The sequel to 2019’s Death end re;Quest has released, throwing players into a small, spooky town situated within the mountains. Protagonist Mai Toyama looks to escape her traumatic past whilst searching for her lost sister in her last known whereabouts. The game is developed by prolific JRPG developer and publisher, Idea Factory, alongside their subsidiary Compile Heart. Although I struggle to view this as Idea Factory’s best work.

Death end re;Quest 2 is a terrible game with a terrific battle system. It’s a horror JRPG, and comes with a lot of disgusting tropes endemic to the genre, like sensationalised depictions of sexual assault and domestic violence. The story meanders almost as soon as it begins, with a lot of repetition making the game feel bloated despite only having a 30-hour runtime. The characters are all walking clichés, one of whom has maybe the silliest name I’ve ever encountered in a video game. But despite myself, I fell in love with the innovative battle system that lets you cartoonishly knock enemies into each other to deal damage. This alone almost made up for all the rest of the game’s shortcomings. Almost. There’s a lot of shortcomings.

There’s a lot of gratuitous violence in the story, so it was a smart choice that the game is a visual novel with barely any cutscenes. Not being able to see the horror – but still read and hear it – softens the blow somewhat. The game is separated into day and night sections, with the daytime purely being a menu containing a list of optional scenes that you view, one by one. At night, you can explore the town and take part in turn-based battles. 

Our protagonist is Mai, a tech-loving teen who, five minutes into the story, murders her abusive father in a fit of rage. She is promptly sent to a fancy all-girls boarding school for orphans, in a small town where nobody knows what computers or smartphones are. It’s a ludicrously contrived premise that’s the perfect setup for a series of mysterious killings to occur, and it’s up to Mai to solve them.

The game’s constant tonal whiplash quickly becomes exhausting. Making a full-length horror RPG is a novel idea, so kudos to the developer for trying something new. I just don’t think flipping the horror on and off was the best way to go about it. Our teen heroes could face a traumatic incident one night, only to act like nothing happened the next morning during the optional scenes. The game’s various elements never quite gel together.

I could go on forever about how much I disliked the non-combat parts of this game (and I kind of already have), but let me run down a few more things. I was pleasantly surprised to see multiple queer couples amongst the students at the school, but each of these relationships turns out to be abusive to some degree. While it’s a common horror trope for characters to make poor decisions that put themselves in danger, the game’s length means that Mai, Liliana and Rotten Dollhart make inane decisions over and over again that often result in not much story progress. And since this is a JRPG, awkward tropes of that genre rear their ugly heads as well. We here at Checkpoint have made our opinions known about the sexualisation of underage girls in Japanese games, and DERQ2 (as I’ll call it) certainly has its fair share. I truly didn’t know that breast jiggle physics was still a thing games did.

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Now let’s get to the combat, which is (mostly) great! It’s turn based, but a character can move anywhere and perform up to three actions each turn. If you want to whack an enemy, then heal an ally, then defend against the next attack, you easily can. But the best part is when you perform an attack capable of a Knockback. A Knockback hits every enemy within the attack’s range and, as I’ve mentioned before, flings them around the battlefield like grotesque pool balls. Various patches on the ground give stat buffs if you step on them, or if you knock an enemy into them. Knock an enemy at another party member and they will perform a powerful Knock Blow, piffing the poor monster around with renewed momentum. Knockbacks never get boring, especially when a single well-angled hit can ricochet one enemy into all the others, killing them all before they can take their turn. It’s an ingenious system that makes every battle something to look forward to. Completely inappropriate for a horror game, but ingenious nonetheless.

Unfortunately, even battles let the game down towards the end, when most enemies have gigantic pools of health and can kill a character in 1 or 2 hits. Tedium and repetition are indestructible waves permeating Death end re;Quest 2, leaving no survivors. Not even a really neat combat system can withstand their might.