Masou Kishin II (PSP) Review

Masou Kishin II for PSP is a direct sequel to Masou Kishin I, released on the SFC in 1996. Despite the passage of 16 years, Masou Kishin II plays nearly identical to its predecessor. The developers have added a few new mechanics to try to liven things up, but they end up not having a significant effect. Terrain effects were added, but they are rarely an issue when most of the terrain in the campaign is neutral. You'll very rarely come across patches of unavoidable water or lava with significant terrain effects. Even then terrain effects are largely ignorable as the RPS element chart, unit height, and unit facing is far more important.

Pilots can now equip and swap skills instead of learning a fixed set as they level. Skills can be leveled up as they're used and new skills are learned as you progress through the campaign. There's not much in terms of depth or strategy for skills - the choices in most cases are fairly obvious. You equip damage dealers with damage or critical rate skills, healers with support skills, and fill in the remaining slots with defensive skills like Mirror Image or Sword Cut. In a few exceedingly rare instances you might want to use some movement altering skills, but otherwise you'll just want to stack the damage or critical boost skills. On the plus side, annoying random skills such as Double Attack have been removed.

The UI is acceptable but riddled with issues and quirks that make it less usable than it could have been. I would go into detail but suffice it to say there's definitely room for improvement. There's a bit of interface lag, but thankfully not as much as the DS version. Combat pacing is fairly good, thanks to the ability to skip animations and speed up certain map animations by holding X+R. The UI and combat pacing is probably the biggest improvement from Masou I, which had a fairly primitive UI and unskippable animations. I wouldn't credit Winkysoft directly for the UI improvements, though, as it's mostly a carbon copy of the standard SRW UI that has been developed over the years by others. If you'd like to see some of the combat animations, check this youtube channel.

Just about any criticism of Masou I applies to Masou II. The player's overall strategy is still dominated by unit facing and rock paper scissors element matching. Seishin pools are still tiny, reducing their significance. You'll still spend most of enemy phase defending or dodging due to how unit facing works. There's still very little customization and depth available to the player - no pilot switching, items, parts, or other features you'd expect in a modern SRW or other tactics game. Since the skills system mostly falls flat, you're only left with the most basic weapon and unit upgrades.

More importantly, the campaign is still fairly stale, limited, and boring. Most scenarios follow the typical formula of moving from point A to B while paying attention to elements and unit facing. Scripted events are uncommon and are usually limited to a single reinforcement wave. The player and enemy unit counts are still too small, with player deployments capped at 8 and enemies capped at around 10-12. Every enemy, from the lowliest grunt to the final bosses, are destroyed the same way - match elements, get behind or aside them, and use your strongest attack. There are a few memorable scenarios, but most of them blur into the same uninteresting and repetitive combat. There are no skill points or difficulty levels to make things more interesting or challenging, either. Masou Kishin II's campaign even pales in comparison to Winkysoft games that are nearly as old as Masou Kishin I such as Super Robot Wars F/FF.

Overall Masou Kishin II doesn't hold up well compared to modern tactics games, and mechanically it feels like a game that should have came out on the original Playstation in 1997 or 1998, not 2012. It doesn't do nearly enough to improve on the original, and the bland, generic campaign is hardly worth playing through unless you have a thing for the plot and characters of the series.

Reviewers experience: Completed w/ no upgrades, no units destroyed, low turn counts, no quickload spamming for low % hit/dodge. Bottom route, 279 turns/41 scenarios.