I'm very tired so I'm not going to make any effort to tie all of my thoughts together into a well-organized, cohesive review and instead just kind of spew it all out. I finished this game over a week ago and if I don't get anything down now I never will.

The Sega Saturn Mansion of Hidden Souls game improves over the game that came before it by actually caring about the characters who inhabit the mansion. Whereas the Sega CD game had maybe one character we got to know enough about to care, this one has many: There's the adventure-seeker who sought out the mansion as another of his things to conquest only to find it boring once he's done so, a man whose outward scariness we learn is merely a defense mechanism carried over from his difficult life, a young girl with abusive parents who's just looking for the love she wasn't getting, and so on. It's all very human and is exactly what I thought was missed potential from the first game.

So why don't I truly love this game? Well, it's a tough one. Firstly, it must be said: whereas the first game only ever showed the residents of the mansion in their butterfly forms, this one made the decision to assign human faces to the butterflies. I do think there was logic to this choice: from a gameplay perspective it's much easier for the player to be able to keep track of characters who look different, something the Sega CD game worked around by keeping each butterfly contained within their respective rooms and giving them bizarrely exaggerated accents. It's an effective way to lift those restraints, but there's something about it just involving human faces that makes the whole thing feel a little cheaper, more blunt.

It would be really unfair of me toward the game to not point out that I think there's more to this decision, and that the game subtly makes a big reveal in a very clever way, but I'm literally falling asleep writing this so I'm just glossing things over real fast now. It is cool though.

The puzzles, if you can call them that, are about as uncomplicated as in the previous game. Most everything is solved by simply walking into whatever room triggers the next event. Unfortunately, this time around there doesn't seem to be a hint system, which can lead to frustration. The one new gameplay element is something of a QTE-style dialogue mechanic. On the normal difficulty you will be expected to quickly respond to things that might not even be yes or no questions by pressing the A or C buttons for "yes" or "no" respectively. The game doesn't wait for input, nor does it even prompt for the button presses. I'm not sure if this can render you unable to progress, but it sucks. Playing on easy pauses the game whenever you are meant to respond, and even if answering "yes" or "no" doesn't always make sense for the circumstances, at least it's more playable this way.

Then, finally, there's the ending, and damn is that shit stupid. Anyway, off to sleep now. Maybe I'll edit this up into something more coherent someday. But I doubt it.