Cat Quest II is the sequel to the original Cat Quest and will be a familiar game to returning players. The major difference in this sequel is the addition of local co-op, where a second player can control the other character. You play as two reincarnated kings of the past, one from the Felingard, and the other from the Lupus Kingdom. If you’re playing solo, then you can swap between the two characters at the press of a button. The second character will be controlled by AI, which makes the game easier as they’ll assist with their attacks and magic.
The story is basic, as the two are setting out to defeat the two corrupted kings that had taken over the land while they were away. It’s basically one big fetch quest to obtain the components required to reforge the sword to defeat them both. The dialogue is one of the strongest points in the game, it’s filled with cat and dog puns. Apart from the usual expected ones, it can be quite imaginative with its puns, which by no means should be as funny or charming as it is. The game’s graphical style hasn’t changed either, given its 2.5D look, with its character models giving it a Paper Mario feel to it.
This is an action-adventure game and the combat system, while simple, is a lot of fun. There is one button that you mash to attack, with different weapons giving you different attack ranges and attack speed. Another button to dodge roll. Then there is magic, which ranges from offensive elemental spells to healing spells to defensive spells. Magic is versatile given that you can pick and map spells to each of the four shoulder buttons. While each specific spell can only be equipped to one character, the spells you equip to the other character will be used by the AI too.
Enemies roam freely in the overworld and in dungeons. They’ll attack on sight but all of them telegraphs their attacks via a red circle underneath them that fills before they strike. This means that you should be able to dodge a lot of their attacks. Positioning can be important given some attacks only strike in certain directions. The combat is fast and hectic, so the button mashing doesn’t get tedious. Although whenever there are multiple enemies attacking at once, it can become difficult to see what is happening given all the effects.
The game doesn’t introduce too many new things after the beginning. What you start with is basically what will carry you through to the end. There are several new abilities to unlock as you progress but they don’t substantially revamp or add to the core gameplay. Rather, they’re more like minor extensions of your current abilities, like hurting enemies when dodge rolling, or being able to walk on water. Especially after having played the first game, it loses some of the novelty factor here and can at times, feel repetitive.
The overworld map is huge, especially considering that there is the Lupus Kingdom to explore as well. There are dungeons plonked all over the world, where you enter and defeat the enemies inside while grabbing all the loot. There are some nice quality-of-life features like telling you whether you’ve completely cleared a dungeon, marking it on the map. Although with such a big map, it can be tricky and annoying to get to the last few places that you might have cleared out yet, scouring the map finding the remaining incomplete dungeons is not fun.
The quest design is also simple and fun. Quests are short on purpose. Each quest’s structure is basically the same: get to this point and then kill all the enemies. It overcomes the repetitiveness with its charming dialogue, and the fact that it constantly keeps you moving to the next objective. The game is overall very easy. While the beginning of the game may be slightly tougher as you’re still getting used to it and your characters’ levels are too high yet, you will quickly gain levels and outpace the quests’ recommended levels. It’s an addictive loop of one more quest, or one more dungeon.
The main story doesn’t take long to finish but you’ll definitely need to do some sidequests to quickly level up otherwise you will be underleveled. Being underleveled isn’t the end of the game given that fighting enemies above your level is totally feasible. The higher the level difference, the more you’re encouraged to kite the enemies. Later on, you gain an ability that forces enemies to stay at a position. This trivialises high level enemy encounters as you can have your character stand far away hitting them with ranged attacks while your AI partner pummels this at the same time. AI partners do not take any damage and cannot die when not controlled by you, which makes the toughest encounters much easier.
It only takes around seven hours to complete the main story along with a healthy amount of sidequests. There are a lot of sidequests but since they’re quick to complete, it’s easy to spend hours on them while ignoring the story quests. The sidequests aren’t badly written, giving them some continuity as most of them are multi-quest stories. Once you’re fully done with the done, there is an option for either a New Game+, or a Mew Game. The former is self-explanatory where you can replay the game with all your levels and gear. While the latter allows you to replay the game while placing conditions or restrictions on yourself to make the game harder, or more interesting as a challenge.
Overall, despite being very familiar to the original, Cat Quest II is still a ton of fun. The addition of dogs now feels so natural, plus it opens up so many more opportunities for all the pun-filled dialogue, which the game’s writing has used to its full potential. The story may be basic but it is good enough to carry you through thanks to the fast pacing provided by the zippy quests. It can be addictive, with the gameplay flowing naturally from one point to another. The addition of an AI or local player does make the game substantially easier but it’s a great game all in all.
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