So I recently played Shadow Warrior Redux, Shadow Warrior (2013) and Shadow Warrior 2.

So, I saw something very suprising. The writing and story is expectedly null in the original, but that was expected, and the writing and jokes are quite good in the 2013... but what happened to the last game?

The 2013 had terribel puns and jokes which fell flat delivered by a naive guy who thinks he's cool, fortune cookies which were just banal or stupid, and all of that was great, it went great with the overall tone of the game and a story which although cheesy did pull it's weight with proper character arcs. You saw Wang go from all-knowing and selfish dipshit to noble and honorable dipshit. That's his arc.

But.... Wang is 2016 is just boring. He never has a good comeback, only wang. All the characters are now kind of wacky, so nobody to bounce Wangs stupidity against. He's a bully in most conversations instead of a dipshit. The character of the girl is so simple and badly writen that they might as well have put a blow up doll instead. The story is not non-sensical, but actually just boring. And the fortune cookies... who thought that dropping actual "wisdom" out of those things in this game was a good idea?

Honestly, I just want to know, did the original writer fall on his head or hold his breath for too long in between the two games?

I think this is a case of flanderization. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization


I was actrually surprised of how much character development there was in SW2013. I had expected just the old Sahdow Warrior 3D with better graphics. SW3D really was Duke Nukem 3D with soy sauce and bad kung fu movies mixed in. In SW2 the writing seems to have dropped the ball on Wang's characterization and focused on what suoerficially makes him Wang. Pretty much ignoring what has happened in the spirit world in the first game. :(

For me that's the reverse, I've found the scenario of past SW games quite boring, too serious, I tried to play them but quit the games in their beginnings.

For me SW2 has what was missing in past SW games, I'm happily surprised for its treason of the serie:
open game with a hub, non serious heroe (but still it's not absolutly anything and all)
SW2 is among my prefered games, still installed, and I come back to it sometimes with pleasure.

I didn't really like the writing in SW2013 to be honest, I thought Lo Wang was just a pompous ass who thought he was a big shot and discovered he was just a righ hired gun who got strung along a plot larger than him.
Frankly in the end I skipped every single cutscene because I felt the attempt at narration ate way too much game time compared to the gunfights who I felt were lacking until EX mode (fully upgraded weapons -although the missile guiding system is pointless make the game more fun and the battles more interesting).

In the end I didn't really care about the story, I felt the final boss, while imposing, was a letdown seeing how we don't even fight Enra and how little we enjoy the Nobitsura Kage given how everyone's been obsessing over it all along the whole game.

The jokes always sucked, but while the original Lo Wang was as you said basically an HK ripoff of Duke, at least his comebacks were fun (my favouritezs are still "You half da man you used to be" and "How is that for Kung-fu fighting you chickenshit?!").

Modern Lo Wang has some nice ones (recycled ad nauseam in the second one), but frankly I don't think the dialog and sxtorytelling picked up or fell down that much. So far I feel like the new Shadow Warrior series suffers from the same problem as DNF did: storytelling, cutscenes and cinematic settings made for storytelling are needless in that kind of B-Movie action game, give us maze-maps and keyhunts, more enemies and explosions.
His exchanges with Hoji in the first game were okay, but for instance one of the later chapters in his lab is just long and pointless wakling around and enduring a slow and prodding dialog that tries too hard to be deep, also Enra is built up to be a mad ruler, a monster to stop, and it's all resolved in a cutscene...

I think the best thing is completely forget about the dialogs and characters, frankly Kamiko sounds like a whiny brat all along and how many things are just not developed, others are just one-dimensional (Smith, Heika), Gozu sounds like a whiny prancing princess, the dialog cutscenes in both games are kinda laughable with the characters constantly flaying and swaying, hamming it up to the max.
All in all, you're just dropped in a post-apocalyptic universe with no real reason, Wang barely grew up by the end of the first game and just became drunk with his own self for handling the Nobitsura Kage and cutting off one of Zilla's arms, most things are vague to sound mysterious but neither of the FWH games had a good plot or writing.
Though hey, so far I haven't seen any good storytelling from FWG, Hard Reset itself is so light on the story it's barely worth mentioning.

Then again the first game kinda grew on me as I unlocked more stuff and EX mode is way more enjoyable because you're fully armed and can enjoy every gimmick. I also like the gun and swordplay in SW2 and I like the exploration aspect, I like the free roam option and how the movement is dynamic enough that you can run, jump, climb and dash between enemies, the overall use of powers and melee weapons has also been improved. I decided to abandon all hope about storytelling and only focus on the action parts and it makes both games so much better (the second one even more so because it's richer and does not make me feel stuck in a corridor of stop&go arenas and boring puzzles and scavenger hunts that often drag-on for too long).

I think the best thing is forget about the story, it's bad, maybe not as awful as Borderlands 2 and 3 could get, but still not great.

You know why Doom 4 and Eternal's stories are so good in my eyes? Because Doomguy doesn't try to be smart, the world around you unveils stuff, but you're not forced to care.
Here, you're supposed to care about paper-thin characters with less characterization than a D-rank ninjasploitation movie made on a Filipino budget (The Philippines were the place ultra-low-budget with gweilo -washed-up D- or lesser-rank white, mostly American- actors were shot).

I tend to agree and this game looks to be even more in the same direction. And by "same" I mean, more "lolsorandom" cutesy inanity mixed in with the occasional low-tier moralizing - basically what we have come to expect from millenial english majors. They affect irony towards corporate game cliches in the trailer but proceed to list off all of the corporate cliches they have embraced" the OP female partner who no doubt will be the de facto lead, the "cool hair", the dancy ballerina fighting animations, the silly billy tone - all the ACTUAL cliches we see everywhere else, while the cliches they are making fun of are mostly a straman. In simple terms, the original and SW1 had BALLS, and now they have been removed. I bought SW2 and was somewhat disappointed. This one 's gonna be a pass.

Balls? Or Wang?