Shinogi Chess Club 2: Resistance Reviews

I loved the original SCC, and there were a lot of things I liked about this game too. The music is still great, I very much enjoy the humorous dialogue, and there are a lot of little touches that shine with personality and charm (Kenshi reading his haikus to the heavens, the evolving decor of the club room complete with its patented Kana Korner(tm), etc). That said, while I was sucked in by the original Shinogi Chess Club and binged through it very quickly, I found myself less enthralled with this one and it took me quite a while to actually finish. I think there are a couple reasons for that: 1. The first two chapters (first half of the game) are really slow. This is somewhat understandable for Ch. 1 since it's an introduction, but I think Ch. 2 was largely unnecessary. It was mostly devoted to explicitly showing events we were already made aware of through more subtle storytelling in the first game. I think about 70-80% of the scenes in this chapter could have been removed outright, and the pacing would benefit from it. 2. Unfortunately, some of the novelty of Shinogi Chess itself has worn off. New board variants were a good idea, but it didn't really feel like enough; the same strategies I used in the first game won every match here. In the original game, every match felt like an opportunity to experiment! Here, it just felt like another opportunity for me to abuse Rook + Pawn stacks (which the AI still doesn't understand and will happily blunder its Queen into). It feels "solved." There are also some awkward growing pains with this being the second entry in a trilogy. The first game ended on a cliffhanger for the overarching story, sure, but emotionally it felt complete. Without spoilers, Shinogi Chess Club 2 introduces some major complications for the main character, Himiko, and her relationships with other major characters. By the time the game ends, none of this friction is resolved, and Himiko herself is left at a really strange and unsatisfying point of an incomplete character arc. That's on top of the fact that we have another story cliffhanger when it really did feel like this was the game where everything would be wrapped up. If/when Shinogi Chess Club 3 comes out and resolves these threads, maybe I'll look back and think this complaint was silly. But for now, it's honestly a little frustrating and anti-cathartic. To be clear, I did enjoy this game overall. I'm just left with some grumblings that I can't really ignore.