Blasphemous 2

• Genre: Exploratory Action Platforming(Metroidvania)
• Time Played: 15+ Hours
• Too Short/Long: A little longer than it needed to be, granted, I did 100% it, if I would have just played through more casually maybe it wouldn't have felt too long.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Pretty pleased. I thought it was overall an improvement on the first, which I thought was fine anyway, if not a bit flawed and overrated at the time.
• Why I played: I liked the first well enough to want to play this one.
• Recommend to others: I'd recommend it over the first and some other well known Metroidvania titles.

Blasphemous 2 is a pretty solid improvement over the first. I remember the first being a bit frustrating in the platforming aspect and a bit too easy in the combat past the early stages of the game. The second is a bit better balanced and your special movement is no longer tied to button/directional inputs that make it easy to accidently execute a different command in their place.

While I found it to be an overall better experiencing from a mechanical perspective, I feel like the flavor wasn't as strong in this one. Don't get me wrong, it's still filled with allegories for the high level biblical mythology, but as someone who doesn't really know too much about that stuff outside of video games, it's honestly kinda over my head. While I don't entirely follow, I still appreciate the theming. I just feel like that theming isn't as strong as it was in the first one. The art and overall direction of the game is just a little bit more standardized, and a little less original.

Don't get me wrong, it's still great in this game, and maybe part of it is only because now it's been done, so it just had less impact than the previous for me. While gameplay was generally better, I do feel some of the quests are a little obtuse and some regular enemies are a little too spongy. 

I liked how it handled your starting weapons and what the means for how you approach the early stages of the game, and how they each had progression based abilities tied to them. It's a bit of a shame the best progression mechanic was tied to what I feel was the worst weapon, and the best weapon had the worst progression mechanic. I would have liked to have seen more puzzles and challenges that explored the mirror jumping mechanic. If the other two weapons had cooler abilities like that, it would have really left an impact. 

Otherwise, it doesn't really do much from a gameplay standpoint to really set itself apart. It just does what it does pretty well.