Stronger than S&P1 in terms of its mechanical depth, content and replayability. Weaker in terms of its emotional impact and difficulty curve.
This is the only game that feels well-designed around the Nunchuck, not even a contest. The new control scheme flows like butter and I'd love to be able to play S&P1 with this control style.
Star Successor's game feel follows much more conventional game design tropes compared to the first game. There's way more enemies on screen at a time, with more tech to learn and a wider variety of enemy encounter styles. Every fight is incredibly unique and often feels like its flipping its genre without disrupting the core flow.
The expanded options of freeform flight, dashes, and unlimited continues are cool but the game kind of uses them as an excuse to make a lot of fights utter bullshit under the pretense you can just dodge it if it's cheap. As much as I love the new artstyle, there's just way too many particle and light effects that make overall game visibility so much worse. There are fights where the enemy bullets flat-out block your view of the boss. The melee attack's also been given this super shitty cooldown on the third hit, and it's a lot more ambiguous this time around what you can and can't parry - a trial and error game design choice that kept me from parrying as often as I should've just so I could play it safe. I had to redo so many otherwise easy fights because of all of these irritations, and given how much longer this game is than S&P1, it often felt like a nightmarish slog.
Don't take the extensive criticism as damnation tho, it's still S&P and it's still rad as hell. I don't think anything this game explicity tries to do is bad - it just so happens that the higher ambition leads to more hiccups along the way. It's still an extremely fun and fast-paced time that I'm sure I'm gonna replay the shit out of, in spite of how many moments made me blow my stack.
This is the only game that feels well-designed around the Nunchuck, not even a contest. The new control scheme flows like butter and I'd love to be able to play S&P1 with this control style.
Star Successor's game feel follows much more conventional game design tropes compared to the first game. There's way more enemies on screen at a time, with more tech to learn and a wider variety of enemy encounter styles. Every fight is incredibly unique and often feels like its flipping its genre without disrupting the core flow.
The expanded options of freeform flight, dashes, and unlimited continues are cool but the game kind of uses them as an excuse to make a lot of fights utter bullshit under the pretense you can just dodge it if it's cheap. As much as I love the new artstyle, there's just way too many particle and light effects that make overall game visibility so much worse. There are fights where the enemy bullets flat-out block your view of the boss. The melee attack's also been given this super shitty cooldown on the third hit, and it's a lot more ambiguous this time around what you can and can't parry - a trial and error game design choice that kept me from parrying as often as I should've just so I could play it safe. I had to redo so many otherwise easy fights because of all of these irritations, and given how much longer this game is than S&P1, it often felt like a nightmarish slog.
Don't take the extensive criticism as damnation tho, it's still S&P and it's still rad as hell. I don't think anything this game explicity tries to do is bad - it just so happens that the higher ambition leads to more hiccups along the way. It's still an extremely fun and fast-paced time that I'm sure I'm gonna replay the shit out of, in spite of how many moments made me blow my stack.