Played on PC, streamed once a week.
Sometime halfway through this game, I came across an article on the studio's workplace culture, and I think it's worth a read: Despite its beautiful Ori games, Moon Studios is called an ‘oppressive’ place to work
!! Spoilers below !!
I think gameplay is improved, overall, from the first game - mixed feelings on the ability switching, but feels better on certain abilities.
Ability switching is funny because I set sword to square, heal to circle (just like Hollow Knight) and never changed those two out. And then I remapped my buttons so that Bash would be on the same button as it was for the previous game, because having it on L1 just feels weird and also would definitely have confused me later in chase scenes. It does resolve the issue of having to learn a new button for every new skill, though.
As usual, the aerial movement is great. I really like that the late-game boosted jump was reworked to use the Bash interface, so it was a lot more intuitive/easy to control and also could be used in mid-air. Burrow/swim dash are cool abilities for boosting into the air, though in later chases (especially the sand worm chase) I definitely lost a few runs to forgetting the appropriate button - that part required burrow/bash/dash and I'd mess up the burrow/bash sometimes. The final battle against Shriek was fairly...ok I guess, but having an entire segment without landing platforms was cool. I thought it showcased the power of the aerial mechanics really well.
As for other abilities - it's nice to see that the bonus abilities from the DLC sections of Blind Forest (that could cause some sequence breaking) were well-integrated here. Weapon abilities made it easier to deal with enemies. I found I mostly used the slow/high energy cost + destructive ones like the spear and hammer for fights. Ori is more of a puzzle/mobility game for me (I guess I turn all games into puzzle/mobility games though), so I usually just had a mobility ability equipped. It slightly bothers me that there are some abilities that are extremely specific to their areas, such as the light one, but it's not that big a deal.
Spirit shards - wasn't that invested in them. There were some neat ones I think, but I didn't really think much about my build or anything.
Autosaves - I feel it was better to be able to save wherever I wanted, especially in more precarious maps, but generally speaking the respawn checkpoints weren't placed too annoyingly far away, except for said precarious maps.
On the whole it introduces a lot of new mechanics, including characters that can be interacted with, shops, quests, etc. but in ways that are easy to warm up to. There's a lot of optional collectible content (which admittedly I did not really collect).
Ok, so. I have a number of thoughts about the story.
First, the good part - Niwen's locations feel more lived in, in that there's more background lore about who lives there, the flora and fauna etc. There's more worldbuilding here that places the new characters in the location they call home, and structures exist because people built them in the past. It's great for exploring - I enjoyed the water mill a lot as an artificial structure and cleaning it up so it moved again was very satisfying. The game expands on the spirit tree lore and how they come to be formed...although this info really only comes up near the end.
A minor issue with the map is that there's one section of the Windswept Wastes that I never figured out how to open, but it turns out that it was a cut area. Extremely odd of them to not make it look less like a place you can go into. It seems like a good amount of content for the area was already done, and it got cut because it was apparently not fun enough...
The plot, though. SO MUCH about it bothers me.
Shriek is one of the big ones - definitely a parallel to Kuro in the first game, except instead of parent with dead babies she's the baby of dead parents. Like Kuro, she hates the light (weird, because if anything, she was wronged by owl parents) and attacks Ori and Ku whenever. She gets a sad backstory in a cutscene. Unlike Kuro, though, she doesn't get any redemption, only a sad ending where it seems she only wanted to be loved. Ori's shown putting themselves between Seir and Shriek in order to stop the former from attacking her, and trying to reach out to Shriek, but she denies it and continues attacking. After that you don't really have a choice but to fight her.
So Shriek's position in the story is pretty weird - she's not really THE antagonist because she's not the one who spreads decay (I believe she was supposed to have some decay-related passive powers, but it didn't make it into the final game?) and is really just a random antagonistic entity. The decay already existed before she was born, and in fact led to the way she is. If you cut her entire existence out of the story...it wouldn't make that much of a difference, except that Ku's life would probably not have been threatened as much. Already she's not very relevant...only shows up in a particular section of the map, doesn't seem particularly invested in Ori's quest to find the wisps. She's not built up like Kuro is as a watchful entity that actively hunts Ori specifically to prevent them from restoring the tree, so...there's just no threat beyond the chase portions, really? The unnamed tatarigami entity that blocks up the mill and possesses Kwolok (and then gets squished in one blow, even though I expected it to be more of a recurring antagonist) has more relevance to Ori's quest.
Despite this they do put a bunch of effort into making her appear sympathetic. I don't particularly enjoy this series' sympathetic villains, though, because their idea of sympathetic but irredeemable lacks compassion. Ori really only extends the most basic of attempts to reach out (I don't think they even reached out to Kuro; they just learnt her backstory and then was like "moving on,") and then the story says anything else after that is their personal decision to make things worse, we tried and therefore no one should criticise us. Kuro's case was arguably less bad, because restoring the spirit tree to her own detriment (understatement) was framed as her own decision. Shriek, on the other hand, is more or less beaten to death by Ori. To recap: Shriek attacked, and Seir retaliated strongly, and Ori got between them, and Shriek attacked, and after this it was just considered fair game. I SUPPOSE it could be considered, like, simplification for the sake of telling the story. But it's so odd that Ori the total doormat wouldn't keep trying and/or just avoid confrontation as far as possible. I feel like many players wouldn't have wanted to actually kill Shriek, given her backstory, but doing so conveniently resolves her thread by writing her out of the story.
As for the ending - it felt really weird to me as a resolution. I think I appreciate the concept of spirits turning into spirit trees and the idea that Ori's sacrifice was necessary to save others. And also that this is supposed to be framed as Ori's selfless sacrifice? I think? The good part of it is that it balances out Kuro's sacrifice in the first game by having Ori sacrifice themselves for the memory of Kuro. But the way it's pulled off, the way it's built up, and the way it's reacted to is all over the place and it feels so off.
I do wonder if Ori at any point wanted to put effort into this place beyond doing whatever they needed to do to save Ku, or if they were just swept along by whatever other people asked them to do. Honestly it just feels like the latter, most of the time. In the first game, I feel like it made sense for them to want to go about saving the land because they'd lost their home and family and could've been seeking purpose...but in this one, it feels like people just saw a convenient saviour in them, and they were simply unable to say no. The Willow pressing Ori to become the new spirit tree of a place they didn't even come from, on short notice, probably presuming that Ori couldn't refuse in order to save Ku even if they weren't particularly attached to Niwen (and that's also a possible source of guilt because of how many other people were dependent on them), was really uncomfortable. If Ku and Ori hadn't happened to go to Niwen...or if Ku hadn't landed in the Silent Woods...or you know, just anything that would've avoided them meeting Shriek...this wouldn't have happened. The sacrifice doesn't feel right because Ori was basically pressured into the decision by time and the other characters. Also that Ori would probably also have died from battle injuries maybe.
I also dislike the way it's framed by the devs? From the wiki:
On a Steam Community Forum discussion regarding distaste towards the ending, Thomas Mahler made a statement about the ending which compared people's maturity to their ability to handle the game's ending, quote, "If you're old enough, you'll understand that making big sacrifices in life doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world."
I feel like this statement...kind of misses the point (and is really condescending lol). Apparently in early dev they also killed off Ku permanently (which caused a lot of playtesters to drop the game) and I really have to wonder if they intended to write a story that was bittersweet and beloved, or if they just wanted to beat players over the head with depression but with beautiful visuals. I've seen comments on the first game that justified the story with stuff like "not everyone can be happy, that's just how things are" like firstly, this is a fictional story written by people who have control over how things go, secondly, it's not even about making everyone happy it's about the dissonance between how they set up people's expectations for the characters through how they made people feel about them vs. what the characters actually got. PLUS it's clear the writer(s) had certain intentions for how they wanted people to feel, without the ability to reflect on why this story...isn't working the way they think it does?
Overall, this is pretty much a gameplay game for me. The experience of moving around, appreciating the art, listening to the music, etc. is great and it's improved upon from the previous game, with a good number of likeable characters and variety of environments. That is to say: everything except the story. I really wanted to like the Ori series more.