The Sword of Hope II

 The Sword of Hope II

Okay, so after playing the abysmally unfair adventure-RPG that was The Sword of Hope on the Nintendo Switch Online service, I remembered that I had actually purchased "The Sword of Hope II" from the Nintendo 3DS eShop before it had shut down. I remember at the time finding it strange that the eShop had the sequel available but not the original. (well, nowadays the 3DS eShop has nothing available, so I guess it's all moot at this point)

So... I suppose now's as good a time as any to actually play through it. I mean, presumably I bought it with the intention of playing it at some point, right? And it turns out that point is now.

Since I just finished having a rough time with the first game, I was hoping the second game would be better.
And...well, it is! it is better. It's still a real slog to play through, but it certainly is a better game.

The sequel takes place after the first game. An evil guy named Zakdos has taken the Sword of Hope and is planning to do something evil with it. Theo must once again stop it. There's not much more to it than that.

The basic commands are carried over from the first game - "Look", "Open", and "Hit" commands are the main way you interact with the world, with the ability to use Items and Magic as well. It has the same exact same point-and-click first-person presentation as the fist game. Though I do think the visuals are better in this game.
The world design is better in this game, too - environments are more varied and interesting compared to before. There's an underwater volcano, a beanstalk castle tower, and a bunch of other interesting locales. Compared to the first game, the adventure is a lot more straightforward too - there is no more required backtracking to previous areas, which means there are no longer points where you have to remember something unusual from an earlier screen. There also aren't as many trapped rooms that warp you to different screens - at least, not until the final castle. I guess this game could be considered a bit more streamlined.

The biggest improvement to the playability is the ability to save the game at any time. In the first game, there was no proper saving, and you could only get your password from the shaman NPC in the starting area. But in the sequel, you can just save at any time and it's fine.
So even if the combat goes poorly, as long as you've been saving on every screen, you can reload and continue without too much worry.


Combat has improved. The extremely wild fluctuations for damage rolls from the first game have been toned down significantly. The damage rolls now resemble that of a normal RPG battle system. So finally, it's actually possible to have any kind of combat strategy. fancy that.
The spells are also decently useful in this game - you can blind enemies to incapacitate them and make them attack their allies, which is fun. And some spells can target multiple enemies at once. It's a decent JRPG combat system, but it's nothing mindblowing. Overall, the enemy difficulty is quite high, so it will take a decent amount of grinding encounters to get strong enough to win.

We now have multiple party members too - Theo is joined by a mage boy named Mute, as well as one of three additional party members who join and leave the party as the story progresses.

With all of these combat improvements, I now no longer feel like the game would work better as a strictly point-and-click adventure - I do think the JRPG combat is worth having now that it's functional. But...as much as the combat has been improved from the first game, it's still not really all that fun to play.
The problem is, combat is so extremely SLOW to resolve. It's abysmal. The text scroll is slow, enemies' attack animations are slow and happen one-by-one... it all feels very clunky, and it just takes so long to sit through. And it doesn't help that encounters are extremely ridiculously frequent in this game too. Almost every step you take into a new screen triggers an encounter. It's not all that fun to explore because combat is constantly interrupting you, and the interruptions take such a long time every time.


I think it was actually a mistake to play this on the legit 3DS Virtual Console version I bought. I would honestly have had such a better time if I was on emulator and had access to speed-up functions.

Because... to be fair, the world design and dungeon design is not bad at all. And even the JRPG combat system is good - it works well and provides a reasonable challenge.... it's just too slow and painful to sit through so much boring combat. If I had the freedom to roam the dungeons and fight stuff at a decent pace, this would honestly be a really cool little game. But as it is now, it was just a frustrating slog.

So... if I was going to recommend Sword of Hope II to players nowadays, I would have to insist you play on an emulator with speedup. That's all it really takes to make this game fun tbh.

The overall verdict regarding the Sword of Hope series is... The Sword of Hope 1 requires rewinds in order to be fun, and Sword of Hope II requires fast-forward in order to be fun.
Funny that. Neither game really holds up without emulator functions propping them up.
Yeah. Don't play either of these games on original hardware if you can help it.

But I do think they are decently fun GB adventures. I'm glad I got to see them. ...now I want to go and play some actually good games next.