Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

There’s a lot to like here, but not a lot to love. It’s also hard to escape the fact that Faded Story Part 1 has essentially two halves, so let’s talk about that.

The first half (and also a little bit at the end) is all scene-setting and story. At one point you’re free to walk around a village for a while, entering buildings and talking to other rabbits, but there’s no gameplay to speak of and you get the sense it only uses standard JJ2 physics for the sake of convenience. At one point you seem to have the chance to buy some powerups or food, but as far as I can tell there’s no way to actually get money; it’s just the appearance of a shop because villages have shops.

More memorably there are a lot of cutscenes. The episode opens by gradually zooming in on a closed book, then the book opens up and you get to turn the pages by pressing right. The art isn’t amazing but it’s neat that there’s art at all—even the more technically sophisticated cutscenes from devres only ever bothered with (lots and lots of) text. Design schematics for the robot boss are the highlight here. Some non-scripted JJ2+ features also make appearances: big flickering lights and fast warps for the doorways and dialogue sequences. Oddly some conversations use standard text events instead of the custom dialogue system… perfectly serviceable but less consistent.

The other half of the episode are the three or so levels of JJ2 gameplay, specifically the kind of JJ2 gameplay that thinks trigger crates (and occasionally trigger zones) are the best thing ever. There are also still some nods to storytelling in the more gameplay-oriented portion of the pack, with transitional areas between tilesets, but at this point it’s mostly about finding ways to head to the right side of the level by hitting this or that trigger crate and then figuring out what path it opened up.

Trigger crates do make up a lot of the level design, but not in a terrible way, and really the level design in general is pretty good, even if I did seem to find a couple sequence breaking moments. It’s much more in the style of custom JJ2 levels than official JJ2 levels but still acquits itself well, even if it does lean maybe a little too heavily toward enemies that are very hard to see. Not a lot of walking enemies to be found here. There’s pickup variety, some swinging platforms, some good spike placement. Areas with different graphics use somewhat different styles of layout, contributing to the feeling of these levels taking place in real locations, which is always useful for a story-based episode. I don’t remember playing any good float-sucker-buttstomping sequences recently, and this episode delivers a couple of them.

What I don’t quite get is why the two halves—the story and the gameplay—are mostly so separate. Multiple j2l files are devoted at the start to introducing the player to the systems for entering buildings, having conversations, and so on, but the plot is actually quite minimal and all those things disappear completely the moment you start shooting enemies. Why aren’t there NPCs to talk to in the gameplay levels too? What was the point of making something so innovative (if still a bit unpolished) at the start if it doesn’t end up being important?

I’m glad to see this is only a first episode. It’s generally perfectly enjoyable to play, even if its level design does mostly fall into familiar patterns from other custom JJ2 maps, but there’s room for it to grow as well, as it becomes more comfortable with its innovations, more willing to play around with them, and more invested in art quality. There’s still room for Faded Story to become the next Demon Invasion.

Always nice to see new Singleplayer content on J2O. It’s a pretty solid pack, and I think it deserves a full review so here it goes:

Faded Story takes place after the events of JJ2,the story is nice and innovative. Although in the first level when the book is approaching, I would have set the Warps on Fast aswell as the cycles between story related levels.

The gameplay in the levels is somewhat oldschool but fun, the enemies are placed well and the use of the hurt events make them quite challanging(played on Hard) so I like what you did there. However some enemies are placed in a way that you would most likely get hurt. But that isn’t much of an issue since it’s very minor. The bossfights are rather easy, though. But that’s just my point of view I guess.

The eyecandy used in the levels in this pack is nice, but not perfect. At certain points some of the levels the eyecandy just looks the same(Waterfalls) or is all over the place with random placed tiles(Weird steel things). In general, the eyecandy and visuals of the levels in the pack is solid, but deserves some room for improvement. The music choices are fine and fit the levels quite well. My favourite levels are Snezí and Nightmare. Speaking of Snezí, there seems to be something wrong with the music, because I can’t hear the track. But it might just be me.

Would I recommended this? Sure! The story is nicely written, the levels are well made in terms of gameplay and is sure challanging. The only downsize of the pack are the visuals at certain points in most maps, it doesn’t look ugly, but could be done better. Give it a go, and I am waiting for episode 2.