--Tsubuyaku, Aragami 2
Aragami 2 tells a story of a fictional Japanese land consumed by political instability and death, one in which resides a group of resurrected people called Aragami struggles to regain their deteriorating memories and protect themselves from invasion. As a stealth game, it is severely hindered. Unfortunately, this is no Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones with its stealth mechanics and is far from the best heights of Assassin's Creed. Objectively horrible controls (at least in contrast with the smoothness of standard button-action assignment), extremely subpar graphics, common frame rate drops, a high amount of repetition, and a very disjointed and underdeveloped narrative/mission system hold it back severely. What could have been a deeply emotional and sobering exploration of how memory relates to personal identity, how suffering can harden sensitive people, and how living "forever" on this Earth could be terrifying, complete with diverse acrobatics and fighting maneuvers, takes quite a while to build up to anything less than abysmal to barely mediocre.
Production Values
What a shitshow Aragami 2's graphics and performance are on the Switch! Choppy walking animations from approaching enemies, very pixelated outlines, and flames or textures that do not appear until you are rather close serve as consistent reminders. On some occasions, the game froze and triggered an error screen. On others, I could still play, but the game ran so slowly that only a few frames at a time would elapse, so that I was unable to to efficiently do almost anything in combat or climbing until I moved to a different arbitrary area. Less severely than such awful extremes, the game does slow down sometimes when there appear to be no reason at all, in light of the very few enemies onscreen and lack of active combat. Running slowly is just an ordinary part of the game. There is also the way that the game skipped a major cutscene in one mission, which consequently had very abrupt in-level transitions. The inhabitants of the hub village suddenly started talking as if an important character was gone, but this was never depicted. Less important but still very bizarre is how the game tracks time in your player file even when you suspend the software by heading to the Switch menu and turn off the screen. Thus, it recorded me as having more than 300 hours when I had in actuality only played for closer to 25.
Gameplay
As an Aragami, you can choose open confrontation or slower, stealthy elimination of enemies. In fact, you do not have to kill anyone at all, either opting to avoid them as much as possible (you can complete levels without being seen) or to knock them out. Unconscious and dead bodies left out in the open will trigger heightened alertness if a patrolling enemy notices them. Hiding the bodies by placing them in tall grass is one way to resolve this; you can also lure guards to the edge of the grass and then more discretely kill them or render them unconscious, pulling them inside the vegetation. Being spotted can actually be dangerous for reasons other than enemy AI competency: the camera can automatically lock onto an enemy so that you have to press on the right analog stick to freely view the environment again and flee if overwhelmed. Also, a highly bizarre control scheme means that you cannot start sprinting without holding the dash button and not letting it go. You cannot simply break into a sprint.
Looking past the technical issues and atrocious control design, Aragami 2 still fails to do almost anything with its promising mechanics for a while. The very few killing moves are extremely repetitive hours in, and changing the protagonist's base wardrobe does absolutely fucking nothing to alter the combat style or even any player attributes. The limited variety in missions is another negative factor; you go back and forth between a hub location and miscellaneous regions where you have to kill certain figures, inspect/collect objects, eavesdrop, or retrieve a character. However, to the game's mild credit, some of the shadow powers that can gradually be unlocked as you level up make it much less stagnant and slow-paced. By assassinating an enemy, for instance, you can eventually trigger a simultaneous assassination of another nearby enemy using a shadow construct, and this works even when two enemies have spotted you and are charging at you if you stun one, such as with an amnesia dart, and then kill it. The other still sees you, yet they are subjected to this double assassination anyway. Another power allows you to turn invisible for a time until you attack or are attacked.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A warrior finds himself returned to life as an Aragami, suffering a curse that will eventually transform him and others like him into a different kind of being, one without their individual memories of their past self and life. The dissociation from their default personality and memory worsens until they would eventually become stone. Using the village of Kakurega as a launching point, the revived warrior helps protect peasants from two rival factions attempting to seize more power.
Intellectual Content
The story is unfortunately only there to provide opportunities to go outside the hub village to kill, eavesdrop, rescue, or kidnap. However, at the very end, despite characters starting to say certain complete falsities for the first time because of this, such as that not even eternity lasts forever (when eternity would by nature last forever), the game finally delves into deeper territory with its reveal that a character has been living in pain for far longer than a normal lifespan. He curses the Aragami to never die, saying that their souls will be returned to them without their full humanity and that they will live to experience all the pain of enduring on as other things they love fade. It is at this point that talk surfaces of how all things allegedly end and that every end is a new beginning, which would then mean that this cycle never ends, rendering the initial idea false. Now, the inherently true laws of logic could not cease or change, and empty space cannot, so there are at least two things that cannot not exist and that cannot change [1]. On many levels, these concepts regarding finality and time and cessation of existence are objectively false. In spite of the many philosophical flaws put forth, at least the game does at last begin to acknowledge the crushing weight of "eternal" life in a world of decay and loss. It is just to the game's detriment that it takes so long for them to be more sincerely explored.
As for other subjects the characters mishandle, one character says their enemies should not be treated justly, when justice is exactly what people should be treated with, since it is literally what people deserve. More related to the base story is how a member of an enemy group talks about a slave as if she deserves whatever harsh treatment her master feels like directing towards her. Of all the issues the story directly touches on, only that of slavery continually comes up again and again, save for a very superficial acknowledgement of how memory is a core part of a person. This slave girl is a resurrected former human in the process of becoming a different type of being, an aragami, yes; however, her master treats her like she by default has no moral rights (not legal, but moral) and like she exists for his own whims, a subjectivist error that is false whether or not morality exists, since his preference does not make something good or evil or amoral either way. He works her until she cannot stand, and as the barebones plot unfolds, slave labor becomes increasingly pivotal to the plot. You encounter slaves in some levels that are in some way mind controlled by fire so that they ignore the player character completely and work no matter what happens around them. Since it is both very important and regularly misunderstood by fools, I will highlight the enormous contrasts between this form of slavery and the Biblical kind.
Biblical slavery requires that all male and female slaves/servants be given at least one day free from labor for every six days of work, and their own rejuvenation is emphasized as a major reason for this (Exodus 20:8-10, 23:12, Deuteronomy 5:12-15), and they are exempt from all agricultural labor in the Sabbath year, where they eat along with everyone else from what the land provides (Leviticus 25:1-6). Other human rights specifically emphasized as being possessed by male and female slaves on Judeo-Christianity include the right to not be killed by their owners (Exodus 21:20-21; contrast with Deuteronomy 25:1-3, as corporal punishment itself is not the issue if there was applicable wrongdoing) or allowed to die through neglect (Exodus 21:28-32), to go free for physical abuse that does not result in death (Exodus 21:26-27), to go free every seven years by default with generous material supplies unless they want to stay with their masters/mistresses (Exodus 21:1-6, Deuteronomy 15:12-17; Leviticus 19:33-34), and to be included in general meals and religious worship (Deuteronomy 12:11-12, 17-18, 16:9-11, 13-15). Also, slaves are not to be returned to their masters if they flee (Deuteronomy 23:15-16).
Conclusion
Aragami 2, on the Switch at the least, is mostly a display of wasted potential to the point that it can be almost unplayable due to performance problems. A shallow story, stymied controls, and, in spite of the slowdown and freezing as if this was not the case, sometimes awful graphics render the title abysmal even aside from the extreme repetition early on. The game is almost nothing but a concoction of minimally developed elements. Later on, expanded powers do alleviate one of its most immediate problems, but not enough of Aragami 2 is polished or strong on its own to come anywhere near artistic greatness, except for some of the themes at the very end of the game--which are butchered by the presentation of obviously logically impossible ideas as if they are deep or in any way valid.
Content:
1. Violence: Killing enemies does draw blood that can stain the landscape, especially when you stealthily kill an enemy on a tower. Corpses do not disappear like in many games, but rather stay wherever they are left.
2. Profanity: The word "damn" occasionally comes up in subtitles.
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