Millennium 2 - Take Me Higher

I have a soft spot for the kind of RPG that fits inside a long weekend and still finds room to make you care about a gripphin and its tamer. Millennium 2 - Take Me Higher is that kind of game. It picks up the story of Marine, a scrappy peasant girl still assembling her coalition of warriors to topple the Mystrock lords, and it does so without any of the bloated fanfare that big-studio sequels lean on. What you get is a compact, hand-authored world built in RPG Maker XP with enough custom tile work and original enemy art to make you forget the engine underneath. The bones are classic JRPG all the way: towns, dungeons, an overworld, turn-based battles where you choose between Attack, Rush, Defend, and skill usage each round. Jeanne, the fairy companion who lives in Marine's earring, functions as both support healer and heavy-spell artillery, and knowing when to save her MP for a boss versus burning it on dungeon trash is the closest thing to tactical depth the combat offers. The difficulty selector (Very Easy through Hard) and the option to adjust random encounter rates on the fly are welcome touches that let you tune the pacing to your mood rather than the game's. Forty quests, scattered secret rooms, and a quest journal that actually keeps you oriented round out the package. Where the sequel stumbles relative to its predecessor is pacing. Some reviewers found the dungeon stretches longer than they needed to be, with certain areas feeling padded to bridge story beats. The secret rooms are a genuine sore spot: unlike the first game, there are no visual cues at all when you're standing near one, which means the 32 of them are essentially invisible without a guide. For completionists, that's a wall. For everyone else who simply follows the main quest and a handful of side stories, it's a non-issue. The save-import feature carries your item collection forward from Millennium 1, though your character levels reset to 20, which some players find jarring but which at least keeps the difficulty calibrated. The tone also deepens here in ways that feel earned: Marine's optimism runs into real friction, and the writing finds moments of quiet emotion that the first episode was still too breezy to attempt. The presentation is the series' most consistent selling point. The artwork during battles carries a stylized European-cartoon quality that stands apart from the typical RPG Maker aesthetic, and the soundtrack has generated enough genuine praise over the years that individual pieces get called out by name in reviews. That ending scene on the bridge people mention in hushed tones? It lands. Running time sits roughly in the ten-to-fifteen-hour range for a focused playthrough, stretching toward twenty or more if you chase every quest and secret room. For a second chapter in a five-part saga, that's an honest length: enough to advance the story meaningfully without overstaying its welcome. If you have not played Millennium - A New Hope, start there. The series is designed to chain, and arriving at episode two cold means missing the relationships that give this chapter its emotional lift. For returning fans, this is a confident, occasionally moving continuation. It does not reinvent anything, and it is shorter than what came before, but it is built with the same quiet care that makes Aldorlea's work feel like it was made by someone who actually loves this genre rather than someone producing it. Kai, Scout Team

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