Chosen 2

My honest first impression of Chosen 2 is that it feels less like a sequel and more like an extended epilogue that forgot to budget its own runtime. Little Big Lee built this as the direct continuation of The Chosen RPG, picking up right where that game's cliffhanger dropped protagonist Edge in the underworld after defeating Akuma. You reunite with his mother Ayaka and her servant Sakae as your party, work through a handful of dungeon areas inside a castle-hub structure, and uncover a plot by the lords of the dead to invade the world above. The setup has some moody potential. The underworld framing, the ghostly companions, the quiet grief of searching for a lost father's spirit. But the game never holds that atmosphere long enough to let it settle. On the mechanical side, this is standard RPG Maker turn-based combat with a dual-resource twist: Edge runs on Technique Points that charge through attacks and taking damage, while his party members also carry Magic Points for spells. Element matching matters throughout, with fire working against the wasps, plants, and bats that populate most of the game, and ice being the call against reptilian enemies. The system is functional. The problem is that the enemy variety barely expands across the whole runtime, so you are running the same elemental math against near-identical encounters for the entirety of a playthrough that most players clock under two hours. The balance is also erratic from the opening area, throwing punishing fights at a party that starts at level three with no warmup, which reads less like intentional difficulty design and more like a skipped tuning pass. The one genuine upgrade over the predecessor is the battle interface. Character portraits now appear during combat, replacing the tiny sprites that made the first game's fights feel visually cramped. Those portraits react to damage, showing wear on clothing as health drops. The effect is noticeable and adds a small layer of visual feedback that the first game lacked. Unfortunately, that same system is also where most reviewers take aim at the game's content choices, and it is a fair target. The mature-tagged content here is applied in ways that feel grafted on rather than considered, and some of it involves the protagonist's dead mother in ways that critics found tone-deaf rather than edgy. Beyond the combat loop, Chosen 2 trades the original's open overworld for a more linear castle-hub structure. There are no bonus bosses to hunt, no side quests to discover, and the shop placement near the end of the game renders those vendors functionally useless. Bugs surface throughout: misaligned enemy sprites, a post-final-boss sequence that reportedly loads the wrong screen, and assorted typos scattered through the dialogue. The story itself leans harder into genre cliches than the first entry, and because the game is so short, there is no breathing room between plot beats for any of it to land. Players who never touched The Chosen RPG will find almost nothing here that stands alone. For completionists of the first game who want the story wrapped up, Chosen 2 provides that, at a steep ratio of price-to-content at full cost. The handful of Steam achievements and trading cards round out a package that makes most sense inside a bundle. If you are hunting for a handcrafted RPG Maker experience with a real sense of intentionality, the genre has quietly produced some remarkable small works that earn the time far more confidently than this one does.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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