Once again an improvement on the original game with so many extra options that make it an absolute joke if you decide to use them all. The difficulty is kind of all over the place, if you use everything on offer its really easy and if you don't its almost unfairly hard. The ranking system is once again very insubstantial with the moves being awarded in no way making up for the loss of on the fly powerups and upgrades. The amount of time it'll take you to memorize the stages to the point of keeping the A rank average up is too much especially with no easy way to replay stages once you've beaten them. If you get a really bad score one time that basically fucks your average for the rest of the playthrough with no way to undo it besides reloading a save. Really just not worth bothering with it at all. I'll give them credit for letting you use a couple of cyber elves without losing any points but you still need perfection regardless to keep your A rank status so just use as many as you feel like.

A decent time thanks to some of the problems of the original game getting ironed out. You barely have to interact with some of the mechanics though because of how short the game is and the moves you unlock by getting A ranks are so insubstantial (who even uses the buster that much) that you can ignore them entirely. Forms as well are just a weirdly implemented idea, you aren't getting more than a few without a guide. I had fun spamming cyber elves and using Zero's movement to speed through the game but it didn't leave much of an impression otherwise. Great music though.

Great game, could not explain the story if you put a gun to my head. Its a tad too confusing and interpretive for my tastes but I dig the world they build here lot. The inventory limit can add a lot of good tension and strategy early game it peters out hard later on when you have so many different guns and absolutely no way to carry more than a couple (with their ammo) and progress at the same time. I just never brought healing items out of the box because I was almost always full up on stuff. This isn't too much of an issue mind, you can dodge and slip past enemies easily enough but I had so much ammo by the end that I couldn't find a good place to use. Burning bodies to stop them from getting back up is a great mechanic since it lets you decide what places you want permanently safe to navigate (taken wholesale from RE1 Remake) but its sparsely used I feel. Overall an extremely well-made and intricate survival horror, albeit with some balancing issues.