BitSnark

It’s probably a good idea to make something clear here; the original Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage represents a very niche sort of game.  Firstly, you have to be a fan of the Dynasty Warrior’s/Samurai Warriors games and secondly, you really need to be a fan of the Fist of the North Star manga or anime, since being a fan of the latter will likely help you embrace the former.  Though I imagine it works the other way around; the game isn’t as technically sound from a gameplay perspective as Tecmo-Koei’s other, similar titles.

If you’re still unclear as to exactly what sort of game this is, take a look at this gameplay video from the original game below:

Still here? Excellent – keep reading.

A couple of years ago, Tecmo-Koei released Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage – their first adapation of the popular and OTT brutal manga which followed the ‘Musou’ gameplay style blueprint of their previous titles, Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors.  Really, it turned out that a narrative in which a perptually pissed off protagonist goes around punching a small country’s worth of folk until their heads explode, was aptly served by 1 vs 1000 style of gameplay that the Musou style enables.  Nobody wanted to see the likes of Kenshiro and Raoh duking it out in the one vs one battles that the earlier games provided – no, what they wanted to see was free-roaming, wide-scale carnage of tattooed goons and impossibly muscled bad guys being offed in increasingly comical gruesome ways.

Largely, the original Ken’s Rage delivered in this regard with a game that felt like a Dynasty Warriors title, but yet had all the characters and events of the manga combined with a feature-set all of it’s own.  For fans of the FOTNS manga and anime the game was a revelation – no other game had really done the property this sort of justice before and now Tecmo-Koei look to try their hand at the license again with a sequel to their 2010 game.  I would expect the game to be conservative in it’s improvements and evolution over it’s predecessor (a practice seemingly common for all Tecmo-Koei Musou games), but really, we know little else at this stage about the sequel other than it simply exists.

The somewhat lacking debut trailer for the game does little to enlighten either, but hopefully we’ll get something with a touch more gameplay to help us fill in the blanks soon:

Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage 2 is due out later this year for 360 & PS3 Platforms