Similar to the first game, Ken’s Rage 2 also features a dream mode that tells “what if” stories for the characters. These stages are closer to traditional Dynasty Warrior gameplay, but are also quite different at the same time. While you still attack enemy bases and fight off generals, you can only fail if you die and enemies can’t reclaim their territory, nor does your army really assist you in anything (some stages are better than others though). In addition to that, every base has some sort of side objective, which aren’t required to capture the place, but are required to A rank the mission. These range from things like, kill enemies with a girder, kill enemies with signatures, kill enemies within the time limit and other things similar to this. Sadly the AI generally doesn’t follow the rules, so you might fail to “A rank” a mission over the AI attempting to help you out. Sadly this is just one of the issues with this mode.
The other big issue with dream mode is the lack of originality between levels. Sure the mode might feature 100+ stages to play through, but there are maybe 15 truly unique stages to play on. At first 15 might seem like an okay number, though many characters have overlapping stories, so you will constantly redo stages in order to earn mural pieces/trophies. As mentioned earlier in the review, the characters have more of a Dynasty Warriors feel to them. This has resulted in some characters losing their uniqueness; like Toki’s parry has been replaced with a buff and Raoh can’t summon his horse. To make matters worse, some characters have virtually no depth to them. According to the game, Rin has six basic moves (note, one is reload…), Ryuga has 11 basic moves (note, most of these just affect the radius of his final attack), even Kenshiro only has eight basic moves, which brings into question why more characters aren’t playable. Some might attribute this to a lack of funds or time to do a dream mode for them, but both Heart and Outlaw (come on, he would have an awesome dream mode!) were from the first game and both lack a dream mode.
Terrible Online
Finally after years of complaints and begging from fans, Koei has included an online versus mode for Ken’s Rage 2. However, this mode is filled with problems and is a total disappointment. While fans were asking, nay expecting this to be a player versus player mode, it’s actually just a series of mini games to determine the winner.
At first this might sound stupid, but Koei was smart enough to make some mini games that favor fast characters and others favor strong characters. For instance open the box, break Jagi statues, win the race and break barrels favor fast characters, where as enemy objectives are better left to strong characters. At first this might sound balanced, but the system clearly favors a strong character like Raoh.
You see every map has predetermined spawns for everything, so a smart player might fight enemies by the race objective or outside of where the barrels spawn. Obviously this nullifies any sort of edge a fast character has and ultimately results in most people playing as Kaioh, Kenshiro, Toki or Raoh. Since none of these characters are super fast (Ken/Toki being faster than Raoh/Kaioh), the edge you would gain by selecting a fast character is outweighed by your lack of power. Also the lack of friendly fire really limits the competitiveness of this mode.
If online versus isn’t your thing, you can also check out the online co-op. This will work on any dream level you completed offline (alternate characters work), except for 1 player only stages and challenge stages, since they can be played online by default. Similar to previous Dynasty Warrior games, this mode is limited to two people and you need to remake the room after finishing any stage. Also experience doesn’t seem to be shared, so it’s basically just a quicker version of the offline mode.
VERDICT
While Ken’s Rage 2 would have made a pretty good first game, it looks bad as a second one. Instead of expanding upon the first game and actually making it work better, they instead decided to make the game everyone wanted/expected in the first place. This has resulted in new problems arising and previous problems (lack of costumes, stage diversity, characters) remaining present. In the end, unless you’re a huge fan of Fist of the North Star or really love Dynasty Warrior titles, I would suggest skipping this one.
[Editor’s Note: Fist of the North Star Ken’s Rage 2 was reviewed on the PlayStation 3 platform. This review is based off the Japanese version and was at the reviewers expense.]
