Death Mark II dares to ask the question we’ve all been wondering: what if, after improving the series with NG, they made a Spirit Hunter entry where everything got worse?
Amateurish sidescrolling environments and character animations instead of the spooky, heavily detailed visual novel screens of the previous two games?
Live or Die situations but your chances of succeeding, even if you pick the right choice, are randomly generated?
Spirit encounters where your options are so limited it’s easy to pick the right one, but far more boring than the Death Mark and NG encounters because of it?
Sidelining new characters for the sake of using the Mark Bearers as the protagonist’s partners?
Constant back-and-forth exploitation of the misery (for player discomfort) and physical bodies (for player horniness) of teenage girls?
I can’t even say I was ever really scared as a player or absorbed by the intense atmosphere of the game, so everything I loved about Death Mark is out, and everything I found distasteful is in. Although the first Death Mark could get very horny about female bodies in horror situations, somehow they made it feel even worse in this game. It doesn’t help that almost all of these exploited bodies are of high schoolers.
Only one of the spirits in the game is male. His body is only a source of terror, and his backstory is the least explored. The rest are used for as much misery as possible, definitely adequately explaining their grudges, but also going over the top in depicting what someone with the role of “girl” in society can go through and (of course) resolving it with the violent deaths that made them a spirit.
Plus, if there’s a situation where they can make a living or dead female body sexy while they’re suffering, you can bet they’re going for it in this game. More than once the protagonist was about to see something “scary” and I could immediately predict how undressed the victims were going to be. I don’t know — it felt consistently disrespectful of situations they wanted to call terrible, scary violations of human rights. After NG went waaaay down on the horror-horny, I had decent hopes for this game that were crushed early and decisively.
At least I’ll always have the first two games to go back to. As for Death Mark II, I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone. It sufficiently made me feel gross, but never afraid.
Amateurish sidescrolling environments and character animations instead of the spooky, heavily detailed visual novel screens of the previous two games?
Live or Die situations but your chances of succeeding, even if you pick the right choice, are randomly generated?
Spirit encounters where your options are so limited it’s easy to pick the right one, but far more boring than the Death Mark and NG encounters because of it?
Sidelining new characters for the sake of using the Mark Bearers as the protagonist’s partners?
Constant back-and-forth exploitation of the misery (for player discomfort) and physical bodies (for player horniness) of teenage girls?
I can’t even say I was ever really scared as a player or absorbed by the intense atmosphere of the game, so everything I loved about Death Mark is out, and everything I found distasteful is in. Although the first Death Mark could get very horny about female bodies in horror situations, somehow they made it feel even worse in this game. It doesn’t help that almost all of these exploited bodies are of high schoolers.
Only one of the spirits in the game is male. His body is only a source of terror, and his backstory is the least explored. The rest are used for as much misery as possible, definitely adequately explaining their grudges, but also going over the top in depicting what someone with the role of “girl” in society can go through and (of course) resolving it with the violent deaths that made them a spirit.
Plus, if there’s a situation where they can make a living or dead female body sexy while they’re suffering, you can bet they’re going for it in this game. More than once the protagonist was about to see something “scary” and I could immediately predict how undressed the victims were going to be. I don’t know — it felt consistently disrespectful of situations they wanted to call terrible, scary violations of human rights. After NG went waaaay down on the horror-horny, I had decent hopes for this game that were crushed early and decisively.
At least I’ll always have the first two games to go back to. As for Death Mark II, I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone. It sufficiently made me feel gross, but never afraid.
FranzMagitek
2 months ago