It's a spy game with awful stealth mechanics and several missions that force you to use said stealth mechanics, but otherwise it's a blast to play as a shooter and it excels in one of the most vital properties a game can have: personality. Levels are well-designed and fun to traverse, though completing objectives can be kind of janky. The dialogue can be a bit long-winded, particularly the back and forths with Smith, but it balances parody and sincerity really well and Cate is a very charismatic main character.

This game is radical. When I went through the standard intro of the hero being rescued from a shipwreck and waking up in an ordinary village, I thought I was going to be playing a JRPG where you travel from town to town and leave behind every NPC to meet new ones. I was pleasantly surprised to find Alundra is a top-class zelda clone with a well-written script and an impressively solid story centering around a single town that endures several twists and tragedies. The gameplay is also great with smooth, straightforward combat and complex dungeons that really feel like actual trials with their complex layouts and occasionally daunting puzzles. It could get exhausting sometimes with some frustratingly strict platforming sections and a couple of the endgame dungeons were downright labyrinthine, but overall it was a great time.

An enjoyable sequel that improves on the first game in several ways but still comes out feeling a bit lacking in comparison. The gameplay in general is more polished with far less opportunities for frustrating deaths, you get a nice new hammer to play around with, and levels are more expansive with a wider variety of obstacles. While combat feels more developed than the original game, it still remains fairly simple and repetitive and there's far too much of it. I still had a good time but I definitely prefer the simple nature of the first game.