dropped the ball when it came to the story. Okay... I'm being dragged along... but what for? When will this end? What will it amount to? Oh, nothing? Really?
- Yeah, as a lot of the other reviews are saying, the wave-based combat towards the end of the game was complete filler and totally unnecessary. The entire ending of the game--in fact--can be probably cut down to just an hour or two but it just keeps dragging on and on with mostly meaningless and unrelated events.
- Spoilers: So, I guess the entire lore of Everhood as a universe is that it's constructed by an entity that just likes to see people fight? It just likes to watch conflicts, climaxed, and resolutions? What?? Why??? Does this completely invalidate my entire experience from the first game? Just a really bad way to expand the world in my opinion. The map of the collective conciousness is cool though. I want that framed on my wall.
If I ever remember to include anything else here, I will. But overall, the latter 50-60% of the game is just complete stagnation with literally no resolution. This was what I feared about the first game getting a sequel. How can you build on perfection? There's not really a way to fix any of these problems without just completely redoing the whole game and story. So... I guess it's a "No" from me. This feels awful to say... But that was really disappointing to a diehard fan.
I'm with everyone else saying that Everhood 1 is like a 95% or higher, and Everhood 2 is like... maybe a 60% or less. It's Everhood 1, with less meaningful interactions, drags on for far too long, with a more bland and less varied soundtrack, and an ending that was genuinely insulting to my time. These are the exact reason I didn't like Undertale when I played it all those years ago. This was exactly what made me love Everhood 1 so much. It was the Undertale I wished I played.