Ikari no Yōsai 2

The Good
Ikari No Yousai 2 is an overhead run and gun game and a Japanese exclusive sequel of Fortified Zone for the Game Boy.

This one kept some good elements from the original. You still are able to switch between the two characters Mazato and Mizuki, each one with different skills... The female can jump and is slightly faster. And the guy, well... he just has more health? We have a total of 4 levels, which are very well designed, with multiple floors and secret rooms. There's a much greater variety and quality on your regular enemies with even some "mid-level" bosses, and some of them are really fun to fight. The graphics are very good - love the Japanese mecha design of every enemy - , and even though they've changed the composer the music still is amazing (perhaps even better)

The Bad
Sadly most changes to the original have been for the worse. The main issue Fortified Zone had was how much better the male character was than the female. Here they eliminated all special weapons, both characters use the same three weapons with the same power, which negates all value to Mazato cause he is slower than Mizuki... So now you just end up playing with her, and occasionally you use him as a "tank". In the original you wanted to search every corner of the stage for the special weapons and items; same with the enemies which after dying sometimes dropped power ups and good stuff, here you have infinite ammo, no power ups and the only item you can get is a health recovery, so you just want to get to the exit as fast as you can. The two players mode is back but with the same problem it had last time: one of the players will get the weaker character.

The map does not show you the multiple exits from a room, or even what's a door, and most of the times the path you need to follow is not at all clear, specially when you got to break walls or floors...
Now you can shoot in all 8 directions, which is a fine addition but By the late stages the weapons become so weak that you end up using just your grenade launcher all the time. But at least the difficulty keeps the game interesting I must say.

The Bottom Line
Ikari No Yousai 2 is still very fun, but every change they introduced took from the game instead of building up on it, still good but just worse than the original: better stay in Japan.