Also made me cry. Everything about the first game, but better.

The controls and abilities are all more streamlined, allowing the player to pick up the pace of both exploration and combat even more.

The art team really outdid themselves on this because wow, what a beautiful game to experience. The FX and backgrounds are especially beautiful. I love the way that the game has you backtrack when you get new abilities. Classic formula, but the pace of this game makes it fun to go back through old areas to find new paths and items.

I can't recommend this game and its predecessor enough.

The sequel to Ori was just as beautiful and engaging… at first.

However there was a specific moment during playing when I realized that things didn’t feel as special to me as they did with the first game. I think the main reason I dropped this game was the difficulty and there are some interesting reasons as to why that is. The first games difficulty I would liken more to Getting Over It. All the pieces are laid out for the player to get familiar with the move set and then master it to become quicker and more accurate but the sequel tries to do the same thing while also bringing in a lot more Metroidvania traits. This causes the game to feel much more confusing and complex then the first which is good from a content perspective but becomes frustrating when you simply want to progress and don’t have the resources to do so. Everything is essentially the same as the first game just more but they forgot to make certain aspects more streamlined to fit a more open game. The Will of the Wisps has a much denser and harder to navigate world compared to the first and I ended up dropping the game entirely because I simply could not figure out how to progress. Perhaps it was simply my own ineptitude but even with the help of the internet I was unable to move forward. So I gave up. I didn’t want to because I was for the most part just as engaged as I was with the first game but I wasn’t going to restart so oh well. It still had all the elements that made me love the first game but I’d much rather return to that game then this one unfortunately. Still great game I’m sure and I’m sorry I never saw how the story concluded.

Apparently the devs are scummy too so looks like we are never getting a third game…

Oh yah and by the way I did like the combat better in this game it felt more natural and heavy hitting. The side quests and character additions were welcome too.

Ok bye bye!

I have never wanted to eat my television screen more than I do right now

This is an atmospheric visual and auditory marvel that improves on everything the first game fell short on. Which wasn’t a lot.

It’s challenging, has extremely addictive and satisfying gameplay with the addition of a very much needed combat system, a whimsical emotional story with music ranging from relaxingly blissful to bombastically intense. The soundtrack of this game and the way it compliments the butter smooth visuals are like nothing I’ve seen in gaming before. It’s a sequel that improves so much upon its original, it almost overshadows it.

The Ori games suffer from the same fundamental flaw as all "cinematic platformers": their striving after beauty, spectacle, and drama directly undermines their gameplay by prioritizing aesthetic and narrative splendor & awe over clarity and autonomy.

In my review for 1991's Another World—a progenitor of the cinematic platformer subgenre—I wrote about how "I didn't feel like my failures were teaching me to play the game as a whole, I just felt like they were teaching me the particulars of each level design." Ori avoids this problem throughout most of its gameplay, but it falls into the same trap any time it leans into the cinematic.

Every boss fight inevitably involves an initial adjustment period (usually requiring dying one or two times) of figuring out just which parts of your gargantuan opponent taking up half the screen is safe to touch and which parts will cause you damage — a question made more complicated, and more frustrating, by each boss having not only highly elaborate "cinematic" attack animations, but multiple phases typically bridged by "cinematic" transitions, complete with environmental transformations. Each of these transitions presents new, never before encountered and completely unpredictable ways of more or less instantly killing the player.

The chase sequences (an oft-relied upon trope) exacerbate the issue: the game expects you to follow a precise sequence of particular moves, with a narrow window of error, in order to make your "by the skin of your teeth" getaway from the big bad. In each of these sequences there are at least one or two moments where the specific action required of you is incredibly opaque due merely to the environment design prioritizing sheer visual spectacle over clarity of communication, and it's only through trial and error and repeated death that one figures out what's required to advance. Ultimately, successfully completing each of these sequences requires no ingenuity on the player's part and allows for no creativity in problem solving. It's simply a matter of following a tightly choreographed script to the letter, as the player is relegated to a performer within a cutscene, a gameplay mode with only one degree more sophistication than the dreaded "quick time event."

And I haven't even mentioned all the platforming sections where glowing, blown out, lens flare-laden backgrounds blend in completely with your character, making it impossible to see wtf you're doing!

I suspect many will see all this as nitpicking. Fair enough. Don't get me wrong: for the most part these games are incredibly solid platformers; exceptional and innovative, even. Hence my four star rating. But I think they fall short of the "masterpiece" status so many seem intent on conveying them. And the reasons for why they miss the mark mostly come down to being unable to make up their mind whether they want to be video games or Pixar movies.