A much better put together game than the first one but also a lot more streamlined compared to the first. Where 1 feels like its throwing darts at the wall and sees what will stick. 2 is a lot more of a straight forward Point A to Point B action game. There isn't anything particularly wrong with that but its an observation i want to make and keep in mind with my replay of the series and see if the memory of "the series slowly devolved into and lost its identity to the pop culture idea of itself" is actually true. Gears exists in pop culture and memes as the dude bro action game for beer guzzling frat boys but you see in the first two games they are trying to be more than that. Sure its still filled with stuff put in the game because the devs thought it was cool, which is a design philosphy i am all for. But it tries to have more of a story than but some of it goes by so fast that it comes off comedic.

You spend an entire game trying to prevent the sinking of a city only for Marcus to hear a single voice recorded sentence of his father saying they should sink Jacinto and he is now going "we have to sink the city before they do." It looks and sounds stupid because its a complete 180 in a matter of seconds after hours of build up in the opposite direction. When you stop and think about it the idea makes sense. Marcus is a man that has been consumed by a world at war for 15 years and if this is the hail mary to stop it in one fell swoop he is gonna take it, for the good of humanity even if its a very difficult decision to make. As said by Adam Fenix in the game "end the war at the cost of humanity's last refuge"

To go back to the topic of Gears slowly leaning in to the memes of itself and morphing into the games everyone thought they were there is no better example of this than Marcus's voice performance by John DiMaggio. This was one of if not the biggest thing parodied at the time of the series peak in cultural relevance. In this first game his performance is a lot more subdued but in 2 DiMaggio is a lot more gruff sounding. He is putting a lot of tension on the muscles of his throat to give his voice this gravely texture to it which results in Marcus sounding a lot more aggressive. I can't say for certain what was the cause of the change in direction and if it caused more parody and memeing than what already existed but it definitely felt like it didn't help and was a sign of where the series was being steered towards.

Overall a good game if not a little bit more forgettable in areas than 1 because its mostly just hallway fight after hallway fight. Excited to replay 3 which was my favorite

some detailed thoughts on like the first half of the game here, especially the dungeons:
https://x.com/han_tani2/status/1802275470991605804

First, I was really surprised how much this game feels like a first draft of what led to Ocarina of Time and Link's Awakening.
Today, this game strongly has a feeling of being undercooked but then polished as-is in order to make a release date. In particular there's kind of a weird mismatch of all the things you can do and items you have, and the levels and world themselves. For instance, in this interview, Miyamoto talks about designing the physicality of pushing and pulling switches. https://glitterberri.com/development-interview/

It's a nice notion and the kind of thinking I like, and it's true that for 1991 this kind of design innovation and sense of physicality in an action-adventure is commendable. And actually I would say that the picking up and throwing is one of the most brilliant mechanical things from LTTP: it gives the world a really embodied foundation and sense of discovery - arguably serving as a foundation for the mechanical aspects of what made Ocarina of Time really memorable.

Game sequels are tough to make. Because you're designing as a sequel, you can easily fall into trying to correct or include things from the original. If you stick too closely to this way of designing, ultimately you'll get a work that feels like it's pulled in too many directions. Zelda is a series that is symbolic of this: one good idea is counterbalanced by the need to include some old idea.

That is, I think LTTP's weakness is that it was being created as a follow-up or correction to LoZ: while you have Miyamoto's innovation of the pick-up-and-throw, you also have like... this expectation of a giant overworld and these puzzle dungeons. Link has to have a sword, so combat gets designed around that, rather than exploring the implications of picking/throwing.

In addition, the game doesn't even just explore the sword: because it has the expectation of dungeons + items, there's so many things that go underused - and that don't have their designs polished enough so we get a gigantic list of weird inconsistencies that - I imagine - probably would make Miyamoto scream. I would scream if I had to ship a game with these sort of weird design mis-affordances. Here are but a few.

- The ice rod can't stop those rotating fireballs
- the boomerang and hookshot bounce off of nonsensical enemies
- the sword hitbox doesn't match the sword very well , especially the lv. 1 sword
- you only slash the grass tuft that's exactly in front of you...
- you can't set mummies on fire with a lantern
- You can't pick up the chargeable-only rock piles, even with level 2 mitts, despite them being composed of level-1-pickupable-rocks
- the cape makes you invincible to bouncers
- knockback (and directional bumping away) of enemies is very confusing to get a hold of
- the medallions don't hurt many bosses
- the hammer doesn't damage things you'd expect (the ice boss's ice)
- Bombs often don't damage things that.. should be damaged

Overall, the dungeons have this mushy indistinct feeling where you just try a bunch of stuff until it works, or a puzzle is so obviously asking you do to a simple thing with a single item. Likewise combat feels more like trying to annihilate everything with the correct item before you're slammed by fast-moving spiky objects and chugging potions.

It's funny because Zelda often comes SO close to just embracing limitations - the object picking/throwing, OoT's limited jump... but then it often throws that out of the window in favor of like 'big epic inventory'. Truly, you don't need much to make an adventure game work, you just need creativity and confidence to make a smaller set of things work, rather than going big, wide, shallow. Regardless of how I feel about say, BotW as a whole, the puzzles in that game were fun because you only had a few items!

It's still an impressive game for 1991, though with the quiet narrative direction they went, they really could have punched up the sense of place of many or most dungeons. Instead the whole game just has this subtle sense of... there being something missing.

Anyways, throwing signs and bushes and pulling on mario paintings to get money is brilliant... make a game all about that!