Your parents were wrong: a second helping of candy won't make you sick. To the contrary, Costume Quest 2 is an even tastier morsel than the original Costume Quest, and serves up an even bigger bag of accessible humor and combat. There are a few sour patches within this fun-sized roleplaying game, especially when it comes to the flawed healing system, but as a whole, it's a tiny treat.
Costume Quest 2's combat as a whole deserves commendation; it's not quite at the level of epics like Persona 4, but it’s deep enough that the turn-based battles never got repetitive over this five to six-hour campaign like they did in the original. Between the ability to add a second attack if the first is timed right, and the option to charge a block for one character and turn it into a counter (trading off that you might not react in time if the enemy attacks one of the other two) it gave me something to think about.The buff system, now implemented via "Creepy Treat Cards," offers a bit more freedom than Costume Quest's Battle Stamps. While the original required you attach a single attribute to each character with only 24 modifiers to play with, there's 45 different Creepy Treat Cards which can be used by any character at any time in battle with a three-to-five battle cooldown period. Most importantly, Creepy Treat Cards aren't mandatory like Battle Stamps, so you can forgo them for extra challenge. There's a far bigger challenge in the form of the inanimate HP-sponge Candy Corn costume that trades a third of your attack options in each battle for a clever quip about the Halloween staple and if you're playing on a non-Nintendo platform, a hard-earned Achievement/Trophy at the end of your quest.
Unfortunately the difficulty balance is thrown off a bit due to the awkward healing system. In my review of the PC version of Costume Quest 2 (now patched to match the console version) I found it had a pretty serious issue that forced you to regularly re backtracking to one of the scattered water fountains. That’s fixed now, by an option to heal an entire party for a nominal fee of the "Candy" currency. While it's certainly better, this solution is like a Band-Aid on an ax wound. Healing classes and items are unimportant vestiges of a system that no longer exists (especially the Creepy Treat Cards that heal allies after battles), and healing is so cheap it might as well be free, removing almost all consequences of taking damage and any resource management for healing. While an overly simple healing system is better than a tedious one, there’s got to be a better middle ground.
Another issue that interferes with the fun is navigation, as making your way through Costume Quest 2's world is far more difficult than you'd expect from a game that appears so accessible. You can buy a map that’ll reveal a new area, but you still have to figure out where you are on that map, because it doesn’t use any kind of location marker to tell you. While that's not an issue with some of the more wide-open areas at the beginning of the campaign, more than one of the future-set stages included far more twists and turns than the map could detail, due in part to Costume Quest 2's insistence on drawing maps in the style of crude childrens’ drawings.Yet Costume Quest 2 won me over with the colorful locales and endearing characters that popped up during Reynold and Wren's second quest to save Halloween. The time travel and resulting dystopian locations like an oppressive school and a Metropolis-style slum, are great, even if the objectives haven't evolved much beyond the knocking on doors and getting tricks or treats we did in the original.
I did miss a few the charming moments because of Costume Quest 2' s itchy trigger finger. On more than one occasion each, I accidentally skipped a cutscene (that could not be replayed due to autosaving) with a single wayward button tap, or accepted loss in a battle by mistakenly scrolling over to the "run away" option. A simple "are you sure?" prompt in each situation would have done wonders.
The main villain is a sugar-hating dentist who actually has personality; a big improvement over the original’s forgettable candy-stealing monsters. The time traveling also allows you to see multiple forms of the same NPCs, which helps to even make the most common-seeming bystander a bit more memorable. That, and constant references back to old Double Fine games and Earthbound, which is one of the biggest influences for Costume Quest, make Costume Quest 2 a cute and lighthearted seasonal RPG despite a few dips in the action due to a quirky health system and maddening map navigation.
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Costume Quest 2 on Wii U fails to take any advantage of the GamePad, as the second screen is only used to show the same art that pops up in every version's loading screen. To its credit, it does change for every new area you visit.