Regarding Village of Nightmare 2

Hey, been a while. I largely ignore the e-mail account attached to this blog nowadays, but I do check it every so often, and thanks to that I noticed a couple comments about the sequel to this little game. (As an aside, the reason I've never actually responded to any of the other comments on this blog after I finished the translation was that I couldn't help anymore, or the answer had already been given.)

Regardless, when I popped back in to check out this new spangled sequel, I played it for a half an hour or so and thought it was pretty good so I left a message on the "News" tab to express my interest in translating it should any of the people who let me know about it pop back around. Since then I've taken a little bit more time to actually play through the rest of it, and I'm sadly not very impressed.

So, to be clear: I very much doubt I'll actually translate Village of Nightmare 2.

Why? Well...


The reasons for this are myriad, but I have to say that it's mainly because the content is lacking. The writing itself is pretty much like before, there are some neat things they did with the story, a lot of old characters return or cameo in an amusing fashion, some old annoyances were removed... But unfortunately many NEW annoyances were added, yet more old annoyances are still there, there are very few CGs compared to the previous game, and most irritating of all, a lot of the corruption was pretty much skipped over.

To be fair, I might very well have missed some stuff. Without the editor program to look into what's actually there, I just played through to whatever seemed most expedient, so I might have missed extra stuff, or missable scenes. I kind of doubt it, overall, but it's certainly possible. That said, even ignoring the segments that seemed to have skipped points, the corruption in general happened way too fast. I thought this was fine in the beginning since several corruptions in the beginning of the first game weren't exactly slow going, but in this one people went from normal to succubus in about a handful of sentences at times.

Not to say that there weren't slow corruptions, or nice scenes. The times CGs were used were usually okay, and the school corruption was great (even if it also included one of the worst instances of skipping, with the teacher's corruption happening off screen), but in general things had no sense of drawn out tension. There were some decently drawn out corruption scenes near the end, but by that point about 80% of the place had already been finished.

The actual battle sections (as in RPG gameplay from RPG Maker) were pretty terrible too, probably the biggest annoyance introduced to the game beyond the content. They weren't awful as far as standard RPG stuff goes, but who the hell is actually playing it for something like that? They added nothing. The end dodge-person game was even more annoying than the one in the first game too. The story that was present was kind of weird at times too, like a section during one of the battle parts that involved a child being found, then ending up killed by a beast that was hounding you for a while. Some sad music played, he want "O-Onee-chan... blarg", and then absolutely no one proceeded to give a shit. I can only assume it was some sort of joke or meme.

But really, most of the gripes are sort of minor compared to content point. I know people's feelings on it were pretty mixed at best, but I actually did enjoy the CG art from the first game, and the fact that there were so few included in the game, on top of the sex scenes being very loose until the end, left me pretty disappointed.

There are other things to praise, or complain about with the game, but I won't go into them. I've already ranted about it long enough. The bottom line for it all is that I don't really feel motivated to translate the game even if I had the free time for it (which is incredibly iffy). Perhaps if an enhanced addition for the game pops up I'll reconsider, but as it stands, it's not likely to happen.

That's it from me.