#ZWEI: THE ILVARD INSURRECTION

[mysteamgrids]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection

[femmefaggot]

game to start first? noting that there are other factors however if any of you enjoy these I may do it sooner...

i am leaving out oxenfree 2 and i did not buy this ticket for now as they have been played, and in the case of the latter it is another visual novel... oh I should have seen about scarlet hollow...

[my-personal-place-to-write-blog]

After Brandish TDR and Zwei: The Arges Adventure, I’ve played Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection (simply known in Japan as Zwei! II).

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection is the sequel to Zwei: The Arges Adventure (known as Zwei!! in Japan). Zwei II is a game made by Nihon Falcom that came out in 2008 and honestly I really didn’t expect to love this game.

Ragna Valentine, a treasure hunter, got waylaid en route to his destination and gets attacked by a nefarious cat and a mysterious teenager. Following this altercation, he crash-landed his plane on the floating continent of Ilvard - his destination, almost costing him his life. Alwen du Moonbria saves him, and in exchange she seeks his help to take back her castle. They form a pact to help each other, and this is how the game starts.

Their journey allows them to come to terms with their own past but also to learn about themselves and about one another (and, in the meantime, prevent the demise of Ilvard).

I would love to say more about it, but the story, while simple, is really good and consistent, the pacing it’s great and the character writing is also really good (it’s good not only for the two main characters, but for the other character as well). The characters are also really ridiculous sometimes, but they have their own stories to tell.

"Time to learn some arcana with Gallandeau"

With all of this said, I want to briefly mention one character here. Gallandeau is easily one of the best comical character made by Falcom in general. He is really hilarious but he is genuinely well done. He steals the show by becoming more than a one-off mascot character. He is also capable to give advice when needed (the biggest example of this is after you finished a certain dungeon around midgame and the main duo is temporarily broken up. You will see him standing outside at the entrance of the mine - while he’s sunbathing at the sun - and he’s giving motivational speech to a certain someone who’s trying to escape from everything instead of facing the truth he just learned. This guy will actually face the consequence of his action, trying to be a coward and feign ignorance after all isn’t the solution to the problem).

I would love to say something more, but I need to go into spoiler details, which is something that I don’t want to do, so I’ll stop here. The development you see through Ragna and Alwen’s journey is just great.

Service Penguin, an actual character that you will meet in the game (it's a girl who’s dressing as a penguin)

Last thing to mention here are the NPCs. There are less NPCs to talk here compared to other games from the company, but just like in other games with their dialogue they reveal new aspects of their personality, their struggle and how they are living and react to what’s happening in the land.

Yes, you can talk to animals in this game

The humor in this game just works, both in the story and in gameplay section (not even the dungeons aren’t safe from a few jokes here and there).

Brandish :D

Zwei II is an isometric dungeon crawler with plenty of different layouts for the levels while sharing a few common themes: usually for the dungeon you will need to clear the first level; after that you will reach a junction (with a save point) which splits in two different paths: one will give you an upgrade for Ragna’s weapon while the other is the actual main path for finishing the dungeon.

"Obstacles? Burn them all"

Inside the dungeons players must defeat the enemies while solving the puzzles (which can be simple or more tricky to solve, but the game gives you some clues on how you can solve the puzzles) that the games throw at you when you are searching for exit. The layouts and the puzzle are different for every dungeon, and it really helps that the game isn’t repetitive as the first one when it comes to the design choice (it’s still worth pointing out that some of them have repetitive environments but, regardless of this, they still looks cool).

You'll get ranked based on how well you did in both dungeons and boss fights (bronze, silver, gold and platinum medal to your rank).

The camera in this game is fixed, but it works really well overall to progress through the stage and doing the platforming section. Also it’s mostly good against the boss but some of them might be a little bit difficult to defeat when you have to circle them and dodge their attacks.

Zwei 2 combat is fun. While it’s not something really complex, the game continues to give you new things to keep the combat fresh and, in the meantime, continue to improve. As you progress, you will unlock new skill, new magic, new Gears and new Arcana which gives new tool to the player for clearing out the enemies.

You have two characters who function as one: when you are close to the enemy you will use Ragna and fight them with melee attack, when you are far from them, you will use Alwen to hit them with ranged attack - you need to figure which spell is the best for fighting the enemy. You can switch between the two of them easily, you just need to press a button on the controller. You can also try to avoid the enemy attacks with the jump button. Jumping is also useful while traversing the dungeon.

It’s important to choose the right place for attacking and focusing on eliminating the more threatening enemies at first and just like I mentioned before, your tools will continue to increase while going forward so you can use a lot of different combos to take them down. Your kit is really responsive and solid, the combat is fun and finds new ways to challenge you right up until the end.

Another element to mention in regard to the gameplay is the pet system, which makes a return from the first game. Just like in Zwei!!, the pet accompanies the player while you are exploring the dungeon: they fight alongside you and while they are doing this, they help gathering the various collectables that the games gives to you.

One of the available pet of this game: a robot

Boss fights are tough fights in which you need to recontextualize how you use your kit: each has its own gimmick that makes this happen. I personally think that the boss fights are well designed and really fun.

However, there are two boss which I don’t like much (I find both them frustrating): one of them (the vine monster) is really difficult to hit and actually a pain to fight overall, the other one it’s a boss that you fight in a graveyard around midgame (I’m calling her in this way to avoid spoilers). You can hit this boss only at specific timing, after she does her move. In paper, this is interesting; the main problem is related to her speed. Everytime you hit the boss, the speed increase and it becomes faster. The timing to hit her is fairly strict (in the meantime you need to be careful as well to avoid her attack).

All the other boss in the game don’t have this problem, so exactly I don’t know what went wrong with this one. In fact, a lot of them are extremely cool to fight (for example, in late game, you will fight a boss which manipulates the gravity and this boss is excellent at making you switch between Ragna and Alwen). This game has a lot of fight that use this mechanic, that said I won’t mention them here in this mini-review.

The food experience system returns from the first game, and it works in the exact same way: enemies drop various kinds of food, which give you different amounts of EXP when you eat them.

If you collect 10 of the same type of food, you can trade them for 1 food item that gives you higher EXP than the 10 combined. Food is also the main source of healing that you have, so you get EXP while healing.

I love this game Falcom, but Carbonara isn't made in this way. You only need 3 things for that: pasta (spaghetti to be more precise), eggs and bacon (and then salt, of course).

I described this system in my review of Zwei 1 (near the end of that post, I'll put a link here so you can check that one out)

While playing the first game I actually didn’t realize how interesting this system is. Since the two main playable can’t get EXP while fighting, they will never be over-levelled compared to the enemy. You are free to kill all the enemies that you want and you’ll just collect food. And the moment you have it, you can choose when you want to use it for levelling up, when you need it for healing, and so on.

Sure, you can grind for food (and I actually did this in the first game in order to brute-forcing through it, personally I don’t think that the gameplay didn’t age really well in the first game) but if you do that, it’s your choice. The game discourages the player to grind (especially since you can get better food with trading) for that, and thanks to this system, even if you do side-content, you cannot become stupidly overpowered (and making the game a joke in this way). Unlike the first game, I didn’t need to go that much in the previous stage to get food for level up and when I did it, I simply collected it to have more things to exchange but like I said before, you choose what you want to use and when. In any case, I was never over-levelled, if anything else I started a lot of stage under levelled and I ended up levelling up during that (or I just used them again the boss – and you will probably need them for this – and levelled up in this way).

The G-Coliseum is an amazing diversion from the main dungeon, the battle arena fights are fun to go through (special mention to the last fight in the gauntlet, it’s really challenging). You can also beat again all the various bosses that you fight in the main story and see the trophies that you have collected in your journey in the Coliseum.

Pokkle and Pipiro, the protagonists from the first game, appear in this game. While this game have some reference to the first game, the story are actually disconnected: it's not necessary to play it to enjoy this game.

You can deliver the treasures which you find in the dungeons in the Adventurer’s Guild in exchange for money and improved guild rank. You will either find or buy some apps that you can equip to serve various in-game functions. A lot of these item are the usual one that you will find in other action-RPGs (a minimap, a window that shows the enemy names and HP, etc.) but some of are really weird (for example, a travel scale, a pedometer, a math game etc.).

The game has 3D, cute-looking visuals. Characters are displayed in small proportions, making everyone look young despite their age. Backgrounds have great composition and unique look, and the addition of foggy effects at some areas help to make it look more atmospheric.

The ost is fantastic, as usual. It’s a pleasure to listen to the ost of both Zwei games, really. Here I’ll list some of my favourite one:

Ordium Shrine

Gloomgeld Woods

A Prayer to Espina

Mechanical Girl

Prepare Yourself

Help Alwen (Rushing in ver.)

Spirit Fortress Melchizedek

Zwei's localization is fantastic, XSEED has done an excellent job with it. The English dub is also excellent (not that I can judge the Japanese one, since it’s not in the game); the only problem is related to the mixing: some cutscene have the BGM to be louder than the voice dub, so it’s better to lower just a little bit the BGM in the menu to avoid this.

This game took me almost 39 hours for completing it (I did a good part of its side-content in the meantime).

This is the last game that the company released on PC before moving entirely on the handhelds and home consoles ever since. The game bombed hard in Japan because of this, releasing this game only on PC back in the day was a wrong choice. Considering how the games ends, it’s clear that Falcom originally planned to make other games in the series, but alas, this never happened. I don’t think that it will never happen in the future, which is a shame really.

Zwei II is definitely a good game and one that I enjoyed a lot, a game that deserves to be played.

[audiobooks535]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection STEAM digital for Windows

[gmlocg]

1,668.) Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection (Zwei II Plus)

Release: December 24th, 2009 | GGF: Action, RPG | Developer(s): Nihon Falcom Corp. | Publisher(s): Nihon Falcom Corp., GameBridge, Interwise Multimedia Corp., XSEED Games, Marvelous USA, Inc. | Platform(s): Windows (2009)

[vermissa-ermine]

It's Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection

ket

[crabsinvideogames]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection

[gooberto]

so I’m about nearing the end of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection and lemme tell you, if you haven’t played Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection, you should play Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection

[third-energy]

Full Steam Ahead for the Falcom Shilling Express.

Steam is having a sale from now until the 19th where every Trails game is currently on sale, no doubt to celebrate the PC release of Cold Steel II.

Incidentally, Xanadu Next, Tokyo Xanadu, and Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection are also on sale. While I’d definitely recommend these games too, I’d highly recommend Trails above all of them.

[femmefaggot]

anyone fucking own zwei the ilvard insurrection or do we need to keep an eye out for sales

[my-personal-place-to-write-blog]

2023 media thread on what I have done so far (part 1)

Brandish the Dark Revenant

Fire Emblem Engage

Zwei: The Arges Adventure

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection

Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim

Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed

[xseedgames]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection - Localization Blog #4

Can you hear it? A voice, booming and boisterous, blowing in upon the cool winds of autumn. A voice that beckons you to come sit a spell and play a good ol’ videogame. “They don’t make ‘em like this no more,” it says. “Well...most don’t. That’s why we need to sell a bunch’a copies, so they’ll get right to making Zwei 3! Yes siree, with Falcom’s storied lineage of action RPGs, it’d be a slam dunk! Ghahahaha!” That voice...is my voice, broad as the sea and hearty as a meal that consists solely of potatoes and slabs of meat.

That’s right, true believers, it’s Nick, here once again to share with you the myriad fascinations of working in videogame localization. If you’ve been keeping up, this is the fourth blog I’ve written about the upcoming release of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection. The first entry gave a basic rundown of what the game is like and what you can expect from it, while the second entry went into more depth about the localization work and the nuances of character writing. The third entry was a progress report, detailing where we were in the QA cycle and why we’d be missing our summer release date.

Today, I’d like to tell you a story: the tale of how Zwei: II ended up with the expanded English voice acting it now boasts. Although this news has been known ever since we officially announced the game, I haven’t seen much discussion surrounding it, but the process of how “let’s add voice acting” went from pie-in-the-sky thought to reality is one I think you’ll find fascinating.

See, the interesting thing isn’t that we added English dubbing to Zwei: II. We weren’t able to secure the rights for the original Japanese voices, so it was pretty much a given we were going to do a dub. No, the most interesting part is that the dub adds a LOT more voicework than was present in the original. Why did we do that? How did we decide what to dub? And how much more is there, exactly? This and more I shall unfold for you, dear reader!

Zwei: II was designed without voice acting in its story scenes, and it holds up perfectly well that way, as classic RPGs do. But, that said, Zwei’s story is very driven by its outsized personalities. The characters really sell the scenes, and while I wrote for each of the characters in such a way as to accomplish that without the need for voice acting, their sometimes-cartoonish gusto and theatricality seemed like they’d be even more colorful when brought to life by VAs. I talked with the big boss, Ken, about the prospect, and he told me to put together a script so we could have the studio price out how much it would cost us.

To be honest, I’m still kind of surprised Ken was open to it. After all, Zwei: II isn’t a console release of a modern title – it’s a PC release of an older title. Maybe that goes to show how well-received Japanese games have been on PC in the last several years. Personally, I think a well-received game like Cold Steel leading the charge as far as “adding additional voice acting to a PC port” did a lot to open the door for a more modest title like Zwei to get a significant bump in voice acting. But success here provided my first challenge: putting together a script.

Now that adding more voice acting was on the table, the question then became, “Okay, so what do we actually voice?” All the battle stuff was covered at a bare minimum due to the fact that it was in the Japanese voice script, so the natural answer was, “Let’s just voice all the main story.” That’s a reasonable target, and not exceedingly difficult to pull from the full game script, since many of the main story scenes are positioned just before and after the game’s major boss battles. I began to assemble a “story scenes” voice script with all the scenes I thought most essential to conveying the game’s narrative, breaking it down scene by scene. After handing off a first draft to the studio and getting their estimate, I was given the green light, since it had apparently come in under what we were expecting.

But of course, ever being one to press my luck, I said, “Wellllll...actually there are a couple more scenes I COULD include!” And with a resigned sigh from Ken, I went back in and added a few scenes I had opted to leave on the cutting room floor during my first draft. As things stand, the new voice script’s coverage of story events isn’t perfect – there’s still one boss battle that has its before/after scenes unvoiced (I chose that one to drop because I felt that what was expressed there is also expressed in other voiced scenes well enough), but such are the choices one has to make at the crossroads of idealism and budgetary limitations.

The whole “voicing scenes before and after boss battles” approach worked well because it set up a good amount of consistency as to when players could expect to hear something voiced. It also, by the very nature of the scenes chosen, is really good at building the personalities of the game’s antagonists – which is helpful since they do a lot to spur Ragna and Alwen’s growth.

The unfortunate downside to my scene-selecting methodology is that I didn’t get to include many scenes outside of those. There are only two voiced scenes that aren’t tied to before/after boss encounters – one in which Ragna talks about his past (which I thought gave good insight into his character), and a key one at the very start of the game in which Ragna discovers that Alwen is, in fact, a vampire, and they have their first long discussion about their blood contract and how Ragna wants to be equal partners. That’s such a defining scene that sets up both protagonists perfectly for everything that is to come that there was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted that one voiced.

At this point, let’s stop for a moment and examine the script. The original Japanese script was 808 lines. The number of lines in the new voice script, however, clocked in at 2807. That’s basically 2000 newly voiced lines, all story. And while it may not seem gigantic in light of a game like Trails of Cold Steel, you’ll certainly be able to feel the presence of the voice acting as you play through the game. Ragna and Alwen in particular saw massive increases: from 88 and 89 to 724 and 548, respectively. We even picked up an entirely new character who had no lines in the original Japanese voice script but did factor into several of the story scenes I had selected!

When casting, I conferred with both Tom and Kris to get their general impressions, and to solicit suggestions in cases where I didn’t have any particular VA in mind. Zwei: II is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve, so I was casting with an ear toward a “Saturday Morning Cartoon” feel – expressive voices that have a touch of exaggeration in them. It was a different feel than we’d chased when casting for Trails of Cold Steel, but it got us the sound we were looking for.

Recording took six days, with a stream of VAs coming in to lend us their talent. John accompanied me for the first couple days, while Tom helped in the latter half, both lending some much-welcomed aid by helping me keep track of any changes we made to lines during recording while I was focusing on the line deliveries. To level with you a bit here, I’ve never been the most organized person, so the voice recording process, with its focus on having everything triple-checked and accounted for, has always felt pretty daunting to me. After all, there’s always that cold dread that you’ll have an actor in the booth and suddenly, some problem with the script files will pop up, costing you precious time when every minute has value. Thankfully, there were no complications with Zwei’s recording – it was actually a pretty smooth, pleasant time (though very busy). Some of our VAs I had worked with before, so seeing them again and trying them in different-sounding roles was fun. Other VAs I was meeting for the first time, and I enjoyed getting to see them at work, as well as seeing what kind of vocal ranges they could pull off (always helpful when we’re brainstorming voice casts for future projects).

Our voice director was someone I’d met before, and in fact someone I requested by name after discerning how deep his knowledge ran concerning things of the nerdy persuasion. For Zwei, I didn’t want to take a chance on a director that only had a surface-level understanding of anime – I wanted to be able to throw out oddly specific requests like “Play it more like X from the series Y!” and have them understand the voicing intent behind that and translate it into instructions the VAs could make sense of.

Talking with him over the course of the project was a mile-a-minute ride, but among all the really nerdy stuff we talked about, one common thread that really stuck with me is his identification of Zwei as a “pulp story.” Before then, I’d approached Zwei in my mind from that anime-centric perspective it so clearly embodies, but our conversations got me wondering how, as a fan of pulp-style stuff, I’d never consciously made that connection before. In another universe where Zwei wasn’t a Japanese videogame, it feels like it’d be a natural fit as a weekly radio serial. The character influences I mentioned in my second blog post all led to “pulp” too, when I followed the strings back.

Back at work, I reviewed all the voice files and marked the ones that needed filters applied, as you do when, for instance, someone is talking to a character telepathically or is possessed by a demon (y’know, your general RPG happenings), and we got them into the game. There’s something of a sense of trepidation that comes when you finally drop all those voices into the game proper. You hold your breath, thinking, “That was so much work... I reeeeeeally hope this sounds good!” Fortunately, our VAs didn’t disappoint, and hearing some of my favorite scenes brought to life through performance really helped sell the emotion of the scenes, just as I’d hoped at the outset.

Now, maybe you’re not fond of dubs. Or maybe you’re a purist, wanting to experience the game without the addition of a bunch of voice acting that wasn’t in the original. Believe me, I totally understand you. Thankfully, the voice volume is on a separate slider, so you can crank it down and read through at your own pace, with the voices you imagine the characters to have. That kind of experience is fun too, I think, and I’m interested in what those of you who play it both ways think about the ways in which the dub shapes how one perceives the story and characters.

Of course, for you fans of RPG dubs, I’m also interested to discover which characters will become fan-favorites and which lines will be the most entertaining and memorable. Our programmer, Sara, has even gone above and beyond with filled-out lip flap for the dubbed scenes! In the original game, there’s a brief lip-flap that’s tied to the scroll-out speed of text in a character’s text box. What that means in practice is that their mouths move for about a second while the text is displaying, then once it’s all there on screen, their mouth doesn’t move anymore. It’s a perfectly sensible setup for a game without voiced story lines, but in the cases where lines were voiced, I wanted the lip flap to continue as long as the voiced line was still playing. From the sound of it, it took some real doing, but the lip flap does indeed now track to the length of the voice clip in cases where story lines are voiced. It might seem to be a minor detail, but I think it’s details like this that help make the experience feel well integrated and authentic.

In any case, you won’t have to wonder too much longer what the game sounds like, because it’s finally out in less than a week, with a Trueblood vampire-approved release date of October 31st. I hope you’ll enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it. After all...everyone could use a little more PASSION in their souls!

[satoshi-mochida]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection will launch for PC via Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store on October 31 with a 10 percent-off launch discount from its standard price of $29.99 / €29.99 / £24.99, publisher XSEED Games announced.

Here’s an overview of the Falcom-developed action RPG, via XSEED Games:

Originally released for PC in Japan in 2008 as Zwei II Plus, Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection brings the cult classic into the modern HD era with visual improvements and, for the first time, a full English localization complete with over 2000 never-before-voiced lines to bring the game’s strange and eclectic characters to life.

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection is a charmingly presented action RPG featuring a unique food-based experience system, a colorful cast of characters, and a quirky, standalone narrative. When the haughty vampire princess Alwen du Moonbria saves the life of brash, treasure-hunting pilot Ragna Valentine by binding him to her service through a blood contract, the unlikely duo must set off to recover Alwen’s stolen magic and her ancestral castle. Players take control of the dual protagonists throughout their adventures, using Ragna’s physical prowess and weapons alongside Alwen’s mastery of magic to discover the combinations that best fit their playstyle and the obstacles they must overcome.

The game’s real-time combat is tied to a leveling process that allows players to choose when to apply experience through a unique food-based experience system. Rather than earning experience after combat, experience is gained by eating a variety of foods, which also serve as the game’s primary source of healing. And if players wait to chow down, they can combine their food into far superior culinary delights that grant significantly more experience! This means that players can tailor the challenge presented by their enemies through a steady diet, either by eating everything that crosses their path or by saving up for a greater gain in the future! A wide variety of pets can fight alongside players, too, helping take down some of the massive bosses encountered on this lengthy adventure through the land of Ilvard. Fans of vampires, treasure-hunting, fairies, ninjas, luchadores, cat-people, vintage airplanes, magic castles, robots, chickens that lay bombs, chain-smoking nuns, and more will find lots to love with Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection!

Watch a new trailer below. View a new set of screenshots at the gallery.

[g4zdtechtv]

Trailer Park - Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection (PC)

Is that a girl in a giant penguin costume?

[sivercat]

The true dangers of Ilvard

[reisearnor]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection is now available on Steam!