I’m genuinely curious what you think. You played far more of the first game than I did.

While I did describe my issues with Yaesha as a returning world, and we had an issue with the bugged + teleporting boss, We did find ourselves in a wholly different scenario the day before yesterday with the broken temple that I appreciated, so my complaints have a strong asterisk that I have to consider.

Otherwise, I've been loving what little we've seen of the game, especially its greater emphasis on "encounters" over the boss battles of the first game. Stuff like the Cube maze and the story Puzzle with the shadows hit me with that sense of wonder that I straight up have not gotten from any game that I can think of in recent memory. I can't think of a game that has hit me like Horizon Zero Dawn, Thomas Was Alone, or honestly, Remnant: From The Ashes, where I feel the need to grab someone and sit them down to experience it, or where we stop to discuss strategies and possible solutions to puzzles.

If you recall how I gushed about Ixillis XV and XVI in the first game forching us to restructure our builds to make sure that we could even survive the fight by focusing on healing, I felt that same dopamine as we slowly figured out what was making the Nameless One tick, realized how we were screwing ourselves by, ironically enough, focusing on healing- then we took a beatdown to him once we decided to tank him as hard as we could by simply having you flip your Archetypes and having Sammy's dog be our main healer.
We didn't get punished for investing in the wrong gear, we simply couldn't bring our tried and true strategy to every encounter, and we keep having to rethink approaches.

I'm watching some videos and seeing how packed with secrets and unlocks every world is, even the Labyrinth has a batch of secrets and items that we missed simply because we didn't experiment enough (the murder portal is way more generous than we gave it credit for, our timing is just off). And I'm remembering that thing you were telling me about how someone applied a bit of logic to the sewer water rising to get a secret. It's just great to know that you're not crazy if something tugs at the back of your head, and again, I can't think of the last time a game did that.

And did I mention the cube encounter? D1 raid vibes as we saw the encounter present itself, wipe us, then we looked at it better and figured its nuances out, then we worked on the execution until we conquered it, and got one of my favorite weapons as a result, letting us use the enemy's tools against them... That's the greatest.

And while it's unfortunate that we both got the Impostor King main quest on Losomn (knowing we could only see a third of the world at most) being able to tackle Faerin with tweaked attacks, then going back to your world to get even with Faelin, and discovering that he was the impostor all along?
Great stuff, and just more reasons to go back and reroll that world.

It's unfortunate that my time with the game as a full team is limited, but I'm definitely looking forward to making the most of the game this week.

-PS. Because they play so similarly, I really don't think it's difficult to go back to the first game. I totally wanna go back and finish the Subject DLC so I can see how Clementine's story there plays out, especially knowing what we know now in R2.

That title is very hyperbolic, because I never lost faith in gaming. As much as I lament the rise of live service games, there have always been and will continue to be great games that don't rely on that model. This game is just further proof of that.

However, I've put 54 hours into Remnant 2 since it came out a little over a week ago, and, for even as much as I love video games in general, it's been a long time since one has grabbed me this hard and just refused to let go. I've played a bunch of it solo, and a bunch of it with Korny and Sammy. Multiple nights over the past week have ended at 1 or 2am, 3 hours after I had stated, "I'm going to get off here in just a minute. Let's go just go do [X] really quick."

Can you weigh in on the RPG elements? It's specifically described as NOT a live service game, but APPEARING to share the DNA with one. Why would that be said? How are the RPG elements implemented? Is it grindy? What is it on a scale of HZD to Vanquish?

The main RPG elements come from building a strong character through gear. There are classes that you level up, but that process is quick and nearly irrelevant. The real progression is through finding gear, items, and weapons that will work together with your classes (you can equip two classes at a time).

Unlike Destiny or Diablo or most live service games, there is no randomness to the items. The rolls on everything are static. There is no grinding anything trying to get a slightly better roll or different affix on any items. If you find an item, it will be exactly the same as the one I find.

As a brief and simple example of a basic build:

I have a ring called Tightly Wound Coil that says "When spending 75% or more of current magazine, gain a SHIELD for 10% of Max Health for 5s." Well, I'm using a bow, so every time I shoot, I get a Shield. That is paired with another ring that generates 3% of my Max Health per second when I have a Shield active. Since I have the first ring, that's literally all the time I'm in combat. I am always regenerating Health. That is further paired with my Medic class which has increased healing effectiveness.

The core of the game is exploring the worlds and fighting bosses and completing puzzles or other encounters to get weapons, rings, amulets, and mutators for weapons to create a build.

There is a twist to that, though. There are three main worlds in the game that are randomly rolled when you first enter the world. Each of those three worlds has two main versions with a different story and main boss, and each of those worlds have multiple dungeons, bosses, puzzles, etc., which are also randomized when you first encounter the world. So each play through of the campaign can be vastly different. You can also use Adventure Mode to reroll specific worlds to find new permutations without having to mess up your campaign progress. Everything carries over back and forth between those two modes. You can also reroll your entire campaign and keep all of your gear and level progression if you want.

There are a bunch of secrets to find, puzzles to solve, often there is more than one way to kill or a boss (or at least a specific way to kill some bosses to get special items).

The other obvious stand out is the boss design. The game has been called Dark Souls with Guns by many. That's a good shorthand, I think, but really sells the game short in a lot of ways. But the boss design is straight out of Dark Souls in many (good) ways. I think nearly every boss fight has started with me saying to every move the boss has, "That's horseshit! How do you even counter that?! I can't do anything!" and ends a few (or fifteen) tries laters with having learned the boss's patterns and dodging it's attacks and finding the attack windows, or swapping classes and builds to exploit or endure it's moveset. It's a fine line between annoyingly unfair, and actually tough but totally beatable, and this game nails that line in a way that From Software has such knack for.

You ask if the game is grindy. I would say no, not in the way I think you mean. You could play through the game once, get the encounters you get, find the gear you find, and probably have a good 20ish hour experience and be pretty happy with that. The longevity of the game comes from rerolling the worlds to get a completely new set of encounters (or sometimes the same encounters with slightly different variations, or the ability to fight the same boss again with a new build, or try to get the alternate kill on the same boss). There are dozens of rings to find, a bunch of weapons (main weapons, side arms, and melee weapons). There's not a whole lot of armor sets, which is a bit disappointing to me personally as fashion is the ultimate end game.

At the end of the day, you'll get out of the game what you put in. You can play through it once like any other action shooter and it'll probably be a pretty fun ride. The overall story is the greatest thing ever and is largely forgettable, but the stories that are self contained within each of the three main worlds are really interesting and well done (seriously, some really terrific voice acting in the game). If you like that first play through and want more, there are many more bosses to fight and puzzles to solve, so you can just keep rerolling worlds and see where you end up.

This year has been an absolutely banger for games. This might be my favorite of them so far.

EDIT: Regarding grind.

I did forget to mention--I'm at the point where I do have to do some farming for upgrade materials. The world level is set based upon your own power level when you first enter that specific world. So every time you reroll the world, it matches your character's power level. So getting new, cool weapons up to par can be kind of a pain. The developers have already said it's something they are looking into and considering, so maybe it'll change at some point.

This wasn't a huge problem for most of my time playing the game, but I have a set of weapons fully leveled, so now everything else I want to use has to be brought up quite a bit to be useable at all.