Jade Cocoon 2 is a game that’s not made for its amazing storyline. It’s just too simple. The game starts with a boy named Kahu on an adventure to find out how to stop this parasitic thing inside of him that will kill him if he doesn’t find the four forest orbs. So he goes out to the different element forests on a mission to find them.

Jade Cocoon 2 has some pretty looking graphics, but there is a major problem in this area. As you travel threw out the forests to collect monsters and find the orbs everything is repeated constantly. The forest drawings are very artistic but most of the time all they use is the same backgrounds and change a few details like color and mist and such, so after a while there is just nothing new to see which starts to make the game very dull.

Jade Cocoon 2 has good voice acting though. A lot of the dialogue in the game helps moves the storyline along quite well and they picked the perfect voice to act the parts of the hero’s and the bad guys. The music is too low keyed and just didn’t stand out at all; they needed to add more emotion to it.

” Hmm? what’s going on..”

Jade Cocoon 2 is a game for people that love to collect monsters. Why? Because that is the ONLY thing that makes the game have a purpose, without this engine put into the game it would truly suck! You see Kahu gets to collect and capture monsters that have different elemental properties to them like water used primarily for healing, fire primarily for attacking, earth primarily for protecting and wind primarily used for status attacks. In a battle Kahu stands on a grid which has each of the elemental properties around him and on each elemental property you get to place three monsters that share the traits of the property to battle against other foes! When in a fight you get to switch between properties on the fly which lets you battle with your other monsters in your command. Sounds confusing huh? Well think of pokemon crystal and ruby, but done in an extreme fashion.
There is a lot of depth in this, and it takes a while to get used to, but you have to be into this type of stuff in order to fully enjoy the game which I am not. A fun thing they added was the chance to have a two player mode which gives you the chance to battle your friend’s monsters…ya I know what you’re thinking what kind of pokemon rip off is this?? The final bone I have to pick with this game is the fact that they took an element out of this one that I though was pretty cool in the first one. You see in part one when you combine your monsters to form a new one their physical appearance changes. In part two however they remain similar which doesn’t make it fun to combine things. They only change different when they level up but not when you combine them. Oh well….

Jade Cocoon is only good for pokemon fans and people that liked the first. So if you’re a hardcore RPG player looking for action along the likes of Final Fantasy and breath of fire stay far away from this game, far, far away…or at least rent it!