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Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Wingman 2: Kitakura no Fukkatsu(ウイングマン 2 -キータクラーの復活-)

About a year and a half after the release of Wingman, comes the sequel from Enix: Wingman 2 and Kitakura comes back in this one. Now, I only read the first few chapters of Wingman to get a sense of the overall setting so I had no idea that Kitakura had gone anywhere. I'm not sure of the story timeline but I guess Kitakura was presumed dead and it seems kind of silly to announce his revival right in the fucking subtitle but there ya go. (Spoiler alert?)

Now all I do is play PC88 games while listening to Plastic Love (tnx YT) 
So, according to random Japanese blogger, the first Wingman sold pretty well (at least for those times) though nowhere near the level of Xanadu, which I don't get cause fuck that game. Anyways, it sold well enough I guess for Enix to go for round 2 and it's what you would expect pretty much any sequel to be: the same shit as the last game but more of it and better. Also, now complete with the obligatory Enix fan service (only one as usual for um... "marketing").

Queue the obligatory Enix fan service click bait
In the gameplay department, they made the user interface a little bit easier to use by allowing you to point at shit to either go somewhere or look at something. Dayum, what is this? Apple II?

Whoa, a cursor? WTF is this newb shit?
You still have to type a bunch of random shit you would probably never guess without a guide but thank god I discovered this little tool that let me bypass the old-school kana input. Unfortunately, there were some bugs using the tool with small kana such as when trying to type "buy juice" so I did have to pull up a pic of the PC88 keyboard at times, but overall WAY easier this time around.

Well well well, looks like we got ourselves a Casanova here.
I'm going to confess to totally cheating again this time around. While the cursor does make things a bit easier than the first game, there's a bunch of random guesswork like having to say "cute" to get an item (again). They have some traps too such as making you go out of your way to pick up some medicine that is never used. When Miku is unconscious, forget about the medicine, you're supposed to type "do kiss" for some reason. Maybe it's a reference to the manga, I dunno but fuck it, guide time. The guide also helped when the game failed to progress as there's a bug that may require you to save and reload (emu save state doesn't count duh).

Kissing without consent is rape! #metoo
Once you cheat, it's a pretty short game as usual but there's a lot more PC88 art to enjoy in this sequel. Although I have to say that even though there is more art, not all of the art looks well... proportional. I'm no artist so I'm not gonna gripe about it but could it be that the Zarth artist was feeling a little time crunch? Who knows? Maybe somebody can kickstart a book about it.

Is this camera angle necessary? I demand a high-tech cape!
One thing to note is that the ending of this game matches the ending of the manga so you might want to avoid if you plan on reading the manga (yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of you out there). Given that it seems the story is pretty much concluded in the manga and this game, I'm curious to see where they take things in the next game: Wingman Special.

Score: 2 disappointed "tweet #metoo" command didn't work out of 5

Overall, a pretty solid ADV sequel at least for those times but there's a lot more competition in 1986 than there was in 1984. The little mini game was a nice distraction though and pretty decent for what it's worth.

This mini game is better than in the previous game but no Contini Punch
The music was also pretty darn good at least in terms of PC88 levels. I should know cause all I listen to nowadays is PC88 music and city pop cause that's what Youtube tells me to listen to.

Coming up next: Plastic Love daft punk nightcore remix 2


Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

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