Jade Cocoon 2

"The Neverchanging Story"

This game is almost nothing like Jade Cocoon, and that's a bad thing.

STORY: 8/10
The story is pretty good, it's original, and considering the type of game it is it actually has alot of story too it. You are a boy who is cursed and must lift the curse by collecting the forest orbs/crystals. The curse is that you will slowly become dark, and then you wil die. And you have a cool looking tail. Yep. You meet people on the way who you must compete with to get the orbs, each with their own reason. This is what's cheesey. There is a scientist in the game named Gil, and he wants to do research on your tail, so he wants the orb so you can't get rid of the curse so he can study your tail. So he wants to kill you too look at your pretty tail. Nice guy. There are other characters like this, who want the orbs for not-so-important reasons, such as fame. Blech.

GRAPHICS: 9/10
The graphics are polygons, and they are quite good. I really can't complain about this.

GAMEPLAY: 5/10
The battle system is unique and original. And as boring as ever. You get various monster which you can raise, and you fight on a rotating disc. You can attack with three guys at a time per turn. They all only have on move. You cannot use their regular attack to conserve mana. You cannot select who to attack. The regular enemies never change. You will fight the same enemy you faught in area 1 in 16, excpect on area 16 it's a bigger, evolved form. Bosses are stupid, they are nothing more than the enemies you fight, except really big. The only boss in the entire game that isn't a monster you fight as a regular enemy or can own yourself is the Master of the game. Not only that, but you don't capture the monsters like on Jade Cocoon, you simply find them in rooms if your lucky. The areas are worse. You walk around various paths, filled with small rooms you can walk in, until you find a Keyspore, then you go to the next area. That's it for the entire game. There are four forests: Fire, Wind, Earth, and Water. They don't even look any different, except Fire has a shade of red, Water a shade of Blue, etc. The farther you get, the more efects. Such as the farther you are in the Wind forest, more wind will blow. In the Water forest, it will begin to rain. Then, there's creating your monsters. You can merge them with other monsters, which does absoulty nothing but give them a bit better stats and a new move. They won't even look cooler, like they did on the first one. Cause if they look diffent, they couldn't inflate enemies as bosses. For the most part, you'll be re-selecting the same move when merging because the others suck, so only thing you really gain is better stats. You can only have two moves for each guy, which changes depending on which side of the combat wheel you use. (Such as Fire will let you use Comet Strike, and if you switch to the Water side you use Med) They can also evolve in battle, and that is pretty neat. While fighting, they have a chance of evolving, and then they look cooler and have higher stats. The problem is, every time you merge the evolution form goes back to level 1. That sucks, since you will be merging alot. The other thing is the repetitiveness. This game never changes. Even the optional stuff is nothing more that going through more forests that are exactly the same as the other ones.

CONTROL: 10/10
Considering figthing is nothing more than pushing X, the control is pretty simple.

DIFFICULTY: 8/10
Stats out very easy, but it gets extremely hard after the master of the game, and the optional stuff is extremely hard.

LENGTH: 10/10:
IT DOESN'T END!!! I couldn't stand to keep playing it to finish the optional stuff, I got sick of it.

MUSIC: 6/10
The Beast hunter battle music is cool, and so is the orb battles. All the other music completely sucks.

RENT OR BUY:
If your considering playing it through, buy it. You'll never finish it if you just rent it, and you really can't build up monsters much, there would be no point. Rent if you wanna test it out, but if you wanna go through it 100% buy it.

OVERALL: 6/10
With a boring battle system, non-changing areas, dumb bosses, crappy music, and not-so-good creature raising, this game should be avoided. If you want a good creature raising game, play the original.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/02/02, Updated 09/02/02