I base my review on the PS5 experience only.

Started off very bad, the performance was poor - but once they added the graphical options that let us disable raytracing, motion blur etc. the game ran acceptably for me. Now, into the meat of the game - I think it's an awesome game but there are definitely many oversights by the developers, for one it feels like they made no improvements over Dark Arisen, infact sometimes it feels like they made DD2 worse in some areas in comparison.

Main oversights imo:
- Portcrystal placement: Vernworth and.... Harve??? That is it? You could atleast put the Harve crystal somewhere that makes more sense, like Battahl or even the Checkpoint Rest Town.
- Removing Strider in favour of standalone Thief and Archer classes was a big mistake.
- Only being able to assign 4 weapon skills - This is especially bad for mages/sorcerer and warfarer.. seriously, the skill to change weapons takes up a slot for warfarer. Increasing it to 8 would make sense, and adding a smarter way to change weapons with warfarer that doesn't involve assigning a skill would help too.
- The loot is seriously abysmal. Almost nothing you find in the wild asides from upgrade materials or for making gold is exciting. All of the best gear is sold by shopkeepers. For a game with a massive world that forces you to walk everywhere, this has to be the worst decision they made.
- Where is the dragon??? In Dark Arisen, they made the world feel like it was beset by a deadly dragon, in DD2 you run around fighting goblins for 30 hours and probably wont see the dragon in that entire time.
- Barely any enemy variability. Just a few reskinned Saurians, Goblins, Harpys etc.
- Vocation balance. After playing Thief and Magick Archer, I feel like the rest are insanely disadvantaged.


Overall, fun game that sadly fell short on being GOTY.

I think this is one of the greatest games ever made, and if you ever find a way to play it it's an absolute must. I've played this a dozen times now on original sega saturn hardware, through the retrotink 5x, my personal controller preference for this game is 3D Control Pad.

Every bit of this game is designed to perfection. I love how it looks, it takes the saturn to its absolute limit yet it still runs so well. It's crazy how much of a jump up this feels from the first one. The people who made this are absolute wizards of programing.

The game starts deceptively simple, but the more times you play it the more I realized it's depth, and I'm still playing it to try and get better and better at it. It's this perfect middle ground between being a cool chill game to spend a couple hours on and also being something that has a ton of depth and mastery that encourages replay. I feel like Sega really mastered this kind of design specifically in the late 90s. You are ranked on various things in the levels that can change how your dragon evoles over the course of the game. The ranking and scoring is particularly addicting and I'd recommend, after your first playthrough, that you go into the settings and make the scoring visible. This I feel, is where the meat of the game lies.

I think the levels in this game are amazing. It's just such a knockout in terms of atmosphere, music, and enemy design. The whole game has this unmatched sense of wonder to it. It knows exactly when to spiral into exciting action, but then it slows down and becomes more contemplative. There isn't much story to go off of, but it's all wrapped so tightly by incredible atmosphere and art design.

I could say a ton more about this, but this is really something you need to experience for yourself. It's a shame this never got properly re-released, it's such a marvel of its time.

Graphics were so convincing I honestly thought I was looking at real footage when the game started up. Such an incredibly effective use of the VHS recording postprocessing effect that other, lesser indie horror games just kinda tack on in a sort of in-your-face fashion. Besides the eerily realistic visuals, the sound design is also the main focus of the experience, as the game's way to suggest more than to show.

Neat little 5 minute game. Would love to see the developer make a larger game using ideas from this in the future.