Not much has been said about Sin & Punishment 2 ever since Nintendo first revealed it at a press event late last year. The game's almost done, though -- hitting Wii shelves October 29 in Japan -- and as the folks at Nintendo and developer Treasure put it, it's everything you liked about the original, amplified.
The original Nintendo 64 Sin & Punishment had a pretty open ending storywise, but players have had to wait nine years for a sequel to come out. "It's not that we particularly had a sequel in mind from the beginning," Treasure head Masato Maegawa told Famitsu magazine this week. "The idea behind that project was basically to make a game that used the left-hand position on the Nintendo 64 controller, since not too many other games did that. When the Wii came out, we felt like we just had to tackle it again -- it's not like we've been sitting on this idea for nine years, but the simplest reason for this sequel is 'because the Wii came out.'"
The basic idea is the same as before -- it's an on-rails shooter, with your character using guns and swords to dispatch enemies and stay alive. The main character this time around is Isa Jo, son of Saki and Airan from the previous game; he's been sent to an alternate version of Earth in order to kill an amnesiac girl named Kachi, but the two wind up working together to defeat a common menace.
If Treasure is telling the truth, you can expect a lot more depth to this game than what we saw with the N64 Sin & Punishment. "We concepted out this game as an arcade-like title, but if you made a game this long for the arcades, the operators would kill us," Maegawa joked. "It's arcade-style, yes, but in terms of volume, it's a different story." Hitoshi Yamagami, project director at Nintendo, agreed: "You can't really compare the number of stages as they're all different sizes, but in terms of playtime it's easily twice the size [of the original]."
Size isn't the only innovation here, though -- the two playable characters also have a variety of new moves. "You used to basically stick to the ground, but you'll be able to move in the air now as well," said director Atsutomo Nakagawa. "There are two player characters now, too, and to make that more enjoyable they have different skills in terms of how their charged shots and lock-on systems work."
This being a Treasure title, Sin & Punishment 2 will also have a variety of difficulty levels, from an Easy mode that allows most people to reach the end of the game to a Hard setting that Yamagami says "is for chosen ones only." Ooooh.
The US version of Sin & Punishment 2 is tentatively due out in the first quarter of 2010.
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From 1up
Interesting parts underlined.
I'm atleast glad they cleared up a bit of the plot, because I had still been wondering how did the ruffian's textures go from dark to white. Being an alternate universe I guess makes it's own interpretation of the first game's plot, though I hope it's still fresh enough that this isn't another Gunstar Super Heroes.
Hard "is for chosen ones only," hmm? Pray to God I qualify for that.
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