Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Ori and the Will of the Wisps...oh man, where to start? This game got going SO strongly and the first few hours had me thinking this would be the perfect successor to the first game, perfectly building on everything that game did and one-upping the presentation as much as it could. However...that very quickly melted away for me around the halfway point. That being my quick initial thoughts, if you want to avoid any spoilers I'd just stop here.

Presentation - This is the main place this game excelled, honestly a complete masterpiece from a visual/audio standpoint. The soundtrack somehow outdoes the original's in my opinion and the visuals are clearly a huge step up from the original as well, which is NOT an easy feat. I did however, have a ton of performance bugs (possibly due to XBox Game Pass version? idk) like video stutters (especially during cutscenes)  and audio cutting out (sound effects would just disappear randomly, often during boss fights). There were also several instances where certain boss music just wouldn't stop playing in the appropriate area after the fight was over.

Combat - Oh boy, the combat. So, one of the major complaints levied against the first game was combat, or rather a mostly lack thereof. I honestly thought this was one of the game's strengths. It was a game focused on its platforming that used occasional lite combat to mix things up and take more advantage of the game's signature bash ability. This game took that criticism and thought it necessary to make major changes mostly for the worse. There are a variety of weapons available to you that you can swap to one of three different hotkeys with a very slick hot-wheel system, however I felt almost no need to use/upgrade any of them apart from completion sake. I just wound up using the hammer-esque weapon the whole game since it also gave you access to the downward slam that was just an ability in Ori 1 (which is still used for finding hidden items) and it was also just absurdly strong. It was hard to feel like experimenting as well when one of your hotkeys is almost always going to be occupied by the regeneration ability (which is STRAIGHT ripped out of Hollow Knight) and another is usually something progression based that doesn't do much for combat. The game tries to get you to use the bow a bunch due to a bunch of equippable shards that buff it in various ways, but I just didn't really care. The bosses as well are kinda just nightmares. There are a handful of them and their hitboxes are quite frankly awful and they basically never stop moving. So many times I would space the hammer attack correctly, completely whiff and just hit the boss's hitbox and eat shit. I wound up just spamming the shuriken on most of them and even that was a royal pain to hit them with most of the time. The game really could have done without this much heavier combat focus and would have been a LOT better of without it. Also, fuck flying enemies, they suck massive ass.

Abilities - The original Ori was so clean and refined in the selection of abilities you got for movement/progression and they were paced EXTREMELY well. Ori 2 dumps almost all of what you had in Ori 1 on you in the first 2-3 hours (including the dash from Definitive Edition) and this part of the game honestly felt great. Where I started to have some slight concerns was once I got the grapple, basically a different take on the bash that just lets you grapple off of a specified object and launch off of it (in a way very similar to Specter Knight in Shovel Knight's DLC) but it largely just doesn't feel good to use. The angle you launch off of it is VERY picky and if you accidentally double tap the button you will just grapple back in the direction you just came from, it's almost too responsive in a way. Things really start going to shit when you have grapple points and bash points near each other (they both use right click to use btw) and the game prioritizes grapple points in every instance which is just AWFUL. The movement in Ori 1 was so clean and not cluttered but this game just throws way too much in that conflicts with each other. The other 2 problematic abilities were the sand dash and swim dash, which are functionally the same thing just in sand vs water and are 2 of the "major" late game upgrades in what equates to the dungeons of this game, it just felt super uninspired and tacked on for the sake of having a progression item there. On top of that, they also don't work well. Both the sand and swim dash use the same key as the regular dash, which largely makes sense, until you're trying to chain sand dashes together and you wind up not registering one of them correctly (trust me it will happen a lot)and you just dash midair into spikes and die. There is a particular chase sequence near the end of the game that perfectly illustrates all the problems with sand dash.

Story - The first game didn't have a crazy involved narrative or anything, but it got the job done and was really good for what it was. The second game's was just kinda eh? The initial setup was fantastic, picking up right where the first game left off basically, but then it just kinda stopped mattering? Ku gets lost in a storm almost immediately after you get a brief glimpse of Ori and Ku having combined gameplay (which had a lot of potential) and the game becomes a quest to hunt down Ku. Once you find Ku after the first several hours, you get a small gameplay section with her again (that you annoyingly have to revisit later with Ori alone for like 1 item because you need to bash) and then she gets attacked by Shriek (the main bad guy) and is out of commission until the ending cutscene. The whole game plays up this huge importance between Ori and Ku and just does fucking NOTHING with it. There was so much potential to replace the shitty sand/swim dash abilities with more Ku involvement and just rework the story to accommodate that. Shriek was also a shitty villain that gets overshadowed by all the random bosses of each area. Kuro was a constant looming entity in Ori 1, but Shriek shows up like 2-3 times, one of which being the final boss and another being a flashback scene showing Shriek's origins, which was cool, but I had zero reason to care cuz Shriek had attacked me like once prior to that so ok?

One other random note I wanted to mention that didn't really have a category to attach it too is that I cheesed SO much of the last half of the game by damage boosting. Granted, I was picking up all the life cells I could so I had a ton of health (on normal difficulty btw), but there were so many points (hidden areas or progression) that I just either couldn't figure out exactly what the game wanted me to do or it was way harder than just slamming myself on some spikes and just jumping off of them. You could sorta abuse this in Ori 1 but not NEARLY to this degree.

Overall, the game is still decent enough, although I couldn't recommend it for the $30 price tag if I'm being honest, even as someone who ADORED the first game. I'm gonna wait until the game hopefully gets some performance/playability patches down the road and revisit it then, but for now I was EXTREMELY disappointed in Ori and the Will of the Wisps.