Towelket One More Time 2: Karaage Tanpopo

Towelket One More Time 2: Karaage Tanpopo (Fried dandelions???) is the second episode to a great Rpgmaker2000 series that I'm really liking so far! Towelket One More Time is the name, and NO! You do not have to start from Towelket One More Time 1, but from Towelket One More Time 3, look HEEERE!
This game that took me about 4 hours to complete, and like the previos episode of the series it was made by Kanao (Kanashimi Hocchikisu)and translated by the Patchy Illusion Team (that did an excellent, job, there are a couple of weird sentences (but happens just a couple of times).

If you did not play Towelket One More Time 3 please note that this game series contains dark humor, violence, gore, sex and drugs! As I mentioned in the review I linked before this isn't really much different from a South Park episode.

Anyway play the first game (it's good) if you can, it's easy and has some references to this second episode, but do not worry, these are two totally separated stories, technically this second episode is set many (15? 20?? 23???) years after the events of the first game. If you played the first game here you will find again the Pon creatures including the Pon Groom, the rats, the insects, and the aliens of the Kisechu Empire (some were finally able to become as large as a human), but the role is more or less a cameo and nothing else. There is also an unnamed character that looks like Pian, one of the children of the first game (now an adult of course!) but it's merely a supposition based on the appearance!
Anyway there is also the return of that magic book of the first game, that is used to make people become huge or little, but it's present just in a section for a quest, and it's not really central to the story.


The tables have turned! Now we're as small like a Kisechu alien, and it is as big as a human being!

Now, the STORY! Towelket One More Time 2 is the story of an unnamed boy (well it's named "Hero" but you can choose his name, the author mentioned that the name is Mocchi) that lives in the country and loves the cows, especially one named Cow-chan (uh, yeah I am speaking of true love here, but if you played the previous game you probably know that this game is weird) and has a friend named Paripariume (that has totally NO relation to the character in Towelket 3 with the same name. That one is an ant singer!), a cheerful and tomboyish girl. Later a fourth character will join the team completing the usual "party of four adventurers", Mitsue-san, a reporter and TV announcer working for an urban television station. A young scientist, Ketsuago-hakase will also help the team after the first half of the game but she isn't playable.

The game starts with some routine: he Hero and Paripariume go to school, go home and so on... until Cow-chan is kidnapped (some would say unsurprisingly) by some aliens. And these aren't the tiny alies of the first game, but some human sized creatures with the head of a duck, blasters ready to fire and a mean interest in using humans and livestock as test subjects in unsettling experiments (they're called "Love lips aliens" in next installments of the series). You can probably figure out how the reporter and the scientist will be involved in the story, but play the game and see, I won't tell you more of the story!


Well, you should be proud of yourself, I guess!

Now, the GAMEPLAY: this game plays more or less like the first: it's a story driven adventure with combat, enemies are always visible and often avoidable, except for the boss fights of course! You have a ton of different weapons, some also present in the first episode, like the fire extinguisher, but you can also use chairs and others pieces of forniture. But while the protagonists in the first game had no preferences, here each party member has a favoured weapon (whips for the Hero, shoes for Paripariume, microphones for the reporter and... udders for Cow-chan!) that lets him/her some special skills. Others, like spells, are learned like in the first game, but unfortunately there is no more Guest character selection, so in this adventure you'll be limited to use just the four protagonists.

There's still a more complex menu (compared to the usual Rm2k one) that lets you access also the Garden, the Bar, the Mind and the character's Menu. Yes, you do not save using the menu, but there are save points scattered around the game, and they look like white signs. Luckily there are a LOT of them (almost one each two maps!) and they also heal the party, so no need rest in the inns like in the first game. There is also little use for the shop of consumables, since not only loot is generous, but you can take fruits from trees, and these are consumables that restore Hitpoints and Magic Points. They are not only free, but they also respawn (like the enemies)!


Mitsue fights with a microphone... and it's super effective!

Ok, but what are the Garden, the Bar and the Mind?
- The Gardenis a place where you can plant flowers you find in-game, and they will grant a bonus to the stats of ALL characters: Bronze +1 stat, Silver +3 stat, Gold: +10 stat (there are only two spots for Gold flowers!).
- The Bar "inside the mind" is a place where you can talk to Elizabeth, a sarcastic girl that gives tips and life advice for progressing through the game. Very useful if you are stuck.
- The Mind is a place where you can do a LOT of things: cook food (more healing items), use money and leaves (that are free to collect) to craft items and check the unlockables you collected during each chapter. You should do that often, because the first time you interact with each of them you get a bonus, a spell or some other kind of reward.

Then there is also the character's Menu, that is used to manage the inventory, and you can access it quickly pressing SHIFT, since the animation of the complex menu is rather long, and this is a bit annoying. I mean the menu in Towelket One More Time 3 was less stylish but quicker!

Speaking about style, let's speak of GRAPHICS and SOUNDS: visually the game is really cute and colorful, it uses the same style of the previous game, custom resources, portraits and enemies. All custom made, there few old/recycled sprites but this time all takes place in the real world, with normal sized people and environments. It's good, maps are well done, even if in some parts due to the freedom of going anywhere it may be possible to go the wrong way, but it's not too bad as there are some "teleports" or "fast travel options". There are just a couple of passability errors in the cow dungeon and the cave, that lets you exit the map where you are not supposed to do that, anyway there are no game breaking bugs!
Music and sounds are good, this time I do not recognize the themes, maybe they're custom? I do not know, but I loved some wacky sound effects used right from the beginning.


Uhm looks like that in this game events will be a tad more dramatic than in the previous entry! (also see that white sign with a little hand on the left? That's a save/healing point!)

Final Verdict
Ok, if you played the previous game or if you read the review you may see lots of similarities: this is just partially true, I mean this is pretty much a similarly-styled linear jrpg but many elements are different, some features were removed, while others were added. And there is one new, important element that was added in this episode, and was not present in the first game: DEPRESSION! Yes, the first game was disturbing, had its dark moments and gorish parts, but it wasn't as dark, gloomy and depressive as for example Lisa (the Painful). Or like this game... well maybe it's because the alien invasion takes place on the real world (and not in the miniaturized vegetables planet), or maybe because some terrible things happen to good people.. but I do not want to spoil, just to warn!

For the rest it's a really wacky game, for example there is a quest in which you have to miniaturize yourself, enter an ill cow avoiding or killing the diseased cow-cells (normal wandering enemies) and kill the virus (dungeon boss) to heal the poor animal! Pretty crazy isn't it? And it is just a minor quest!

Overall I liked it almost as much as Towelket One More Time 3, but a bit less for the lack of a large cast and other changes (in some cases, like the lack of choice of protagonist it makes sense). Anyway this is just a matter of taste, it's still a good game, and if you know Rmk.net score, Good is 4/5.