Yomi 2 Reviews

Its a fun card game

As a longtime player of Yomi 1, I will say the bread and butter of the multiplayer game is all here and the bugs are fixed very quickly if found. It's a very solid multiplayer game at its core and the changes in the sequel give more to make the true hybrid of hand management from a card game with the mindgames of a fighting game. I feel like the polish and presentation are lacking with the Live2D looking art, and there are cutscenes for big attacks but not really any animations for most of the regular attacks. Perhaps this may change outside of Early Access. The singleplayer Career mode is very barebones. The setting is that you are a Yomi player going pro (in-world, Yomi is also the same card game it is in real life) with parodies of real life people also playing, but it's presented in the form of a Twitter or social media feed, full of cliche stuff, political arguments, and nothing in the way of actual plot. It's mostly just a small distraction from the fact you're just playing game after game of the regular game. There's one arena with special modes that mixup the game rules, but the overall story here is not very compelling. The AI has multiple difficulties (including easier ones that tell you the kinds of cards they are going to play in a range like 40% block, 60% attack) and they work quite well, so they can provide a challenge. As for the changes, the way the balance shifts from player to player every turn gives a natural ebb and flow to combat, making one player more likely to go on the offensive on their turn with more cards and faster attacks. This makes the battle feel and move a lot faster and more naturally than the stalemates that occurred in Yomi 1. Certain attacks are now unsafe on block, and so spamming fast attacks has been nerfed, which is also a welcome change. Lastly, Jokers still kinda exist, but cannot be used as Blue Burst to escape combos anymore, just as combat options. Generally, offense has been improved and big combos are easier to do. The removal of two-sided cards while still having the same hand limit leaves many more cases where you don't have the options you want in battle, since you can't have one card be both a Block and an Attack at the same time. This is not better or worse objectively, but I don't like it as much. The super cards (previously Aces) can also now only do one super or the other, and they also require a separate super meter to perform, so they can also take up space in hand as a dead card at times. Overall this is a solid game with no frills, and I would recommend it for the multiplayer experience, but I feel the single player experience is quite lacking unless you like doom scrolling so much that you want to do it in a fantasy world too.

Yomi 1 was already great but this time they really cleaned up the design (the game design and the graphic design) and added more depth. High-low mixups can be done without needing a knockdown, and knockdowns and frame advantage (called Edge in this game) work just like in fighting games. This is an excellent followup to Yomi!

The game itself is quite fun, and I think the digital implementation is very well done.