The game is good. I can complain about all the ships all day, but I cannot
truly take issue with it. It absolutely lived up to whatever hype it had, and I say this as someone who is not some huge R-Type fan. I respect the series for being good games, but it is not on the list of games I greatly enjoy. Final 2 is very much line with previous games. It's clearly better than R-Type III and is probably better than the first Final. Is the game perfect? Obviously not. Very few games could ever be called perfect. But why are we ever expecting perfection? R-Type is not a perfect series. That this game is better than even one other game in a series that is largely good is always an achievement.
But this review by Mark? Oh no. There is nothing "in-depth" about this review. He has crossed the line this time, if he hasn't many times before. Literally all this video is is someone who doesn't like R-Type as a series complaining about R-Type as a series. This is the exact kind of nonsense that goes on in gaming all the time, the kind that really makes me want to start doing videos myself. Unfortunately I am not currently in a position to do so. I hate this so much. Gonna copy what I wrote on the review because noone cares for YouTube comments, especially not text walls.
It's ironic that you make fun of Eurogamer for "not really playing games" when it's very obvious you haven't played any of the games you mention in this video or in the comments, including R-Type Final 2 itself.
Every time you've been called out for claiming Granzella "has no significant experience", an outright lie, you've attempted to compare the game to multiple titles that are actually good. Mighty No.9 is actually a good game, and it also has basically zero Inafune involvement anyway. Death Stranding is a good game, at least within its field, and the majority of people like the game. Devil's Third is a genuine great game that was "criticized" by the same kind of people who criticized classics like God Hand back in the day. But the most rotten comparison on the list has got to be the Shenmue 3 one, a great game that was designed exactly as a Shenmue 3 should be, which we do not deserve whatsoever. I am not a "fan" of any of these games. We have metrics and standards for figuring out whether a game is good or not. You can *dislike* the games all you want, but to call the developers out for some wrongdoing, as you have done here, is itself a great injustice.
You have stated repeatedly that you don't especially care for horizontal shmups, nor for R-Type the series. That is a huge red flag right there. You clearly state that you primarily care about "bullet hell" games and specifically want R-Type to be more like that, even calling it "innovation". This was the exact problem that many shmup developers ran into when Dodonpachi became big; they felt that Dodonpachi had taken over the genre and that there was no real room for anything else ever again.
I just need to call attention to this: you go on and on and on about the developers having no experience, it seems to be so crucial to your point. It's such a tragedy because you are so fundamentally wrong about this that any point that could be drawn from it is itself fundamentally wrong. Never mind that the game is good completely regardless of developer experience.
So much of this just seems to be your personal opinion, with no basis in fact. Great example, all the whining about "trial and error gameplay", a centerpiece to video games (and basically any learned skill ever). Then there's all the whining about "objects blending in", when it's abundantly clear that you're just not paying attention and you immediately move to blame the game for it (like so many do with any game). There's not really a way to challenge any of that. You're claiming to be an authoritative source that is trying to persuade people to touch or not touch games, but you do so only by delivering outright untruths and personal opinion to the table.
Complaining about specific enemies might be the worst part of this video. First there's that blue tank-like enemy; it's a very simple enemy to figure out with no real memorization required. The changes in flight pattern are likely due to rank anyway. Right after that you complain about a boss that has a *very* specific pattern, which you seem to think is so important to good design. The lasers always start in the same place and always rotate to the same place, and the laser attack is clearly telegraphed by the core "plugging in" to the laser cannons. Is it sort of a "gotcha" the first time? Maybe... like the overwhelming majority of bosses and situations put into any video game that has ever been made (especially those repeatedly called "good")... I guess... The only issue I've seen with this boss is that it did not fire the lasers the *first* time when it was supposed to, and I have never seen it do that since, so it might be a rank thing, or a small bug that I doubt anyone else has seen, or possibly even the environment I used to run the game (as is so often the case with PC games). Then after this, you complain about a boss that doesn't have any sort of "phases" and is clearly meant to be speedkilled, and fighting bosses from behind is common in R-Type and R-Type-like games because you can shoot behind you. It's, gasp,*variety*! Shock! Bonus points for actually suggesting that people time out the stage 2 boss, which is really hard to do unless you deliberately refuse to fight it.
Speaking of points, you absolutely 100% can make a game focused on scoring regardless of what its survival is like, because how people feel about both scoring and survival is heavily opinionated anyway, and because *the focus on heavy scoring systems came about as a result of those bullet hell games you love so much*.
You also make strange claims about *other* games that are simply untrue. Leo actually has checkpoints and is otherwise an R-Type game in design, just with some very superficial changes to mechanics and aesthetics. It's really not very different at all. fundamentally. Nor is ImageFight or X Multiply, which are more or less R-Type spinoffs (something R-Type Final canonized even).
I'm not even sure where to begin with the "euroshmup" nonsense. Absolutely nothing in this game even remotely resembles that strand of design, which is filled with things like enemies being almost unkillable, literally undodgeable attacks, needing to buy equipment just to handle any situation somewhat okay, etc; R-Type Final 2 has absolutely none of this. Your complaint about "being able to stay in one place and shoot" is, at worst, an R-Type series issue; it is completely possible to beat multiple games in the series using nothing but your Force, your regular shot, and your charge shot, and I believe at least one game (Delta?) can be done with absolutely zero shooting. *I could be wrong about that, I am pulling this from my own research and I may have forgotten details.* But I have the decency to actually tell people that.
Then you attempt to call the Final games something besides "mainline", simply because they don't have numbers in the title. That is especially heinous. R-Type Final 2 is a better game than at least R-Type III, and it may actually be a better game than the first Final. That's already extremely good in a series which is like 95% good anyway.
All the complaining about the game through the lens of the Switch version is particularly heinous, never mind that multiple people have reported that the claims made here aren't really true. The biggest issue with the Switch version right now is the load times between deaths, and that's probably something that can't be helped.
*But the absolute most heinous bit of this video, the lynchpin of your entire argument, has to be the Sine Mora comparison. You have NO IDEA what you're talking about here. The two games have nothing to do with each other. R-Type Final 2 is operating on a level so far above something like Sine Mora that it is genuinely insulting to make that comparison.*
I'm sorry this comment is so disorganized. This video is so unbelievably rotten to the core that I cannot help but be angry, and this is doubly frustrating as it'll just lead people to calling me an "R-Type fanboy", regardless of my personal attachment to the series (there's not a lot of it, I prefer vertical games usually). You don't have to be a fanboy to see through the lies of this nonsensical video. It is plain as day to anyone with any minor experience with this genre, or at the very least this series. It is so deeply upsetting to me that so many people are willing to believe this lie, with the only possible endgoal being to see this developer shuttered and R-Type shelved once again, despite them having made a great game that deserves great sales numbers.
Indeed, you will notice that I have not mentioned my opinion once here. That's because how I feel about the game doesn't matter. What matters is this: if you're going to actually going to criticize something, you need to have your facts in order. If the game was actually bad, your claim at the beginning that you feel "trapped" would have merit. The game is good, therefore your claim is bogus. You're not being honest. The only honesty in this video whatsoever is that you dislike the game. I'm sorry that you dislike the game! But it's incredibly wrong to drag a clearly good game and its clearly good developers through the mud because you just so happen to personally dislike it.
This is nothing more than someone who doesn't like R-Type complaining about him not liking R-Type and holding the developers responsible, as if they've harmed the gaming world in some way. I would like to believe that you're better than this. Please try to do better.
