A good game held back by some of the absolute worst game writing and quest design I've ever seen.

There are some new elements that are a step forward on what the first game offered, but what Dark Arisen and DDO perfected, DD2 seems content to take two steps backwards and trip on it's shoelaces.

The open world is much bigger and there's much more satisfaction to be had in wandering around with your pawns and seeing the sights, but it's strongly hampered by a lack of enemy variety and severely reduced mobility options. There is no more long jump, double jump, or dodge rolling; meaning your only option avoiding damage and traversing terrains is a pathetic bunny hop. The hitboxes of bosses are surprisingly forgiving to compensate, but this just sacrifices the good game feel that came from navigating ledges and leaping out of the way of big attacks.

Returning classes are universally nerfed and the couple of new additions are underwhelming at best. The Trickster is an intriguing idea for a class in a game such as this, but the environmental hazards are not as common as the trailers would have you believe. Most of my time using it I spent waiting for my pawns to to most of the work. Getting your enemies to jump to their death seems to be the best use of it, but you can't deploy your illusory double from any major distance away from you. All you can do is hope that one of your pawns can push them off when they run up to a ledge. The one time I did use it to some effect of luring a cyclops out of the city and into a ditch, it spontaneously teleported back into the city. It feels more like a class designed for challenge runners to post meme runs and compilations on youtube with. Wayfarer is similarly disappointing, in that it does not allow for more than three skills across any weapon type in the game, and requires two additional button presses to activate them.

Lastly, the writing and quest design is an absolute mess. For starters, the game will routinely waste your time with quests, the object of which is: go to a place, then go back, and then sometimes go back and forth again. This is a decent way to train the player's navigational skills, however far too many quests operate in this realm and no other, making these quests feel pointless on a replay. More plainly put, there is usually nothing worthwhile to do once you've gotten to point B, other than run back to point A. Lord help you reach point B, you didn't bring a certain item needed to progress that the game never explicitly stated you needed, adding another pointless rotation into your expedition. (Pro tip, when the elf asks you to come watch him train, make sure you've switched to the archer class)

Other times, the game will accidentally skip over important information with cutscene triggers, and sometimes straight up change the rules on you. For example, in one quest, you need to give an NPC some items for a trip, and the game explains that they'll need enough items of sufficient quality to make it back safely. I give them two items that I think will do the trick, but there's a third slot and I have nothing to give them. Normally you can hand in two items and come back with a third in situations like this, but on this occasion, after backing out of the dialogue, the quest proceeds without giving me a chance to say yes or no. You're given the chance to go and save the NPC, but he got pounded into the dirt by goblins the second I showed up. Again, there's usually an out in scenarios like this. Dead NPCs are supposed to go to a morgue where you can revive them with a wakestone. Not this one apparently!

For a better example of poor game writing, that isn't a personal fuck up, we can look at the quest where you have to rescue the elf girl from an ogre. The elves talk about the Ogre with phrases like "Even our strongest are no match for it." which is all well and good for if this were introducing the Ogre as a boss, but it's highly unlikely that the player hasn't already killed or at the very least seen an Ogre up until now, and they aren't the toughest of foes to begin with. But the real cognitive-ludonarrative-buzzprefix-dissonance comes when you fight and a completely different Ogre en route to the cave, accompanied by the Elf escorting you there in the first place. Like hey guys, Ogres aren't actually that tough, just bring more than three people and you're fine.

Other small little things like this crop up routinely. Due to the close up nature of the camera, you can pass near key game triggers without realizing you're supposed to be interacting with them, but the game will stop you in your tracks for an NPC to announce themselves as though you sought out them deliberately. Special shoutout to the old woman who proclaimed it took special intuition to find her from behind a wall while I was randomly jumping around a rooftop, and didn't actually see until after I fell off the roof and spent another two minutes trying to find again.

For a sequel to come out 12 years after it's predecessor, one would hope they had enough time to playtest more than one full playthrough.

Play for the vibes alone. This game takes about 3-4 hours to complete, and you'll spend maybe 30 minutes of that actually playing a handful of mini games that happen once and never again. Except for this one mini game where you squash bugs in the bath tub which you can do whenever you want, but it gets you nothing, and I don't even think you're required to do it in the first place. The mini games in question are dreadfully explained and make no sense, but you can just tap randomly and get by on blind madness. The one where you have to play the instruments with the mice was basically impossible, but even though I failed my first attempt, the game just let me skip it. I guess they knew that one was especially ridiculous.

The majority of your time will be spent running in and out of the house, clicking on everything until you find the right item or dialogue trigger to advance the story, and if you're both stupid and unlucky like I am, it will probably be in the last location you check every single time. Having seen the movie doesn't help much.

The imagery if the movie translates well into the DS's graphical limitations, so there is a serene feeling that comes with playing it, which probably just comes from wishing the game was better.

You can unlock outfits for Coraline, and there are even some new minigames you play from the main menu after beating the story, but like, why would you want to? There's basically nothing to do in the game other than walking from point A to point B. I suspect this game was made in a month. Shocker for a movie based DS game, I know.

If you want to play a puzzle adventure game on DS about a dark haired weirdo girl running around a spooky house, play Emily the Strange: Strangerous instead

Showed a lot of initial promise, however the core gameplay becomes repetitive after not too long. Story missions to sidequests all feel identical in structure, and only the same handful of a dozen enemies ever show up.

Progression is tedious and the lack of online functionality doesn't help, as many of the game's mechanics were tied to it, most notably the ability to access certain items and sending units you're not using away to gather resources.

One thing I have to give it praise for is the universal friendly fire system. It makes you consider where you move your units on the field and carefully choose what attacks to use when.

Hope for another game to pick up the slack here.