Nights of Azure 2: Bride of the New Moon Reviews

9/10

This is a very mixed title, it's only barely a recommend and only if you get it on a very rare sale. Action RPG in a small 2-game series by Atelier creator Gust. This title uses a combo oriented system, with fairly large hordes of enemies. Most of the time mobs aren't a threat but a few enemies are dangerous enough to break out of your stunlocks. Only late game bosses are a really dangerous threat in normal difficulty, there's higher difficult if you really want to go further. The world is kind of interesting, the story is mixed. While technically it's "yuri", it's definitely the faux yuri to TITilate male fans. Combat works by using a mix of heavy and light attacks, there's a series of different combos that can be done with those moves. There's also a human [spoiler]or "human"[/spoiler] companion, and you can bring two demon-spirit allies called Servans. There are skills for the Servans to use in combat, and each human companion has a different set of attacks, including an active, assists, and combo attacks. There's a decent variety of moves. Some Servans also give you alternate weapons to use, each with their own combo moves. This seems good, but since you only have two Servans and they provide map mobility, you'll rarely want to use these. It's a bad system in my opinion. Progression around the small group of maps involves opening paths with different Servans, all but one of which is optional. There are four types of blocked paths, and you can only take two Servans at a time so it'll take multiple trips to collect everything. This wouldn't be a problem if there weren't time limits! There are two time limits. Each chapter has a number of days limited by the moon phase, it makes it not super clear exactly how many days you have remaining. Days inside of dungeons also have limited real-time time before it boots you back to the hub. This in-dungeon time limit does shut off during boss fights and the large number of cutscenes, and gets longer as you level up and get time extension abilities. Once you beat the game once, the moon phase time limit goes away in NG+ allowing you to get all the endings. The equipment system is also pretty poor, and the crafting, such as it is, is also terrible and it's almost embarassing to be a Gust game with it. The game ran decently aside from chapter 4, where it crashed multiiple times, including once AFTER the final boss before you had a chance to save. Graphics is OK, but does suffer from the annoying FOV blurring that a lot of later Gust games do, it's nowhere near as bad as Atelier Ryza 3. It's Gust so the music is excellent. Even with all the negatives, I still enjoyed most of the game. Normal ending wasn't satisfying, but the combat was still fun and I still liked the tropey but fun characters.