— Spirit Hunter: NG Review —This is what sequels are supposed to be. NG improves nearly everything that was good about its satisfying-but-flawed predecessor, Death Mark, while also addressing nearly all of its shortcomings.
Like Death Mark, this too is a modern (well, 1999) tale of Japanese horror, mixed together as text adventure and visual novel, only here the blend makes a more seamless whole, rather than two disparate halves warring with each other. Thankfully, this time I really can call this a VN.... a narrative with strong exposition, intriguing characters, and even a much better antagonist. Unlike the first game, which kept its secrets all to itself until the very end (and in the last few pages of the collector’s edition art book), making for a fairly empty feeling narrative almost the entire time, NG’s characters and setting will suck you in almost immediately. It still takes an hour to get going, but once it does, you’re hooked. NG creates a new roster of evil spirits designed to evoke both revulsion and sympathy, but it doesn’t quite reach the same stunning degrees of haunting pathos one felt after dealing with the ghostly apparitions of Death Mark. Frankly, it’s a small price to pay when everything else here is a clear upgrade.
The presentation is vibrant, not staid. The artwork is more eye catching. Although there are some recycled assets, the sound design improves upon one of the high points of Death Mark, and the soundtrack offers real emotional connection instead of just ambience and atmosphere.(edited)
The “boss fights” as they were, come about more organically, and don’t feel as forced. The translation is much better (there are still syntax errors, but few and far between) at conveying the, ahem, spirit of the Japanese source material, rather than strictly focusing on literal word-for-word interpretation. The puzzles can be a bit daft, though when you finally discover the answer to a few of them, you will understand their internal logic.
Developers Experience also managed to create NG as a direct sequel with a brand new cast, therefore not requiring any knowledge from the previous title, though players who have completed Death Mark will certainly glean a larger degree of pleasure to the many references made to the earlier game.
Lastly, a word about performance. Thanks to some clot at Nintendo Life, there exists a caption along metaranking sites that suggests this game performs not just poorly, but borderline unplayable on Switch. This is a gross mistake, and NL admitted as much by re-writing the entire review with no mention of performance issues, although the stain of the initial damning caption remains.
If Death Mark got an ‘A’ for effort but ‘C’ for execution, then NG gets ‘A’s all around. Consider Death Mark as appetizer, tasty but unfulfilling, and NG as the satisfying main course. I look forward to the palette cleansing dessert portion of Spirit Hunter sometime next year.
— 4 stars. Bring on Shibito Magire—