Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2 is an Action, Adventure made by CyberConnect2. With assistance with publishing from SEGA. This game is a continuation of the first game Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles. It’s a hand in hand rendition of the anime Demon Slayer – Kimetsu no Yaiba-. To the point that we only get these games after a year when the anime ended. So, if you want to know more about the story, then I highly recommend watching the anime.
Unless you’re like me and want to immerse yourself into the world and get your hands dirty, then be my guest. Something else I want to touch on is going to be CyberConnect2’s history with making anime renditions of games. They previously had their hands in making the entire Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm series. Basically what I’m saying is, this company has a great track history when turn an anime and it’s story to a fun experience. Now let me grab my sword and start my training on the review breathing technique.
I swear, do not do what I did and hold your breath with each skill used. Not a joke, I almost passed out thrice.
Gameplay
If you played the previous game, then you can easily jump back into this game. Although I didn’t play the first entry of the series, I do have experience with CyberConnect2 games. The first I’ll cover is the game modes available this time around. Where in the first entry, you only had Adventure mode and VS mode. However, this time they also gave us Training Paths and The Path of a Demon Slayer.
The path of the Demon Slayer has you recreating fights that you couldn’t do from the first entry. Shouldn’t take you long to breeze through those fights, but man do they pack a punch. Meanwhile, Training Paths has you doing your training with the Hashira of your choice. It’s basically a choose your path fighting net with battle conditions. Basically, you choose who’ll fight, win with the battle conditions to get a reward. You can even choose the difficulty of this mode as well to satisfy those hardcore gamers.
Now when it came to the Adventure mode, it was a good mixture of map exploration, combat and story telling. Having already read the manga and watched the anime, the story itself was a one to one remake of the story.
However, I did love the inclusion of the side story for their unique side plots and demon designs.
There’s also the gears system that you’ll get a hang of quickly, yet I find slightly annoying. I could understand limiting Tanjiro and the gang with only having three gear slots, while the Hashiras have nine. If there was a way to unlock the last 6 for them, I would have happily worked my butt off to get those slots open. Lastly, the Story mode itself lets you play Tanjiro, Inosuke and Zenitsu and use their abilities to understand it better. With Tanjiro’s nose, Zenitsu’s ears and Inosuke’s sixth sense, these three are honestly a power house of overpowered characters.
Graphics and Audio
CyberConnect2 has a certain style of making everything into a 3d model even if the scene demands 2d. I believe all the years on work on Naruto polished their skills because the look is flawless. There are times during a cutscene where I completely forget everything was 3d until something breaks the illusion. For example, when certain scenes shows the camera still while the characters talk, it appears to be 2d. Normally if the camera moves, you’d normally notice that it’s a 3d model. Yet, because of the slow speed of the camera movement, it keeps the illusion up.
However, it you focus on things like the front of character and never look at their hands, it’s solid. It takes just a fraction of a second of looking to break out of this trick, but easy to get into again. Other the that, the environments, characters and the Ultimate animations are beautiful and flawless at every turn. I honestly got addicted to saving up my ultimate gauge to finish each fight with it.
Now to cover the audio portion, the English dub of the game was really well made. Almost as if they managed to grab the voice lines from the anime themselves and placed it in the game. Though I hope the VAs got paid for their part in the game if my first thought is true.
And if it’s not, then good on them to paying the VAs an honest wage for honest work.
There are times when the voice line don’t match the mouth movement of any character, but that’s normal in this field. This game was mostly made with the Japanese language leaving the characters’ mouth in the first place. Though the last thing I’ll cover is the few times I was playing the mini-games during Story mode. Some of the models create weird bugs that causes my game to be on loop and having me force close the game entirely.
Luckily, the game would continue where I left off and not have me restart the entire chapter from scratch.
Longevity
Out of the five modes we have access to from the word go, only the Story mode has some girth. If you do the entire story with side quest included, you can complete it in about 11 hours. Now, if you’re doing local/online battles, you’ll be have several hours of fun trying to get higher in the ranks. But, for those who aren’t into fighting actual people, you can spend your time trying to get every character mastery to level 99.
Which with my imaginary calculations, it’ll take about over 20 hours just to level up only 1 character to that exact level. So, for completionist/masochists you’ll have your money’s worth going thru this challenge.
Final Thoughts
Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2 was really an enjoyable experience that anyone can get into. Its got easy understanding of how the button and combats work, so it’s beginner friendly. With the fact that we get to experience the game as if it’s the anime is wonderful in my eyes. Then again, it is CyberConnect2 we’re talking about here. A team who wholeheartedly respects the source material to make sure not to cut out the important and minor scenes in the show.
Yet, with how much of the story we’ve already gone thru the game, I’m worried for the last game. Since the Infinity Castle arc will be short with the last bit even shorter, I wonder what they’ll pull out of their hats when the time comes.
I give Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2 the Thumb Culture Gold Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
YouTube | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Discord | Podcast