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GAME: Kamen Rider Battride War II

As is an ongoing and unfortunate trend in Bandai/Namco character games, this game has been released in two editions: the standard edition and the “premium sound” edition, which costs about $30 more. The premium edition features all the original theme songs from the TV shows as performed by the original artists, and the regular edition, which we received, has... nothing. You get dull, generic filler music for the entire game.

It's understood that there are rights issues and fees to be paid when using the original artists: Super Robot Wars has always used instrumentals for this reason. Excising the theme music in any form, on the other hand, is clearly just a cynical move to punish the fan who doesn't pay the extra $30. One could, of course, argue that being made to pay $100 for this game is a punishment of its own.

There's a general lack of polish throughout, of which you'll certainly see a few examples: enemies getting stuck behind invisible walls, a mission refusing to end as Rider and sidekick repeat the same lines at each other (“Great job!” “I'll protect everyone's smiles!” “Great job!” “I'll protect everyone's smiles!”), and of course the way the assist Rider will always charge in a straight line, often directly past the target you intended him to attack. At one point I caused the player character to freeze in place forever by merely pausing at the wrong time.

And that's not all! There are even crash bugs: pick Fourze in Rocket States and behold as the game crashes and informs you that your save data's been corrupted! It hasn't been, your save game is safe, but this is absurd. It's embarassing that the game shipped in a state where simply choosing the wrong character crashes it. This is clearly a case where Eighting's bosses told them to just ship the damn game already. The first Battride War game came out just over a year ago.

It's understood that there are rights issues and fees to be paid when using the original artists: Super Robot Wars has always used instrumentals for this reason. Excising the theme music in any form, on the other hand, is clearly just a cynical move to punish the fan who doesn't pay the extra $30. One could, of course, argue that being made to pay $100 for this game is a punishment of its own.

Every time I go past this article, I think it reads: Kamen Rider Buttride War II.

......yeah

Looks like the only things that really changed from original Buttride War are the story, the cast, and the items system (for the worse). That's rather unfortunate, because I thought the first was a fun little time-waster with a surprising amount of depth.