Red Steel 2 is a sequel In Name Only to Ubisoft's first-person shooter/swordfighting launch game for the Nintendo Wii. It follows a nameless almost silent hero, who returns to his home town after having been banished by his clan only to find it completely overrun by a violent bike gang called The Jackals who attack him and take his sora katana. The hero has to work together with the only locals still fighting back, uncover the reason for the invasion and avenge his clan.
This game has completely abandoned the modern yakuza setting of the first game and moved to a Cattle Punk setting, with a new hero, a new art style, and improved controls.
This work contains examples of:
- After-Combat Recovery: Once you clear an area of enemies, your health is automatically refilled back to full and any armor you lost is regenerated.
- A.K.A.-47: All guns, including listing various fictional ammo types as upgrades when you upgrade their damage. Amusingly enough, they call the Tommy gun a "Johnnygun".
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Weirdly Zig Zagged after the battle with Payne. First he begs the hero not to hurt him and claims that he's working for someone else, then he attacks the hero. After this fails and he ends up dangling from a ledge, he goes back to begging for his life and claiming he didn't do anything to the Hero. Finally, when the hero demands to know where his clansmen are, he goes back to screaming insults and threats, even as he falls to his death.
- Anti-Frustration Feature:
- The pause menu lets you restart a chapter (which can help you get past any game-breaking bugs as long as they don't block you from pausing the game). You can also adjust the game difficulty at any time from the main menu.
- Strangely, in the mines at Rattlesnake Canyon (not Rattlesnake Quarry), there is a safe you can crack for extra cash in one of the poisonous caves there. If you approach the safe to crack it, you are invulnerable during the safe crack sequence and can't take any damage until you finish or quit.
- Attack Its Weak Point: The hammer-wielding elite Jackals have a X-shaped weak point painted on their backs.
- A Winner Is You: After you beat Shinjiro in the final battle, The Hero kills him and it ends with a "The End" screen followed by the credits.
- Auto-Revive: "Ace" playing cards from each of the four suits of a card deck can be purchased from Songan's casinos that will instantly revive you and give you back part of or all of your standard health bar the next time you are struck down in battle, allowing you to keep fighting instead of having to reload from a checkpoint.
- Auto-Save: Used to save your progress.
- Back from the Dead: After you defeat Okaji in Rattlesnake Canyon, Tamiko is relieved that the world is ridden of such a monster. But as soon as you leave the area, cue a cutscene where he secretly resurrects and prepares to fight you again at Tiger's Nest.
- Berserk Button: Okaji goes from being a cold, merciless, but hyper composed villain to a roaring raging psychopath when he is forced out of his armor.
- BFS: Both Payne and Okaji wield these.
- Big Ol' Eyebrows: The Hero whenever you get a decent look at his face.
- Black Blood / Bloodless Carnage: While the "animated blood" in this game is not red, every slash, stab and gunshot is accompanied with a large burst of sand-yellow liquid, allowing the game to barely get away with a T rating. Arguably, if they had gone for red blood instead, they would've probably had to tone the actions themselves down a good deal.
- The FMVs also do not feature any bloodshed whatsoever.
- Black Knight: Okaji.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: The firearm ninjas defend themselves with blades attached to their forearms, which they also use to strike you up close.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: Makes more sense in this game, where upgrading parts of your Badass Longcoat gives you layers of armor on top of your life bar that can take up to 4 hits before you start to take damage to your lifebar. The actual lifebar is upgraded via the parts of the clan emblem at the back of the said Badass Longcoat.
- Boom, Headshot!: The Special ability "The Shot" does this if used as a finishing move with the revolver: other guns go for a pointblank stomach shot, a Pistol Whip followed by a quick vertical burst, or an upwards point-blank chest shot. Getting a head shot normally results in an instant kill and being awarded $200.
- Strangely, Headshots only insta-kill if you're far away. Presumably, this is so you can Finish Him! off.
- Boring, but Practical:
- The Tiger, a move that allows you to block an opponent's attack and stun them, is by far the least flashy of the Kusagari Powers. However, it leaves your enemies wide open for a while, and always works, even against Giant Mooks or bosses, making this one of the more useful moves.
- Kneecapping and then finishing gun mooks or lowly sword mooks. It's not exciting, but it's the best way to take them out fast.
- Aerate the opponent's skull with the revolver, then use the Rush on him. Gets old fast, but you get a good amount of money.
- The double-barrel is incredibly effective against ninjas.
- Perhaps the easiest way to deal with the penultimate boss is to break his armor, then let'er rip with the machinegun. If it's upgraded enough, one long string of bullets is all it takes.
- Bottomless Pit: Subverted. There are several deep chasms in Rattlesnake Canyon, but only your enemies can fall into them with a well-placed Dragon, and not you.
- The Cavalry : A one-man example happens when Judd manages to escape his predicament after being betrayed by Songan and give backup support for the Hero with his shotgun at the entrance to Tiger's Nest, where he is accosted by Shinjiro and ninjas.
- Cattle Punk: The game is set in dystopian Nevada and features tumble-weeds, a grumpy sheriff, six-shooters and a roaming band of bandits mixed up with samurai, cars, machine-guns and robots.
- Checkpoint: The autosave system also doubles as a checkpoint system. Fatally lose a battle and you'll resume play from the last autosave checkpoint.
- Closed Circle: Most enemy encounters will trap you in force fields to prevent you from escaping until the battle is over with either you or your enemies dead.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: Turns out that when only one Kusagari survives...he becomes a One-Man Army who fights several times better than a whole clan of them.
- Continuity Reboot: There is absolutely no connection at all to the previous game. It has a different setting, characters, location, backstory, gameplay, premise, and graphical style.
- Critical Annoyance: When the Hero's health is running low, you'll hear a beeping sound.
- Curse Cut Short: When you first step into Songan's second casino, he says "holy" in disbelief, but then cuts himself off, in a move somewhat unusual for a game with several profanities in its script.
- Cutscene Power to the Max: The Hero can perform stylish acrobatics in cutscenes that no button combo or gesture can ever reproduce.
- Cutting the Knot: In Rattlesnake Canyon, rather than find a way to unlock the front gate of the Kusagari temple there that Shinjiro has taken over, the Hero's allies have him go to Rattlesnake Quarry to build a bomb and bring it to the front gates to blow it open.
- Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You : Subverted in that it's not the Hero's father who abandons him, but his master. At Rattlesnake Canyon, Jian tells him that his master abandoned the Hero for one good reason: to hide the secret of the Sora Katana from the Kusagari's adversaries.
- Defiant to the End: Payne and later Shinjiro don't easily concede defeat once you've reduced their health bars to zero.
- Degraded Boss: In the fourth chapter, Chase, you will fight a guan dao ninja and a Katakara chaingunner for the first time, independently. You'll then see them again for the rest of the game several times, with the former appearing more often.
- Die, Chair, Die! / Rewarding Vandalism: You may well kill more boxes than baddies in this game. Many objects you can smash are effectively made out of money that you'll need to scavenge for upgrades and better gear.
- Disc-One Final Boss: Payne and his Jackals are the main antagonists in Upper Caldera. Before you kill him he admits he was working for Shinjiro. When you travel down to Lower Caldera you find that indeed Shinjiro and the Katakara were in charge
- Disney Villain Death:
- In Rattlesnake Canyon, there are plenty of places where you can normally fall to your death, if not for Invisible Walls that prevent you from falling off. But these invisible walls don't stop enemies from falling to their death, which you can exploit to your advantage by knocking them to their doom with the Dragon.
- A number of bosses fall to their death when you defeat them.
- Door to Before: Throughout your journey, you'll come across locked doors that you'll only unlock once you open them from the other side.
- The Dragon: Okaji. He is also the game's penultimate boss.
- Dual Wield: Jackal gunslingers and ninjas.
- Exploding Barrels: There's plenty of them, they're marked appropriately with warning symbols and colors and you just need one single attack, whether from you or an enemy, to make them go off. The explosions can hurt anyone, including you.
- Expy: The Hero's appearance bears a strikingly similar, if not exact appearance to another sword-wielding desert swashbuckler: Zorro.
- Face–Heel Turn:
- Finishing Move: You have plenty of these at your disposal once an enemy is stunned or brought to low health. Make your finishing attack in the correct direction as indicated to earn double the money, which becomes triple if it's also a Hidden Strike, which features special animations like throwing your sword or blowing out the enemy's skull at point-blank range.
- Flunky Boss: Payne will summon two mooks every time he slams you to the ground.
- Flash Step: Shinjiro uses this in the final boss battle.
- Game-Breaking Bug: As pointed out in this review
, some copies of the game have bugs that can wipe out save data and require you to reset the chapter, wiping out an hour or more of progress.- While most fatal bugs can be overcome by resetting your Wii or restarting the chapter, there's one fatal bug that will force you to restart the entire story from scratch. The only certain way to trigger it is to load your game, do nothing and immediately quit to the main menu. The next time you try to load the game, it will always silently freeze on the load screen, forcing you to unplug your Wii. Every. Single. Time. So, whatever you do, don't do that.
- Gender-Blender Name: Shinjiro's second-in command and Katakara leader is a male samurai who goes by the name Okaji, which is mostly a female name.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: Payne, Shinjiro, and Okaji all have evil scars of some sort. Okaji himself has the worst of it, and is so horrifically scarred he resides himself to almost living in his armor.
- Giant Mook: Of the sledgehammer, minigun and naginata-wielding variety. The former two can only be hit reliably and finished off from behind.
- Gratuitous Japanese: Less than the first game. In this game most of the Japanese tends to be either "katana" or specific clan names.
- Heart Container: When you meet Songan for the first time, you can buy Kusagari emblems to build up an extra health bar.
- Highly-Visible Ninja: The hulking guan dao ninjas are too big and tough-looking to go unnoticed.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Played with: The hardest of three difficulty levels isn't called Hard...it's Ninja.
- In Name Only: This game has literally nothing to do with the first game aside from the same basic idea of a FPS that combines motion control based shooting and swordplay.
- Ineffectual Death Threats: Payne screams one of his usual over-the-top threats while falling to his death.
- Large Ham: Payne, who is deliciously over the top. Interestingly enough he is voiced by the game's director Jason Vandenberghe.
- Loading Screen: Most loading screens are blatantly hidden behind opening doors. The only proper ones appear when you begin or end a session, respawn from a checkpoint or enter a new area, with a random tip about the game's controls.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: Each chapter's map is divided into many small areas that the Wii needs to load in with intense disc activity, gated by doors that lock your movement and take time to open when you try to open them. Whether you're planning to travel from one far end of the map to the other or cut your way across a linear chapter, expect to have your patience (and your Wii's disc lens) tested time and time again by the sheer number of moments where you'll have to stand still watching a door take it sweet time to open.
- Locked Door: This game features several kinds of locked doors which can require either using a special switch you have to find, blasting the locks with your gun, whacking them with your sword, or just waiting until you have a mission that requires you to go through said door.
- Logo Joke: Every time you start up the game, you'll have to watch the Ubisoft logo get sandblasted with a tumbleweed rolling by.
- MacGuffin: The Hero's sora katana.
- Made of Iron: The Hero, especially in the game's cutscenes.
- Marathon Level: Rattlesnake Canyon is the longest of the seven chapters. The middle three chapters can also become this in Challenge Mode, because autosave is disabled in such mode and any chapter you start in Challenge mode must be completed in one sitting. Hope you have a Bladder of Steel to conquer any these three levels on Challenge Mode!note
- Meteor Move: Players can use this on enemies after knocking them into the air with one of the Powers.
- Ms. Fanservice: Tamiko, with that cropped black leather halter top with a pretty long v-neck. Yep.
- Notice This: If a wall is climbable, whatever it's studded with will shine bronze or copper.
- Obviously Evil: Oh come on! Just look at Songan's 'stache! Theres no way someone with a stache like that can be completely trustworthy! Subverted in that he only betrays you reluctantly and gives you a chance to get back.
- Offhand Backhand: The Storm, when used against enemies close enough to you that are behind you. It counts as an One-Hit Kill on any Mook and works on giant ones as well, who normally need to be finished off from behind. That said, they have to be telegraphing an attack for you to be able to use the instant kill.
- One-Man Army: For much of the game, the Hero singlehandedly battles ragtag gangs of outlaws and a rival samurai clan with an ever-growing arsenal of weapons and special abilities.
- Permanently Missable Content: Several points in the game you go through points of no return. Once you go past Rattlesnake Canyon, the last two levels have no safehouses for upgrades, so you can not get any that you missed.
- Pistol Whip: The Jackal gunslingers can do this. And later into the story, Songan does this to the Hero after briefly betraying his allies.
- Point of No Return: Explicitly mentioned at the end of each level of the game, giving you a prompt on whether you want to advance in case you still haven't done everything. Annoyingly enough, the game still keeps giving you money after you've gone past the point where there's no way to spend it on upgrades, meaning you need to abuse the method described below to get enough of it before that if you want to upgrade everything before the end of the game. The Challenge Mode that allows you to replay stages doesn't help any either because you can't access any of the upgrade locations during it and any money you collect in the stages only counts towards your final score that determines how much of a money bonus you get in your main file, again meaning that by the time you can actually access the last 2 stages in Challenge mode, you have nothing to spend the bonus on either.
- Power Trio: Shinjiro: Ego, Okaji: Super Ego, Payne: Id.
- Press X to Not Die: There is one cutscene quick time event of the instant death variety. And it's the only instance of this in the whole game. The standard finishing moves could also count, although they are entirely optional and the one you can perform at any given time depends on what kind of stun the enemy is currently in, which is again dependent on what kind of move you hit them with to begin with. Amusingly, there's one QTE as well where - with the hero hanging from the side of a truck, the driver holding a gun at him, and no easy way to dodge if the driver shoots - even the on-screen prompt doesn't know what button you should press, displaying just an icon of the Wii Remote and three question marks. The driver pulls the trigger and hits an empty chamber.
- The Quiet One: The Hero is just two lines of dialog short (Or too many) of being a Heroic Mime.
- Random Encounters: In non-linear areas of the game, you may occasionally run into random waves of enemies if you wander around for some time.
- Razor Wind / Sword Beam: The Dragon. Not immediately obvious which it's closer to, since its main purpose is to push enemies away and stun them if they hit a wall and if not charged up fully, it does no damage whatsoever on its own.
- Reward from Nowhere: While it does make sense that killing enemies carries a reward of some sort and finishing them off in a stylish way increases the amount, the fact that you can trap a single enemy against a wall and then fling Sword Beams at them until your hand gives out and get 500 dollars for each one pretty much rules out other possibilities.
- Rule of Cool: Red Steel 2 loves this trope. Half the special attacks are probably impossible to do in Real Life. The Kusagari powers are definitely impossible.
- Safe Cracking: Hidden throughout the levels are safes that require the player to listen to the click of the tumblers on the Wii Remote.
- Samurai Cowboy: This game's box-art even provides the page image for that trope. The Kusagari are a whole clan of duster-wearin', pistol-packin' samurai.
- Shockwave Stomp: The Bear.
- Shoot the Fuel Tank: The way you destroy trucks in Upper Caldera.
- Shout-Out: One of the missions is called You Have to Cut the Rope.
- Snark-to-Snark Combat: Jian is a Cynical Mentor with a dry wit, and one of the few times the hero speaks is to snark back at him.Jian: So you have come to save us all?
Hero: It's nice to see you too.
Jian: You still have poor timing, and I see you have lost your sword, that's just great. - Spin Attack: The Storm.
- Standard FPS Guns: This game has four guns that include the handgun, shotgun, rifle, and tommygun, all of which can be upgraded in various stats including damage, reload speed and accuracy. Once you upgrade the main stats for each gun to max, you gain access to a final upgrade that adds an additional property to each gun's shots: revolver's bullets bounce off walls, shotgun breaks armor, tommygun pierces through enemies and rifle gains exploding rounds.
- Sword and Gun: The reason this game was made.
- Taking the Bullet: Tamiko takes one to save the Hero at Tiger's Nest.
- The Stoic: The Hero and Okaji.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: The Crush, when used as a finisher.
- Thunderbolt Iron: The Sora Katanas were made from ore derived from a meteorite of sorts, according to Jian.
- Timed Mission: The first half of the fourth chapter, "Chase" ends with a five-minute countdown in which you must race to catch Shinjiro's train before it leaves.
- Time Skip: Three days pass between the first half of the game and the second half of the game, which the Hero spends wandering through the desert after a failed attempt to stop Shinjiro aboard a train.
- Traintop Battle: In the middle of the story, you'll battle henchmen atop a fast-moving train on your way to chase Shinjiro.
- Uncertain Doom:
- The game doesn't clearly ascertain whether or not Tamiko truly died after taking a bullet from Shinjiro when the Hero entered Tiger's Nest.
- Shinjiro also boasts that he captured the Hero's allies just before the final confrontation, who may or may not be alive, since you never hear from them afterwards.
- The Unreveal: The Hero's name is not revealed.
- Wake-Up Call Boss:
- If you haven't mastered the combat system yet, Payne will definitely make you... well, feel the Payne.
- Don't duel Shinjiro without getting all the health and armor upgrades first at the very least!
- What Happened to the Mouse?: You do not directly hear from your allies, as well as Songan, after entering Tiger's Nest. Shinjiro boasts of how he captured your allies and forced them to help him remake his sword in the last chapter, Revenge, but from there, it's unclear whether they're dead or alive.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
- Payne takes the cake for this one: Not only does he forego the chance to simply kill the protagonist in the beginning, effectively dooming his gang and himself in the process, he also neglects to take away the hero's gun.
- He even pulls this in the boss fight where he has a move where he grabs you and slams you to the ground. Then, as you lay there stunned, rather than finishing you off with his sword or gun he summons two gun-toting Mooks, giving you just enough time to get back on your feet so you can dispatch them in short order and return to whaling on him.
- The Hero then does this in turn to Payne. After finally getting the Sora Katana back, he skips an opportunity to stab Payne in the back, causing the Boss fight to resume.
- Played with in the boss fight with Shinjiro who is just standing in a large open space waiting for the player to walk down to fight him. If you just shoot him he blocks the attack and the fight starts straight away.
- Wrecked Weapon: The Hero is strong enough to break a few swords in half...including his own.
- You Are Too Late: Shinjiro says this word-for-word...and gets killed by the Hero anyway.
