A playthrough of Sega's 1999 survival horror game for the Dreamcast, D2.

D2 is the final game in Kenji Eno's trilogy of surreal horror titles following D (1995, PC/PS1/Saturn/3DO) and Enemy Zero (Saturn), and though its arguably stranger than either of the two that came before it, it is a satisfying addition to the series.

It represents an even larger deviation from Enemy Zero than Enemy Zero was from D, which I was glad to see. Eno was hardly the predictable type, and this game really highlights that. In addition to the highly detailed first-person interior scenes and the fully 3D connecting world, some RPG mechanics have now been thrown into the mix. They're simple but they can be tense thanks to gross enemy designs, the limited ammo for more powerful weapons, and the fact that you can't move in battle. Despite how they might initially appear, they're quite integral to the gameplay and mesh well, even if the encounter rate is annoyingly high in some areas.

The indoor areas are very similar to what we saw in D and EZ - you still move on predetermined paths, and they're rendered in real-time thanks to the Dreamcast's significant jump in horsepower. They look excellent. The snowy outdoors also look amazing, and the stark lack of color does wonders for the tone of these scenes. It's an incredibly impressive presentation for a Dreamcast game, let alone one that was released so early in the system's life. There's a good reason it shipped on four GD-ROM discs.

The story is... novel. I've never seen anything else like it, and I dont want to spoil too much, so I'll just say that it usually holds together pretty well, and when it goes completely off the rails, some of the stuff becomes so jaw-dropping that might not even notice. It does a lot with to keep things tense - from the extreme body horror and sexually violent imagery (OMG the first boss on disc 4!!!) to the constant creeping ambience of the sound design, Eno had a vision and went with it. There are a ton of cutscenes - you might think of it as the MGS take on survival horror, but it works. Though it's not without its flaws, the entire package is pretty startlingly effective.

Especially post 9/11, given the content of the intro FMV.

But ouch, the voice acting and lip synching does hurt a bit. And Kimberly's face - what happened to her?! Why are her lips so weirdly shaped? Laura's raccoon/grandma eye makeup (bright pink, of course) is a bit odd as well. And the fact that she's running around in knee-deep snow in a skirt suit and heels. Not very practical, is she?

Many people have asked over the past few years if I could do this game, so I bought a copy a while back so that I could have a video ready in time for Halloween. So for those of you that requested this, I hope it was worth the wait. I hope you all enjoy it. I certainly did. This one is pretty special.

I played this on an original Dreamcast console and captured it through one of those nifty VGA-to-HDMI cables. It's far, far more convenient that trying to directly capture from a VGA+stereo audio cables, and the quality is virtually identical to a raw VGA signal. D2 looks pretty rough on a composite connection - the game is pretty dark, and on anything but it's native 480p through VGA turns everything into blurry mush.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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