Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for an audio review.
Today’s recipient? What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord!? 2, a mix of dungeon-building, ecosystem-making, and pun-spewing. Enjoy!
Abridged Transcription:
Hello GamerNode, this is Jason Fanelli, your Associate Editor, with an audio review of What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord!? 2 on the Sony PSP. I’ve chosen the audio review route for this game because I’ve stared blankly at my screen trying to think of the words to write about a game like this, and I can’t find them. So because of that, here I am with my audio review, and I hope you enjoy it.
Now, What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord!? 2 In this game, you are basically the God of Destruction. Your overlord, Badman, is instructing you on how to create chaos in the world. In each land, you build dungeons by digging through the soil, creating paths, generating monsters, and after a certain amount of time, heroes come into your dungeon and try to steal your overlord. Now, this does sound crazy, but it’s actually kind of fun in that you can actually balance the entire ecosystem of the dungeon. If you hit a certain block, the slime monster appears, and the slime monster gives other blocks nutrients. If there are enough nutrients in this block, it’ll create an Omnom, which is a little bug that will eat the slime, maintaining itself, so you have to create more slime. The more nutrients you get, you can also create lizards that will eat the Omnoms, and then the lizardmen will be eaten by dragons, etc. In doing so, you’re creating your own little world of creatures that you need to maintain and lead the charge against the heroes that will enter your dungeon.
What makes this game interesting, besides the gameplay itself, is the humor. It gives you happy and light as you’re playing as the God of Destruction. In one part, he says that his power level is 0 and he’s powerless to help you fight the heroes, but if any woman asks, his power is about 53 million. There’s another part where there’s a long explanation and you can press X to skip through the explanation. At the end of it, he says "Listen, if you don’t like my eloquence, don’t machine-gun the button. All you’re going to do is wear that poor button out." I thought that was funny and creative of the development team to throw little jabs at the player.
What I did not like about the game is the difficulty level. This game is hard. Very hard. I found myself so frustrated at times, thinking I had built the perfect dungeon with the perfect amount of monsters: two dragons, a golem, all of it, and I was destroyed. The hero comes in, lighting torches, throwing magic, using swords, and just obliterates my entire little world. I am rather lenient in my gaming, I’ve said before that a game that gets me mad is a good game, but this was too much. I found myself stuck at the second level of the game (3 stages in the second level) for almost three hours. I kept dying at the third stage of the second level, and instead of making you go back to the beginning of that stage, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the level. That is incredibly frustrating and not fun, and anyone just picking up the game will see that and immediately be turned off.
I did enjoy the graphical approach; the 8-bit, classic graphics will remind players of NES- and SNES-style visuals while still being current. The music is well done as well, the medieval-style tunes rivaling that which you hear at any Renaissance Fair, which makes sense considering the medieval setting of the game. The gameplay itself is interesting as well, as the slime monsters can evolve and produce more nutrients, and every once in a while mushrooms appear, passing nutrients that create magic flame monsters. Overall, though, the insane difficulty makes the game unbearable at times. If you have a lot of time to dedicate to the game, do it, but anyone that doesn’t should probably avoid it.
What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord!? 2 is enjoyable and has its moments, but you will be banging your head against the wall due to the challenge. There’s nothing wrong with a challenge; Demon’s Souls, for example, was a great game for a challenge, but I prefer to abuse controllers from a console rather than a $200 portable system. If you want to learn the game (the tutorials, though limited, do get the job done), then by all means give it a shot. Otherwise, leave the challenge for the hardcore crowd.
