Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection

Also known as Zwei 2.... which yeah is pretty redundant.

Anways This game is about Ragna Valentine after he crash lands on Ilvard and is saved by making a blood contract with a Vampire Alwen du Moonbria.
two two decide to team up inorder to get Alwen's castle back so she will break their contract.

The controls are fairly simple.
Ragna fights with an anchor gear, this can slash or spin and later on in can even grab and glide (honestly gliding was wasily my fav)
Alwen fights with Magic... each spell had a different attack pattern... my favs were force arrow (yeah the very first one you get) and Holy Lance (it's a lit like force arrow just much horter range and stays where you fire it.
as you got through dungeons you get new abilities which allow you to explore more dungeons and so on.
The leveling system is the real unique bit because you level by eating food. I like this concept in theory... in practice enemies do not drop near enough food and even with quite a bit of grinding i was still two levels short for the final boss.

Overall the story is good... nothing amazing but it's sweet and funny and really well written and acted (even if the music often overpowered the voices in cutscenes.... even though I lowered it....)

The music is fantastic and fits the feel of the game perfectly (but this is falcom so of course the music is good)

Finally the art direction is lovely... i kinda wish falcom would make more games that look like this (don't get me wrong Ys 8 is beautiful but i'm always a sucker for more stylized games) and now that i have seen the sprite work for Zwei 1..... yeah i really wish ore falcom games looked like this... it's just so pretty.

Is it one of my altime fav Falcom franchises now?
no
Do i hope that eventuall we may see zwei 3?
hell yes... I mean it'll never happen but if it did i'd be right there.

I have no idea why this game did poorly in japan... it's really really enjoyable and at about 20 hours isn't too bad as far as length is concerned. I will probably go back and try to tackle those lv 99 dungeons (which should be super fun at level 27 : D )
but for now i'm just glad i got to finish out the year with this sweet little game.

You can get it on Steam and GoG and it ran perfectly fine on the highest setting on my computer that is pushing 6 years old.

and now to wait for Tokyo Xanadu Ex+.... it came otu dec 8th but VGP hasn't shipped it yet : ( may not see it till the new year....)