@HistoryInRust said:
@WesleyWyndam: @Nicholas: I just want to chime in and give a different perspective. Now, this is entirely representative of my own thought on the matter, and isn't something I take to be categorically factual in any sense. Just my opinion.
By the end of Dead Space 2 I'd more or less totally been exhausted of the franchise. The original is, in my mind, a totem highbar for quality survival horror games. It had a lot of tension, great atmosphere, mostly excellent pacing. It knew how and when to let up on the player and give them the time to recuperate.
Dead Space 2 was a veritable jumpscare funhouse. It followed a rigid, transparent pattern of quietude, quietude, JUMP SCARE; quietude, quietude, JUMP SCARE. A lot of folks claimed it expanded the backstory of the cultish lore the first game had established, but I never really seemed to pick up on any of it. That stuff never felt integrated organically into the narrative, which was otherwise an overbearing, one-note discussion that amounted to, basically, "Hey guys. Issac is fucked up. Yo. Yo, guys. Issac is fucked up. Issac is pretty fucked up, y'all."
The second game has a couple really memorable bits, but I had been grated so much by the gameplay around them that I sort of didn't care about them. And that final boss. Don't even get me started. After a couple dozen deaths against it I finally looked up a Youtube walkthrough and noticed every Youtube strategy for tangoing with the boss involved a gun I'd neither purchased nor thought I'd need at any point throughout the game. I'd made it all the way to the end without needing the weapon, and though I'm sure there was some way to circumvent its necessity, it felt pretty devious to me for the game to have allowed the player to draw themselves into a corner without any indication otherwise. That's something games did decades ago. I thought we'd gotten past that.
I don't know. A lot of people really liked Dead Space 2. I came away from it thoroughly irritated. And I'd been a big fan of the original.
Not to say you're wrong per-se but you might be remembering some things through rose tinted glasses. Dead Space 1 had just as many, if not more monster closet jumps as the second game. Both titles had a literal gauntlet like enemy section before the final encounter - Dead Space 1 the entire part when you're on the planet is just an endless onslaught of enemies in that factory/warehouse as the Marker ever so slowly moves forward. Not to mention the final boss of Dead Space 1 is much more cliche and video-gamey than that of Dead Space 2. The original also had plenty of pacing issues where some sections were a total slog - like the hydroponics lab where you had to go activate 3 pumps or something, riding that elevator up and down, flip a switch, oh monsters popped out of walls right on cue. Dialog? The dialog in Dead Space 2 was miles beyond anything we ever got in the original which basically amounter to "Isaac, the pumps are broken! Isaac, the navigation is screwed up! Isaac were going into an asteroid field! Isaac, I can't find sugar for my tea.." etc. I started to laugh every time they contacted me as I took on this role of the space plumber man fixing up this mammoth ship all by myself.
So yah, Dead Space 2 did amp a lot of things up but they fixed and improved upon basically all core mechanics of the original. There was more dialog of good quality, more involved story, bigger set pieces, fixed minor control nuances (like for instance zero-g) varied level design and so forth. Everyone complaining so much about how the series has been completely bastardized need to take a long hard look at that first game. While it was great and completely fresh at the time, it wasn't without many flaws.
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