Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

It’s hard to know how to react to RabbitCity 2 (Remastered) because on paper it sounds like such a great ride. Its storyline could make an action movie blush—enemy invasions, identity theft, a secret submarine escape through an underwater minefield, escaping a falling elevator after a bomb attack, defending a boat from a flying robot, sneaking past surveillance cameras, fighting through train cars, restoring power to an island, chasing an airship in a helicopter, and more. The story visits multiple locations and sets up a nigh-constant series of new objectives, and I struggle to think of a JJ2 episode with a larger supporting cast.

And yet…

There’s a term “programmer art” which comes to mind when I think about this episode. The whole episode uses basically a single tileset (with some slight variations for specific areas), which seems to have been compiled specifically for this episode, which gave the author more or less full access to everything ever drawn and the ability to pick graphics that suited each purpose perfectly. The downside is that the graphics don’t always match up too well. Art style can vary a lot, and the levels are incredibly visually busy, to the point where it’s easy to lose track of what’s actually important to look at. Fewer hues and higher contrast between foreground and background would together make this episode much easier to look at.

The other main visual issue is that everything always looks the same. Some moments of exploring underground caves are fine, because they use the tried-and-true Carrotus tileset, but everything else uses the same few wall textures, the same set of background elements, the same doors, and so on. The episode spends so much time in each area—police station, warehouse, island, etc.—that it can be easy not to notice at first when you’re leaving one area for the next, and the fact that all locations use the same artwork really exacerbates this issue. (This is admittedly useful for certain important elements—it’s nice that doors use consistent images—but not so much for basic walls and backgrounds.)

A similar issue can extend to the gameplay. While there are certainly some interesting, memorable, and rewarding moments—exploring a sewer with limited oxygen, fighting off enemies on trains, navigating as a submarine, leaping for ladders hanging from the underside of an airship—they can be few and far between. Most of the episode seems to be spent shooting the same small catalog of enemies in interchangeable small horizontal passages, and it is very easy to grow fatigued by this, especially given the episode’s lengthy overall playtime. When you’re not blasting through the same enemies over and over, you’re going on constant, poorly-guided quests for the next trigger crate or key or ID card. (By the time your inventory contains red, green, and blue cards, all of which open some doors but not others, their targets distributed seemingly at random, the episode has all but crossed into self-parody.)

Interestingly, the reason for the endless horizontal areas is that RabbitCity 2 Remastered is clearly trying for a certain verisimilitude in its layouts, reminiscent of The Lost World Episode but in cities instead of natural environments. (Familiar tropes from other older JJ2 episodes, such as key cards and trains and exploding reactors, help with this impression.) This is a commendable goal, and sometimes it really does work, and sometimes it really doesn’t. The worst offenders are when aiming for realistic human (…rabbit) architecture results in incredible degrees of repetition. A hotel building has you climb countless identical floors with identical rooms, searching for the few that are unlocked in search of… something or other, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. But by far the worst offenders are the elevators. Over and over again, RabbitCity 2 Remastered decides that the best way for you to spend your time would be to take a slow elevator ride from one area to another. At one point you even ride down an elevator, meet an NPC, ride back up, discover a door is locked, and ride right back down again. At another point the characters even comment on how slow the elevators are, an odd moment where you have to wonder how much the episode’s author is or is not in on the joke. (Later they comment on how ugly the airship is and how a room’s proportions are unrealistic—again, is this self-realization or mere randomness?)

The elevators, though, are only the most obvious examples of what is probably the episode’s worst annoyance: it’s constantly stopping for nonsense. Every time you find a key card, adjust the water level, or whatever, the action abruptly stops to send you to a new .j2l where you have a chance to save, then back to yet another .j2l in exactly the same place you were, but with one tile in a foreground layer changed. (Just like Tomb Rabbit—but isn’t this sort of thing exactly what AngelScript was introduced to prevent?) And this happens over and over and over. Maybe there are about two hundred playable levels, but there are only maybe ten or so actual areas to explore—again, all of them visually identical—and you keep running back and forth within them to meet the next NPC, pick up the next key, or find the next trigger crate that gives no hint for which door it might randomly unlock.

Also taking up their own levels (with save spots between them) are cutscenes. On some level I feel bad about blaming the author for the cutscenes, because they suffer so clearly from amateur translation. And yet there are so many of them and they fail so completely to convey any appropriate emotions. Between the ridiculous dialogue and the overbright, overbusy graphics, it’s impossible to care about the hundreds of dead bodies you pass over the course of this episode. And sometimes the cutscenes even go out of their way to waste your time, like when a floppy disk (yes, really) needs to be formatted before it can have a database installed on it, both of which operations have their own progress bars. Does the author seriously imagine the episode’s player enjoying this sequence? Is the fart joke supposed to be just that humorous? Or is it really just a middle finger to the player for expecting their time playing the episode to be respected and rewarded? (And why are there two different police stations, anyway?)

The reason I have so much to say about RabbitCity 2 Remastered’s mistakes is that there is a decent experience buried underneath it all. But the author has thrown so much nonsense on top of it, made it such a chore to play, and supplied it with such inappropriate visuals, that there’s no reason anyone should make the effort to find it.