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« on: October 09, 2016, 05:44:00 PM »
I wrote some thoughts below, but ended up rambling more than I wanted. I played YW1 to 100% completion minus Tsuchinoko-panda, YW2 well into post-game (defeated Ayatsuri-sama), a bit of Busters and YW3, all in Japanese, so my perspective is probably very different from most people's.
I don't think the first game is as bad as you make it seem. I also dropped it after an hour or two when I first tried it a few years ago because I didn't know what I was doing and stumbled into a backstreet at the very start of the game, which didn't work out well. When I picked it back up, I found it pretty addictive, and I like how simple it keeps things compared to YW2's overwhelming amount of content.
YW2 at its base is definitely a better game. It acts partly as a remake of the first one and polishes most of the mechanics and the environment. I think all the bosses (usually optional) and areas from the first game show up in YW2. In a way YW2 feels more like an adventure, with a lot of mini-games, weird random events, youkai that show up in all kinds of places, and special areas like the endless tunnel. It's packed with so much content that I got sick of it after 120 hours with probably half of the youkai recruited, while in the first game, I was able to get them all, except for Tsuchinoko-panda, after about 100 hours (excluding resets to facilitate finding rare spawns).
In my opinion, the amount of content in the second game is both a good and a bad thing. It's easy to deviate from the main story and spend many hours running back and forth doing side-quests that beg for your attention. It's also easy to get lost in an optional area and find that you need a certain youkai to get past an obstacle. Some youkai that you need to activate events or open up areas have to be found or befriended in somewhat obscure ways. Such youkai existed in YW1, but they were usually just rare spawns and totally optional. There are also many youkai that have to be unlocked through QR codes or passwords obtained during special events, and luckily, you can find most of these online, but I heard some were time-restricted (Wondernyan, I think?), and then you have version exclusives, as well as digital purchase exclusives, which kind of sour my experience as a completionist who doesn't want to buy the same game three times.
There are a few balance issues in YW2. For example, in YW1 I had no problem going straight to the post-game area after beating the game, while in YW2, it's hard to find an appropriate location to level up in order to survive it. I ended up repeating a boss fight over and over, which is only possible if you have befriended a certain youkai that is not easy to get. Even that took a bit of time. The main quest line also provided no real challenge, until maybe the two last boss fights. The same issue was there in YW1 if the player did a lot of sidequests before going back to the main quest, but it's definitely worse in 2, and it makes the spike in difficulty between the end of the story and the post-game even worse.
I thought the voice acting (in Japanese) was fine in YW1 and YW2, the biggest difference on that end, as well as with the dialogue in general, being that the characters' personalities changed completely between the two games. I think the first one was produced before the anime's overwhelming success, and YW2 is a kind of Pikachu Edition for the series that takes a lot of the characterization and developments seen in the anime and incorporates them into the game. The second game is generally funnier and more colorful than the first, but the characters and plot were a bit too childish for me to enjoy (obviously understandable as it targets children). YW1, in all of its simplicity, had a more straightforward and silly story, while in YW2, it seems to switch constantly between self-awareness and a more serious, but cliché tone with maybe too much power of friendship. I do love most of the content added to the second game, and the whole traditional aesthetic, however, and to me the hook of the game is not the main story, but the aspect of exploration, solving side-quests and finding cool stuff all over the place, which YW2 accomplishes excellently, and better than YW1. The fetch quests aren't very fun to play out, they seem to be mostly an excuse to develop the small stories and characters involved in each side quest.
I think YW1 is still worth playing before YW2, firstly because it's a natural progression in terms of amount of content and level of polish, and it's harder to go back to YW after playing YW2 for that reason, secondly because the second game, despite retconning a lot of the first one, contains a lot of references to it, thirdly because it's much shorter and easily digestible than YW2, and most importantly because you need the first game in order to get Koma-san in the sequel, and Koma-san is the cutest youkai.
P.S.: that "advanced targeting move" you mention isn't really a targeting move. You just poke an enemy youkai and find a spot that will either damage them slightly, make them easier to befriend, give you more experience (not sure about that one) or refill your energy gauge. It doesn't influence who your youkai friends are actually targeting, and it only works on youkai who are slacking off or are being possessed.
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