One thing you may or may not have noticed about japanese to english rpg maker game translators is that they love making surprise translations suddenly appear out of thin air with no warning or announcement. The first Inaba game saw a sudden translation sometime early this year and now the sequel is here all of a sudden as well.

If you have not played the first game, Inaba 2 is pretty much a stand alone sequel to the first game, with only two of the leads and one survivor from the last game returning. Now the first Inaba game was a decent enough experience, but it had a few flaws. Does Inaba 2 fix these flaws, or does it bring new ones to the table? Well...

I'll start off by talking about the visuals, which haven't really seen a major change from the first game. It's got good tiles and character sprites and such, being largely First Seed Material, so that's pretty much a given. The mapping also felt roughly at the same level. The maps were pretty good looking for the most part, but a few in between were not exactly up to par. The halls in particular were very large and empty in comparison to the first game. There's also more pixel inconsistency in this game than in the first game. Again, this is most obvious with the text window, font and art, but that's a bit more excuseable. Other than that, a few sprites here and there had 1x1 pixels on them, but nothing in particular stuck out like a sore thumb, luckily.

That being said, the art of the game, just like in the first game, is pretty excellent despite the inconcistency. Even though these artists all have very clear, distinct styles, every piece of art in the game still looks excellent. There's even a really impressive animated section near the start that was pretty awesome.




I don't remember much regarding sound from the first game, but I will say the second game was pretty good on this aspect. The sound effects on particular were very easy on the ears and pleasant to hear. The jazz music in the background really set the tone of the game, and while no song in particular really stuck with me, I still enjoyed the game's music.

Now, the music is actually a lot lighter this time around, and that pretty much applies to the entire game. Inaba 2 is way less content heavy than the first game was, so if you're one to scare easily, I feel that you may enjoy this game more than the first game.

That being said, that's also one of my main complaints for Inaba 2 as a sequel. It's a very watered down game in comparison to the first one. Ironically enough, it took me around 30 minutes longer to beat this one, but the content I got did not feel anywhere near as fleshed out as it was in the first game. The first game generally did more with less. I will say that the cast was a whole lot better this time around, and I'll get to more on that later, but the game really didn't do much with Inaba and Nina this time around. Of course, the excellent sarcastic exchanges were still there, but as far as I remember, there were a few emotional scenes shared between them in the original, the like of which seemed completely absent from this game, save for the bad ending. The endings themselves felt a lot more rushed in comparison to the first game's and nothing felt like it had much of a real consequence.

Inaba 2, a decent enough game on its own, sadly does not contribute much to the Inaba series. I'm willing to bet once the third game releases in english, this is going to be that game you can just completely skip over without having to worry. The biggest addition to the overall story it made that I can think of would be the introduction of Harima's wife.

That being said, let's take a look at the cast! Inaba 1 was a game with two excellent leads and a side cast that I couldn't care less about. I'm happy to say that Inaba 2, as a game with a much larger focus on the Sakaki family rather than the leads, had a much, MUCH better side cast in comparison. There were a few characters here and there that I felt could have been explored better, particularly Akane, Tsubaki and Terumitsu, but the rest of the cast was generally very good. Harima, a character who I had not cared about at all in the first game became one of my favorites in this game, and a lot of that was thanks to the introduction of his wife, who on her own was a great character. Just like Inaba and Nina, these two have a very strong and well written relationship and their exchanges are probably going to be one of the most memorable parts of the game for me. Of course, I'm happy to see more of Inaba and Nina too, even if much other than humour wasn't done with them, because both of them are great characters.



The story on its own is much lighter and simpler than in the first game too. Where Inaba 1 was a sort of meta take on whodunnit stories, Inaba 2 is just a plain whodunnit. It doesn't even delve into paranormal territory like the first game did and the third game also seems to do. There's pretty much no horror unless you count one hanged dude and a few splatters of blood. Even the game itself never gets a dark screen tint, even during night time, it's always has this really bright palette to it. Ironically, I predicted the killer the moment the dead body appeared on screen, and with that, I'm gonna delve into spoiler territory.



I would say that while certain things certainly could have been done better, Inaba 2 has a good enough story if you're looking for just your average whodunnit story.



The gameplay, once again, is very watered down. There's one puzzle in there, I guess. The rest of it is mainly spent talking to everyone. I will say that the addition of the map was so handy with how the faces of whoever you had to talk to flashing and stuff, as well as the quick travelling. Other than that, even the last bit where you have to piece together the mystery by picking the correct choices is much easier than it was in the first game.

Just like in the first game, my absolute biggest problem with Inaba 2 was simply how unpolished it was. A lot of the time, the game doesn't play out that smoothly. For example, every fade is a straight cut to black and a lot of pictures (like the main image that shows up after the animated intro) straight up just pop up out of nowhere with no fades, scrolls or anything of the kind. Cinematic this game is not. I do like how the characters kind of move around and have different positions during cutscenes, but other than that, yeah, Inaba is not getting an Oscar any time soon. One other minor nitpick I have is how the text window sometimes covered parts of the UI (aka that one window at the bottom left that says "Press C for Map"). One other thing that would've been kinda nice to see added would have been some sort of indication that you're switching from investigation mode to story mode so you know when you can use the map and when you cannot. Danganronpa comes to mind with how it has animated transitions when a corpse is discovered and when investigation or class trials begin and such.



So is Inaba 2 worth playing? Yeah, on its own, it's a pretty good game. I just suggest that you don't go into it expecting it to be much like the first Inaba game. If it had been up to me, I would have gone with advertising this game as a spin off rather than a full on sequel. I'm very hyped to see Inaba 3 now, with its darker looking tone and story that actually seems to go deeper into Inaba and Nina's relationship. In the mean time, yeah, not the best it could have been, but Inaba 2 was a fun way to spend my afternoon.

I give the game three Brocks out of five.