Video Game / Shadow Warrior 2

Got enough Wang for all of ya!

"I used to have it all. Then I fucked up, and saved the world."

— Lo Wang

Shadow Warrior 2 is the follow-up Flying Wild Hog's offbeat Shadow Warrior (2013) shooter following the further misadventures of former Corporate Samurai Lo Wang. On June 10, 2015, publisher Devolver Digital announced the game. An announcement trailer soon followed, confirming the game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game also features four-player co-operative multiplayer. The game was released on PC in October 2016, and for consoles in May 2017.

Five years have passed since Lo Wang shattered the alliance between his deceitful former boss and the ancient gods of the shadow realm. Despite noble intentions, Lo Wang's efforts to annihilate the darkness corrupted the world, creating a strange and savage new order where humans and demons live side by side. Now surviving as a reclusive mercenary on the edge of a corrupted world, the formidable warrior must again wield a devastating combination of guns, blades, magic and wit to strike down the demonic legions overwhelming the world. Lo Wang can battle alongside his fellow ninja buddies online in four-player co-op, or go it alone in spectacular procedurally-generated landscapes to complete daring missions and collect powerful new weapons, armor, and arcane relics of legend.

The third installment, Shadow Warrior 3, was released on March 1, 2022.

For the trailer, click here.

The game provides examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Kamiko thinks that Ameonna's affection for Lo Wang is creepy. Wang mostly disagrees.
• Absurdly Youthful Mother: Mamushi Heika is Kamiko's grandmother, yet Wang notes she looks young enough to be Kamiko's mother. There is a reason for this.
• Affably Evil: Ameonna, who never stops being oddly flirty-creepy, even after Lo Wang stumbles across the fact she's trying to kill Kamiko and then the universe.
• A.K.A.-47: Several of the guns (those which are nor divine/demonic weapons neither Zilla-made futuristic guns) are based on real weapons:
  • The Devolver Anaconda is a Colt Anaconda.
  • The Point Five-O is a Desert Eagle.
  • The Swift & Messon is a Smith & Wesson Model 6904.
  • The Sidekick is a heavily customized MAC-10.
  • The AR-53 is a G36K.
  • The AMCAR Rifle is a M4.
  • The MG Triple-6 is a gold-plated M60.
  • The One-Trick Pony is a M79 grenade launcher.
• All There in the Manual: There's a surprising depth of information and backstory that can be collected as Randomly Drops and stored in the Wanglopedia, ranging from news reports and eyewitness documents about the state of the world, to lab notes regarding Orochi Zilla's experiments, to journals and diaries regarding nearly every supporting and background character in the game.
• Almighty Idiot: Ameonna's illogical reasoning and self-destructive tendencies that have erupted in the sequel. They're largely the product of Go Mad from the Isolation due to Mezu, Hoji and Enra's negligence.
• Apocalypse How: Planetary. The existence of demons and their being unleashed on the world sparked a devastating war between humanity and demonkind, leading to heavy casualties, mutations of local wildlife from demonic energy and multiple cities overrun. Exactly how bad it is is hard to say, but the world is radically different now.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Black Tears (or Crude), which is basically Eldritch Oil. Pros: Makes regular oil look like you're dumping olives in the fuel tank, increases the density of ANY essence (Chi, Broadcast Signals, even tea flavor), and when mixed with blood it temporarily increases intelligence. Cons: It turns people into weird monsters who explode into little monsters that spontaneously grow into large monsters, it mutates the land around it with eldritch tentacles, It might be sentient / controlled remotely as anyone riding a Crude-powered vehicle usually crashes into a wall.
  • It turns out what Crude is literally meant to be Ameonna's rain, a side-effect of extensive gate-sealing that becomes increasingly plentiful the more unstable and sexually insane Ameonna becomes.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Lo Wang thinks Smith is joking when he says he's not only a Masamune, but also an expert swordsman who can manipulate chi. This is despite fighting legions of demons and being granted magic powers by a God.
• Artificial Limb: Zilla has a cybernetic right arm as a replacement for the real one Lo Wang cut off in the previous game.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The final boss is set to "Warrior" by Stan Bush. It's an original piece created by Stan specifically for this game, and specifically themed after his signature work "The Touch."
• Awesome, but Impractical: The weapons and upgrades absolutely brim with flash, but some of them simply aren't practical:
  • The Raven. A heavy minigun that does absolutely monstrous single-target DPS, but it slows you to a crawl just by carrying it, has awful accuracy, takes a second to spin-up between refiring (which, factoring in increased enemy mobility, often makes it a choice between holding the trigger and wasting ammo as you try to track the target, or else wasting time waiting for it to spin back up while you try to get a steady shot), and chews through ammo like it's going out of style. While these traits are present in ALL the heavy machinegun type weapons, they're so pronounced on the Raven that it's hard to justify using it (and it's a money-only weapon, which will wipe out most of your savings when it's available). Its Demon counterpart has the bonus of reloading a tad faster and firing much more accurately, the King Skeletor does more damage per shot, and the Triple-Six has no warm-up time and reloads much quicker.
  • Chainsaws, arguably. Massive DPS, can nearly-stunlock its victim, and oh-so-satisfying to use, but they effectively lock you in place while sawing into a target (in a game where standing still on higher difficulties for any length of time is almost certain death), the target CAN recover and knock you away or otherwise attack you, and most heavier/rarer enemies are resistant or immune to the stunning effect outright. They can be a VERY powerful workhouse, but heavy caution should be used for when to employ them.
  • Charged shot mods. In exchange for a significant reduction to fire rate, you can charge up a weapon's shot over several seconds to get a damage multiplier. On the right weapons this can lead to an absolutely devastation Alpha Strike, but the drastically reduced fire rate means that that shot had better count, because you won't be using that weapon as a run-and-gun workhorse anymore.
  • Multi-barrel mods. Fires multiple shots from the clip at once, with a total damage boost to boot. Like above, absolutely amazing damage output, with a much more reasonable reduction in fire rate, but a hefty accuracy penalty as well...and worst of all, the weapon will overheat almost every shot (whereas for most weapons, this is only a risk if you fire nonstop for several seconds), leading to even heftier cooldown periods before it can even be reloaded. It's extremely pronounced with lower-level mods on double-barrel-style shotguns, where the reloads are often more than five seconds, and the charge shot puts on a cooldown and doubles that reload time.
  • Doubleshot mods. Each pull of the trigger consumes two bullets for increased damage out. This is the automatic counterpart to the semi-auto multibarrel, and you'll see a significant increase in DPS; however, while it lacks the overheating, accuracy, or fire rate problems, the increase in damage is MUCH less, considering two bullets are being consumed at a time, resulting in burning your ammo supply twice as fast for a 40-50% increase in DPS.
  • Rapid-fire mods. Usable on revolvers and bows, on the former they increase the otherwise-slow fire rate, and cause Wang to fire the gun fan-the-hammer style, but the weapon suffers a not-insignificant damage penalty, turning it from a precise, high-damage Sniper Pistol into a weaker semi-auto mid-range weapon that are, more often than not, completely outclassed by actual sub-machine guns or the assault rifles. On top of that, the clip size and reload speed aren't modified, so expect to spend as much time reloading as you do shooting. It's even worse on bows, which lose their chargeable shots, great range and high damage in exchange for a fairly-weak quickdraw shot that isn't nearly fast, powerful, or long-ranged enough to justify the speed of ammo consumption (which, again, isn't modified.)
  • The Heavy Metal medallion allows you to finally dual-wield Assault Rifles. The issue is, there's another Medallion that ups most Firearm damage, and chances are, you use weapons other than the assault rifle to deal with other threats.
• Bad Boss: Orochi Zilla kills off (or tries to, anyway) his employees extremely often. Both main characters are Zilla-Corp agents who were betrayed, though Kamiko, at least, was a spy, whereas Lo Wang simply had a conscience. His female counterpart, Yakuza boss Mamushi Heika, isn't much better.
• Bag of Spilling: Wang loses all of his weapons and powers from the first game save for two of his sword abilities and the ability to heal. There's no real explanation (with one very specific exception that ends up being the focus of a series of early sidequests.)
• Barrier Maiden: It turns out that not only was Ameonna the provider for nourishing rain in the demon realm, but she was also used to seal the gates of the demon realm against the forces of Chaos. Of course, most of it was an excuse to be passed around in her siblings' power plays, who used her powers to build great monuments to themselves, while Enra had her locked away, by herself, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Later, it turns out Kamiko is meant to be one, as she has the blood of a god in her, and thus a good candidate for sealing the gate.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. You can slice, gib, charbroil, and explode apart female demons and Yakuza members as much as their male counterparts. Played straight with Kamiko's corrupted body, which retains (mostly) her humanoid form on top of a massive Silent Hill-esque mountain of flesh, and Ameonna, after fusing with said body.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Orochi Zilla is, obviously, The Heavy of this game, being the main instigator behing the first half of the plot, and Ameonna takes over as the main threat, forcing Zilla and Wang to join forces.
• Big "OMG!": Lo Wang's "Eureka!" Moment, involving a three-year-old half-demon stuck inside his mind the entire length of the game.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: While being the granddaughter of a Yakuza boss is already a pretty messed up start for Kamiko, this extends up to being the daughter of a demon lord, whose demigod aunt is actively out to destroy her soul, her boxfaced Cyborg uncle being a lucrative pervert and, above all else, being related to a dragon out of nowhere.
• Blamed for Being Railroaded: Mamushi Heika gives a sidequest where Wang is tasked (in ambiguous terms: "give a message") to take care of a (independent) drug dealer operating on her turf. Wang interprets it as the order to kill the dealer, and that's indeed the only way to complete the quest (particularly since when Wang finds him, the dealer has gone demon as a result of using too much of his own Shade). When Wang goes back to Mamushi Heika to receive his reward, she chew Wang out because she actually wanted to recruit the dealer, not to kill him. ^note  Wang does protest that the state he found the dealer in made communications impossible but promptly gets ignored.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Thanks to the team increasing in size, this allows the game to grant more satisfying kills with a new damage system, such as blowing holes through beasts, slicing or blowing them into chunks, or with some weapons, tearing their organs out messily.
• Blood Knight: Wang. Just listen to his glee at tearing apart packs of enemies.
• Born as an Adult: Kamiko trained three years ago with Smith Masamune...almost immediately after she was born as a result of Mezu committing Child by Rape on Kamiko's mother. Just gross.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: During a sidequest where Lo Wang rescues some demons from Yakuza sex traffickers, he has to get through a door which requires a retinal scan. Which naturally means:
  Lo Wang: You mean the entrance fee is one dead Yakuza head?
• Bullying a Dragon: Lo Wang is a badass ninja/samurai/gunslinger hybrid, with violent, sociopathic Blood Knight tendencies, and who once killed a god. That being said, it's astonishing the number of Yakuza thugs, junkies, or even ordinary civilians who try to con him or pick a fight, expecting a complete pushover...and that's not even getting into gameplay!
• But Not Too Foreign: Smith Masamune, a dark-skinned kung-fu master, is a son of an African-American soldier and a Japanese woman.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Wang's interactions with Gozu mostly just has him mock him for being seemingly ineffectual and doing nothing but sitting around and complaining.
  • Wang himself gets this. Despite being a legitimate badass, his lame one-liners and childish jokes, constant Deadpan Snarker attitude, incredible ego and utter disdain for just about everyone means he tends to get a lot of abuse, and plenty of jokes are made at his expense.
• Casual Danger Dialog: Still chipper as ever, Lo Wang casually mocks gods, demi-gods, yakuza bosses, hi-tech assassins, and several types of demons, leading to responses that make even Orochi Zilla want to shoot him right off the bat.
  Lo Wang: Hey, buttface! I see your face still looks like a butt. I like the commitment you're giving that.
• Chainsaw Good: Several different varieties! Ranging from a longsword-styled cyber chainsaw, a buzzsaw fused with a demon that eats other demons, a plain ol' chainsaw, and the pre-order bonus chainsword, among other.
• Child Prodigy: The majority of Zilla's technology turned out to be developed by Kamiko when she was in her youth. Kamiko plays it completely straight once Lo Wang deducted that she is literally three years old.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Ameonna developed a personality since the last game - a slutty, creepy, backstabbing personality, no less. And she manages to creep the hell out of Zilla.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The game menu's and the card image for the skills Lo Wang can learn are all taken from the art cutscenes from the first game. Apparently someone was proud of the art and with good reason.
  • After you find out Kamiko is, by bloodline, Hoji's niece, she tells Lo Wang that Hoji might be able to talk through the sword that Ameonna forged his ashes with. Lo Wang asks if it's true, and Kamiko suddenly hears the sound... of gullibility. A very similar exchange happened between Hoji and Lo Wang in the first game.
  • Xing is STILL headless... bodiless, rather.
  • Lo Wang still can't get the Dirty Harry quote right, and doesn't even bother with trying to, anymore - he replaces 'punk' with various OTHER words.
• Cool Car: Lo Wang's custom black Datsun 240z makes a return. Wang has shown a soft spot for Datsuns when the Kyokagami twins offer a white one as trade for a large amount of Shade. Against his better judgement, he agrees to the deal. To absolutely no one's surprise, it turns out to have a bomb in it, which the Kyokagamis promptly detonate.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: Lo Wang brought some friends along this time around. You can battle through the expansive campaign alone or team up as a four-player typhoon of destruction online in campaign co-op mode. Each co-op player experiences the game from Lo Wang's perspective and see other players as his ninja buddies (similar to the Co-op mode from Call of Duty: Black Ops III).
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Hard to get worse than Orochi Zilla, who not only has taken a fascist hold over nearly every city in at least Japan (if not the rest of Asia, or the world) where everything is copyrighted and owned by him, and any kind of dissidence is met with you forcibly being rewired into mindless, capitalist obedience, he's also responsible for a ton of nasty demon experiments that have resulted in numerous deaths. He also takes credit for "saving the world".
• Crapsack World: The mortal realm is corrupted, constantly changing and infested with demons. According to Lo Wang in the trailer, the world doesn't even want to be saved, the presence of demons having brought out all of mankind's worst aspects which they now revel in.
• Critical Existence Failure: Averted. Enemies can now lose limbs and continue to fight with lowered combat ability. For instance, chopping the arm off a swordsman won't stop them from using their other hand, but they will parry less frequently.
  • Played completely straight for Wang himself. You can fight just fine whether you're at 1 or 100 health, but as soon as that last hitpoint falls, you're toast.
• Cyberpunk: Zilla Enterprises has created neon drenched "Safe Cities" for those who don't want to live in the wildlands amongst demons (an understandable desire). These cities are filled to the brim with technology three centuries ahead of their time, including short-range teleportation and competent radio broadcasting. Unfortunately, Zilla holds an iron grip on the populace through his cybernetically-enslaved supersoldiers. Anyone who questions his rule is directed to a "reeducation chamber" for brainwashing and/or death.
• Death by Childbirth: Kamiko's mother died after giving birth to her, though a large part of that was probably her being raped by a demon lord, and Kamiko being Born as an Adult.
• Despite the Plan: Double Subverted. Lo Wang decides to poison the Kyokagami twins with Cyanide in the mix of Shade he provided them, as he now works with Mezu. The Kyokagami twins flipped the trade and tried to kill him out of their own spite, allowing Wang to out-backstab them and kill them anyway. On the return to Mezu, the twins turned out to be alive in their own hideout, but not until they began to choke on their own drugs since Kamiko slipped a doped product while Lo Wang was cooking said Shade.
• Disk-One Final Boss: It was obvious for Lo Wang as he was being ratted out by Mamushi Heika ever since rescuing Kamiko; however, after her death the plot takes a massive twist.
• Disk One Nuke: Previously, The King Skeletor machine gun, which does about 100 DPS when your other weapons hover around 60-70 DPS in the early game. It can be found on the second floor of Kamadera Ninja Shop that is locked until a story-important mission, but you could grab it through the window with a bit of platforming as soon as you got to Dragon Mountain. Unfortunately, this was confirmed to be a bug and patched out. Even after the patch, though, it does much more damage than the cybernetic and human counterparts (the Zweihander and Triple-Six, respectively, which you get after the King Skeletor) and works well with double-ammo and damage modifiers.
• Dragon Lady: Kamiko in her spirit-form has the most attractive form yet. The Kyokagami twins make another appearance, and Lo Wang's new boss, Mamushi Heika, fits the stereotype as well.
• Dual Boss: The final battle of the Way of the Wang DLC has you fighting both versions of Kamiko's corrupted body at once. The battle with the Kyokagamis at the end of the Heisenberg side missions also counts.
• Dual Wielding:
  • Some melee weapons come paired by default. Predictably, they have high attack speed but lower damage in return. Most of them are pairs of swords or sabres, but there's also the True Patriot, which consists in a tomahawk and a knife.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Inverted!
  This difficulty level is for people who don't feel like they need to prove anything to themselves or anyone else. Playing Shadow Warrior 2 on easy is perfectly fine, if by the end of an exhausting day all you need is to feel like a goddamn superhero.
• The Eeyore: Gozu is usually too depressed to leave the palace, despite his immense power, and splits his day between doting on Ameonna and moping on the front stoop. His inaction as his subjects suffer far worse than he does is why Lo Wang despises him. Lo Wang even calls him Eeyore at one point in the game.
• Elemental Weapon: Gems can imbue weapons with fire, lightning, ice, or toxic. This is especially important in later levels, where many enemies start resisting pure physical damage but have weaknesses against one of the elements.
• Elite Mooks: Superior and their bigger brothers, the Elite enemies. Bigger, beefier, tougher versions of enemies that often come with physical resistance and/or elemental auras.
• Eldritch Location: The in-game justification for the game's Procedural Generation is that Earth's landscape is constantly in flux.
  • Also, everything beyond the Gates. Mezu describes it as the antithesis of everything known.
• Enemy Mine: The threat of Ameonna destroying the world forces Lo Wang, Orochi Zilla and Mezu to join forces.
• Establishing Character Moment: Just like in the previous game, players get a nice glimpse of Lo Wang's personality during the first mission alone: lack of respect towards the person who hired him, gives close to zero fucks to borderline eldritch monsters attacking him, and even after getting into a car accident he maintains focus on his mission. Impudent, badass and professional.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Mezu's entire rationale behind sealing the Demonic Gates. He was actively trying to prevent the extra-dimensional plane of Primordial Chaos from absorbing and thus obliterating all of existence, Human and Demon alike. This pushed him to go to great lengths in order to keep reality from imploding; see Well-Intentioned Extremist below.
• Excalibur in the Rust: Nobitsura Kage returns in the sequel, but prolonged use of it made the sword too small and unwieldy (as the sword shrinks if too much of its power is used at once.) Lo Wang implies only intelligent demon mice can wield it now. After Smith Masamune found the scrolls needed to reforge the weapon, it turned into a medallion instead, much to Lo Wang's surprise and frustration. Smith even points out that while the weapon would never live up to its potential again regardless of what he did, at least in its current form, he can put it to work in another Infinity +1 Sword (as it boosts the damage of melee weapons by a not-insubstantial amount.)
• Face Death with Dignity: Mamushi Heika, after the jig is up and Wang's after her blood. She calmly commits Seppuku in front of him, taunting him all the while. Wang, of course, tries to make it as undignified as possible by mocking her "determination" even as she cuts herself open.
• Fantastic Drug: Compound 61 was created in a laboratory, designed to give people insightful visions. It was later "cut" with other drugs and sold on the streets as Shade, which is known to cause euphoria, mild hallucinations, anxiety release and dependency.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: Lo Wang's new outfit only has a sleeve on the right side.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Wang and Kamiko start off with a rocky relationship that bounces between quiet moments of friendship and harsh insults, with things arguably reaching their most heated moment when Master Smith dies. They slowly reach a relationship more like this by the end of the game.
• Gainax Ending: The last scene: Kamiko decides to sacrifice her soul to the otherworld to reforge the demonic gate into a gateway, and then a dragon appears (to which Xing proclaims "That's my girl!") and reaches for the camera, apparently devouring Lo Wang ^note The sequel's trailers, however, confirm that the dragon was indeed Kamiko, and both Wang and Zilla team up to try and find her.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: During the game, Lo Wang is able to teleport directly to his missions' location thanks to Kamiko. The story ends with Kamiko's soul leaving his body, but if you keep playing after the end of the last story mission, Lo Wang is still able to teleport.
• Genre Shift: From a linear first person shooter with light RPG elements and hack and slash elements to a (optionally) co-operative loot based RPG-FPS hybrid with hack and slash elements.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Sometime between the two games, Ameonna was forced into this by Mezu and his brothers, seeing that she was the only person who is able to reseal the dimensional gates. Consumed by greed for power, Mezu couldn't see that the prolonged isolation of gate-sealing is the only real reason Ameonna wants to destroy the gates and end the universe altogether. Oops.
  Lo Wang: So you mean the sex tape, or the trying to destroy the universe?
  Xing: Both.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Ameonna already knew about Mezu's affair with Mamushi Heika's daughter and her plot to kill Mezu's daughter, Kamiko, since the beginning of the game. Lo Wang was just a pawn who would've already finished the job if he actually decided to fight Mezu once more.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • An option for pistols and SMGs (and assault rifles with the Heavy Metal amulet). By slotting a Geminate gem, you can get another copy of the gun in your off-hand. This also imposes hefty damage, accuracy, and reload speed penalty, but the significant increase in close-range DPS is well worth it.
  • Gun-wielding Yakuzas are equipped with either two Point Five-O or two (non-fancy looking) Sidekicks.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Kamiko is a child of a human and an Ancient.
• Hand Cannon: Nearly the entire Pistol category of weapons, save the Colt 1911, which even points out how small it is. They might come in revolving, semi-automatic, or energy varieties, but all of them deal huge damage per shot and emphasize accuracy over fire rate, culminating in The Triad, a tri-barreled, huge-caliber beast that would tear people's arms off, if it weren't for Chi magic making the recoil a little bit manageable, and Jigoku, a Desert Eagle with the souls of 12 demons trapped inside and clamoring for more.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Lo Wang, the man who wants to save the world, is a vulgar douche, and even in the developers words, an "asshole" who revels in violence.
• Heroic Second Wind: The skill Second Chance allows Wang to revive if he kills anything within a short time after taking fatal damage. It does have a time limit (without a specific Amulet equipped).
• Heroic Lineage: Smith comes from a bloodline of master swordmakers, and one of his ancestors forged the Nobitsura Kage from the first game.
• Hidden Depths: Lo Wang apparently personally cooks breakfast for all of his one night stands, in addition he's apparently a really good chef.
• Hit So Hard, the Calendar Felt It: Some of the Zilla-made collectible documents are dated after the demonic invasion.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: You can have up to 8 weapons on your active slots, which you can freely swap with whatever you have in your inventory.
  • This is even demonstrated in the opening credits, where Wang and his pals freely pull weapons from thin air on-screen.
• Hypocrite: Zilla. At one point he tries to justify his actions by saying that progress requires sacrifice, to which Wang points out Zilla is never willing to make any sacrifices himself.
• King Mook: In each level, there is a larger variant of a Mook who serves as a boss fight and drops a unique weapon or skill when defeated.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Proper ally health bars always show as green with no modifiers. When you run into an NPC with a green bar but a laundry list of status effects and elemental auras underneath, you know they will without fail attack 10 seconds later after you finish talking to their leader.
  • For every mission^note the only exception are the two first story missions you can check the exact reward (skill, money, items) in the quest menu. Seeing the rewards for the penultimate story mission sounds like this but actually turns into a subversion, as the actual context is a plot twist. The mission is set in Zilla's labs and the reward is a sword named "Arm of Orochi", which implies the mission ends with Wang killing Zilla. While the mission's climax is a bossfight against Zilla, Zilla survives the fight and then decides to ally with Wang in order to fight Ameonna's plan to trigger the end of the world. Wang receives Zilla's sword as a gift to seal their alliance.
• In the Blood: There's one thing Kamiko does have in common with her father; they really want to call out Lo Wang for being an idiot.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Properly upgraded and slotted, any of the higher-tier weapons could qualify, but two, in particular, stand out for being picked up near the end of the first playthrough:
  • The Arm of Orochi - received after establishing an Enemy Mine with Orochi Zilla, this cyberpunk Chi-katana produces energy waves with each slash like other Chi-blade weapons...only in this case, they don't use up any Plasma ammo. In addition, the Arm of Orochi and its beam waves can't be blocked, making it useful against foes with formidable defenses like the "Geisha" enemy types.
  • The Ryuken, implied to be the sword that Smith Masamune forged from his grandfather's ashes. You get it after vanquishing Ameonna. While it only accepts white and blue quality upgrades, its formidable damage and special traits — a chance to restore all your Fury after a kill with a special attack, and casting Chi Blast on every critical hit — more than make up for that.
• Invisibility: "Vanish", one of Lo Wang's new powers, allowing you to sneak past enemies, and to perform a vicious Sneak Attack. It wears off after one attack or if the time runs out, although it's especially devastating combined with the Power Slash (which charges for less time compared to the Vanish time limit).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Lo Wang, leaning very heavily towards the "jerk" part. He's a sardonic, irreverent asshole who mocks absolutely everyone, including his close friends and allies, cracks crude and immature jokes at the drop of a hat, and is a violent Blood Knight who relishes the chance to carve people up. He's still more or less a good guy in the end, though, as he tries to help Kamiko get her body back, shows a great deal of respect for Masamune Smith both before and after his death, and won't hesitate to step up to bat if someone proves sufficiently evil enough, especially rapists.
  • Kamiko herself counts as well, as she was willing working with Zilla at the beginning and is pretty bitchy in general (in her defense, most people stuck in her situation wouldn't exactly be happy about it.)
• Jump Scare: Early in the game one of the first mini-bosses give Wang a light scare which serves only to piss him off.
  Wang: Fuck off! I hate when they do that!
• Losing Your Head: Xing is still bodiless, but now Zilla has hooked up him up to a drone that lets him fly around.
• Ludicrous Gibs: The amount of gibs in this game is still as generous as ever, especially if you use powerful attacks.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Downplayed. Mezu didn't out right state that he is Kamiko's father, but instead implies that he made a deal with Mamushi Heika and let Kamiko herself connect the dots that his father raped Mamushi's daughter, in order to have Kamiko born.
• Magitek: Most of Zilla's technology is based on chi, due to him utilizing Kamiko's research to its full extent.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Kamiko means "Little God/Spirit". Guess what her lineage is.
  • "Mamushi Heika" could basically be interpreted as "Her Majesty the Pit Viper". "Mamushi" is an East Asian species of venomous pit viper (Gloydius blomhoffii), and "Heika" is Japanese for "Your Majesty".
• MegaCorp: Zilla Enterprises gets an upgrade to this in this game, setting up "safe cities" under Zilla's control where people can live without fear of being torn apart by the demons, but at the price of having to work for Zilla with everything this entails.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Master Smith falls victim to this trope. And please, take it easy with the Wang Jokes.
• Mistaken for Gay:
  • A variation; When talking about Kamiko, Wang tells Ameonna that he has "a young girl trapped inside his head" and is mistaken as a transgender woman.
  • Played a whole lot straighter after Wang defeats Zilla. Ameonna is utterly convinced they are secretly attracted to each other.
• Mission Control: Wang gets a new entity, Kamiko, accompanying him this time around. While similar to Hoji in the first game, she's actually a human whose soul is stuck in his mind after her body becomes demonically tainted.
• Missing Mom: If Lo Wang is to be believed, his mother died before his fourth birthday, either that or he was just fucking with Kamiko who knows.
• More Dakka: Each of the three weapon "classes" (Demon, Human, Zilla) have their own take on the machinegun. The Demon Minigun deserves special mention.
• Ms. Fanservice: Form-fitting red dress, high-heels and a very graphic body frame, it's very unusual to see this coming from Kamiko's spirit form, whose original body gets corrupted twice by Shade injected through-and-through. And also, invoked in the mid-game by Ameonna, who is stated to be the star of several naughty tapes.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The original theme of the 1997 game plays whenever you enter Larry's shop.
  • One of the 1997 game's anime-style fanservice easter eggs is on computer terminals... and a hologram on Smith/Hideo's bed.
  • The Zilla Mechanoid fight Orochi Zilla pilots is a nod to the battles with Zilla in the original game, where Zilla is fought piloting a giant mech..
• Navel-Deep Neckline: Ameonna's outfit doesn't leave much to the imagination, being open all the way down to her crotch.
• Nerf: The first patch to the game powered down some game breaking weapons and skills, mainly the Arm of Orochi, which was overpowered due to its unlimited 100% force slash. Maximum Base Chi Regeneration has dropped from 10/s to 4/s, and auto-reload requires quadruple the time.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Lo Wang's efforts to annihilate the darkness corrupted the world, creating a strange and savage new order where humans and demons live side by side. Lampshaded by Lo Wang himself in the trailer, saying that he "fucked up and saved the world".
  • This becomes subverted as Xing explained the thorough situation around Lo Wang. See Go Mad from the Isolation.
• Noodle Incident: At the beginning of the game, Larry gives Lo Wang a Plot Coupon (for free) to thank him for getting him out of trouble with the Yakuzas prior to the events of the game (no much information is given).
• No Yay: In-universe: After Lo Wang defeats Zilla again, Ameonna appears and is utterly convinced they have the hots for each other, and to just kiss already, because the universe is ending soon. Zilla is disgusted, and Lo Wang is bemused, but being Lo Wang, goes along with it to annoy him some more.
• Occidental Otaku: Inverted Trope. Lo-Wang, who is half-Japanese, is obsessed with American music, comic books, and media.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Lo Wang is a man-made full of mockery, violence and dick jokes, but the few times something or someone truly gets under his skin, such as Gozu for doing nothing for his kin, or after acquiring the Blade of Exile and wondering if he would be capable of speaking to Hoji again, are moments that shows that although he's far from being the nicest person around he's also just as far from being the worst. Also whenever Wang doesn't spice his dialogue with stupid/immature jokes, such as when meeting Orochi Zilla personally since the events of the first game, he can be actually pretty scary.
  Orochi Zilla: Lo Wang! I thought I smelled comic books and hand lotion.
  Lo Wang: (without a speck of sarcasm in his voice) You lost a hand last time we met, Zilla. I don't recommend testing me again.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Ameonna, who would use anyone to extend her personal amusement to the universal extinction.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Unlike the last game, Yakuza will continue to hit hard long after their arms and torsos are turned to gore. Justified by post-apocalypse research into healing magics and cybernetic technology, which give them a higher health pool and allow them to heal up in the interim if they kill all their targets.
• Our Dragons Are Different: the ending has Kamiko going through the Gate, after which she seemingly emerges as a big black dragon and eats Wang whole.
• Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality: Poor Gozu. Can't tell it straight to Lo Wang that he actually enjoyed watching porn tapes of Ameonna bathing and doing things beyond bathing. Like bed.
  Lo Wang: Check, Please!.
• Permanently Missable Content: The specific way to gain several of the weapons is to kill the Optional Boss found in several main missions and side missions' map. While side missions and some main missions can be replayed after completion, not all main missions are replayable. Notably, the Sheng-Long grenade launcher can only be gained from the loot dropped by the Lord Destroyer unique boss from the story mission "All in the Family", which isn't replayable.^note Though the New Game + feature makes no weapon truely missable
• Photo Mode: With free camera, a lot of image settings and an unpause feature, with notable thing being that Wang is always invisible.
• Pieces of God: Crude has already been a piece of magic already known to the populace, but as Xing explained Black Tears turned out to be Ameonna's Rain, pieces of her that correlate to the instability with the Collision, which constantly breaks her the more she maintains the gate close for prolonged periods of time.
• Post Modern Magick: Humans and Demons have started to co-exist partially thanks to Kamiko's research, leading to a fair bit of humanoid demons going native. Wang's gun salesman is a demon by the name of Larry who got the name from a video game.
• Procedural Generation: The breach between the human and demon realms created an interdimensional hernia resulting in constant shifts to the world. This is used to justify levels being randomly generated, with landscapes and paths bring new twists and turns to once familiar terrain and routine missions.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: A man in the trailer injects himself with Shade to transform into a big beast once Lo Wang comes for him. The result isn't pretty, at all...
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The only mission Lo Wang takes entirely seriously, with no dick jokes or mocking, is one in which he has to rescue some demonic acolytes of Ameonna being held as sex slaves. The soft spoken, sadistic joy in his voice as he methodically grinds the Yakuza responsible into a bloody pulp is a hatred apparently only rapists are able to coax out of him. There's also his encounter with Mezu, when Wang accuses him of raping Kamiko's mother — for someone who already hates most of the immortals with a passion, Lo Wang turns it into even more vitriol for Mezu.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Following the end of the Demon Trafficking mission described above under Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, Lo Wang lets Gozu have it after having more than enough of Gozu's self-pity and his refusal to get off his ass and leave Ameonna's side for even one moment to help her people:
  Gozu: You are always so unkind to me.
  Lo Wang: And you sit up here on your self-pitying ass, waiting hand on foot for an immortal narcissist while the people you pretend to care about are victimized. Don’t try to tell me you give a shit about humans. Your actions, sorry...inactions, tell the story.
• Renaissance Man: Master Smith is a skillful chi bender, master weapon smith, historian, and head of the local ninja clan. To top it all off, he's also Lo Wang's personal mechanic!
• Retcon: Further expands again, considering that the expansions from the original count as "sequels":
  • In the original Wanton Destruction expansion, Zilla fights in a mech and dies once the mech is destroyed. In 2, not only does Zilla survive the crash in somewhat good condition after the mech is destroyed, but knowing the situation, he teams up with Lo Wang, putting their differences aside.
  • Like the previous 2013 Retcon entry, instead of Zilla wanting Lo Wang dead, both Lo Wang and Zilla are pitted against each other by a god. This time, it's Ameonna.
• Rooftop Confrontation: Encouraged with the new open map design and parkour. Leaping from roof to roof is a great way to evade swordsmen and also prevents heavy enemies from getting too close for comfort. The Calamity Town mapset especially encourages this.
• Scenery Porn: The game is adept at pulling this off despite the randomly generated levels; Dragon Mountain in particular looks gorgeous, especially with the different weather effects that can occur, and the missions themselves all manage to look and feel like beautiful, handcrafted maps despite being randomly generated.
• Sequel Hook: Smith Masamune's soul is contained to a Soul Jar. Zilla, Xing and Mezu are still alive despite the gritty tension with Lo Wang. And the final cutscene has the bloodied protagonist get eaten alive by an extra-dimensional dragon, followed by a Smash to Black.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Now in pump-action, automatic, and double/multi-barreled variants! They're pretty good against group of enemies, what with their high single-shot damage and high knockdown chance, but their single-target DPS is inferior to most other weapons, save for the autoshotguns. You can also mod the multi-barrel ones to fire all their shells at once for even more damage at the cost of accuracy, fire rate, and reloading.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Special Melee attacks all qualify: Sting is a devastating forward thrust that can pierce through multiple enemies, Vortex is a full 360-degree spin that hits everyone around you (and can be angled based on your reticle, allowing you to perform non-horizontal spins), and Force Slash lets you fire off a Sword Beam that can pierce through enemies and walls. All of them cost absolutely nothing and have no real drawbacks, save needing to briefly charge them to full power and not reaching their full potential until upgraded.
  • Even better, you can use these moves with the Chain-sword and Chain-katana, and they inherit the saw-through-enemies property. Sting will do massive DPS to everything in front of you, Vortex will tear through enemies around you one-by-one, and Force Slash will deal multiple tics of damage to enemies as they pass through. With damage upgrades on the weapons and the skills fully-upgraded, it's possible for these weapons to one-shot Elites.
  • The Devolver Anaconda, your first revolver, is basically this. As Wang himself puts it: "Small, but efficient."
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Mamushi Heika the Yakuza leader is named after a snake (see Meaningful Name) and her office is decorated with snake statues. And she turns against Lo Wang midgame.
• Socketed Equipment: Similar to Diablo, weapons come with slots for gems that give the weapon additional properties. Unlike said game, you are free to remove the socketed gems and put them into another weapon.
• Soul Jar: Smith Masamune's soul enters into one before his supposed death, due to the amount of experience he has personally with tampering souls, enough to make Wang envy his skill.
• Sharing a Body: Due to her body being injected with a high dosage of Shade, Kamiko's soul is transferred to Wang's mind while Smith repairs the damage.
• Shout-Out:
  • Sometimes, when Lo Wang goes into stealth mode, he tells the player to "be vewy, vewy quiet".
  • Like in the first game, Wang is singing along to "The Touch" by Stan Bush while driving. The song for the final battle is a new song by Bush licensed for this game.
  • In short, Wang, being effectively a reverse otaku obsessed with geeky American culture, tends to throw these out left, right, and center.
  • The default revolver is called the Devolver Anaconda.
  • ZL-209 is a thinly-veiled pastiche of ED-209.
  • The demonic Killer Rabbit that appears sometimes when you willingly, or accidentally, kill a rabbit is called Bunnylord.
  • Wang occasionally belts out "Killing in the name of..."
  • One of the melee weapons is called Ghidorah.
  • A Demon grenade launcher with a heavy dragon motif is called the Sheng-Long.
  • The female Yakuzas who use katanas all have masks that bear a striking resemblance to Deathstroke from DC Comics, down to the two-tone ballistic mask.
  • One of the named mini-bosses is called Gun Fury.
  • The Kyokagami twins now have the same eye and jaw augments/replacements as Raiden.
  • The missions to cook a very illegal street drug are titled Heisenberg.
  • The first gatling-type weapon you get is called "The Raven", after a certain GAU-18 wielder with a Raven motif.
  • In Zilla Cities, one of the graffiti you can find is a goat with a purple heart, with "True love never dies!" underneath it.
  • To the devs' previous game, the electric barrels and terminals from Hard Reset make an appearance (though both can't be destroyed, unlike that game).
  • The tech minigun from the Bounty Hunt DLC is a skinnier, stripped-down version of the one from Bulletstorm - makes sense, given that Flying Wild Hog used to be a part of People Can Fly.
  • Another Bounty Hunt DLC mission, the one that has you hunting down Larry's action flick collection, is one big shout-out to Broforce, another of Devolver's big games.
  • There are a couple nods to Doom:
    • One of the early weapons the player can collect is a large gauge double barreled sawed-off shotgun named "The Stick of Doom" .
    • During one of Gozu's side missions, Larry mentions that your Yakuza targets look a lot more drunken than "a Mancubus on payday".
  • You can find 50 Blessings symbols in the graffiti in Calamity Town.
• Spy Catsuit: Female Yakuza mooks are dressed in a two-colors catsuit (black and a random other color). Some are barefaced, some others wear a balaclava.
• Stripperific: The acolytes of Ameonna. The demons in the Shadow Realm were under a new management. The Hata Mari enemies also wear tiny kimonos - enough to have have one breast hanging out.
• Suddenly Voiced: Ameonna. At the very least, she was in no condition to speak in the first game. Having time to come out of a millennia-old coma will do that to you.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: Ameonna's ultimate goal is to open the Gates that hold back pure Chaos and let the universe get nothing'd. After millennia of emotional abuse, physical abuse, complete and total isolation, horribly dying once, having the one person who cared for you (and who you cared for) being responsible for said horrible dying and getting brutally mutilated in front of you and horribly dying in turn, you can't really blame her for being tired of life.
• Sword Beam: Called Force Slash in this game. Can be done with any standard melee weapon, and can be charged for more power. Chi-tech melee weapons can throw them around with their default attacks, though this is weaker than the charged version and uses ammo. Finally, if you upgrade Shadow Fury enough, you can even unleash Force Slashes with your melee weapon while in this mode like you could with the Nobitsura Kage from the first game.
• Take That, Critics!: The trailer for the Collector's Edition shows off various positive review scores, with the exception of a 5/10 from Polygon declaring that the game was "Unfunny".
• Taking You with Me: The Revenge skill (which activates if you take lethal or fail to achieve a Second Chance) allows the player to do this. Wang will die after his last seconds expires, but you can try to kill whatever is in your sights with a potentially huge damage boost.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Played with. Wang's perfectly willing to tell people about the time he killed a bunch of gods and saved/broke the universe... but nobody seems to quite believe him.
  • This is probably because everyone who knows Wang knows he likes to run his mouth, and of the three people besides Wang who actually know the full extent of what happened with Enra, two are dead and one's running a doom cult.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Mezu couldn't bat an eye at Wang without spouting an insult or two before discussing plans to reseal the dimensional gates that Ameonna was previously entombed with. Although, having had his barrier nearly removed by, and almost being killed by, Lo Wang, it's justifiable.
  • This extends to Orochi Zilla, and for a good reason. As Ameonna explained that she wanted to destroy the universe by prying into Kamiko's corrupted body to make the gates even more unstable, both Lo Wang and Zilla are forced to side with each other to put a stop to Ameonna's insane determination towards ripping the universe apart, so Zilla gives Lo Wang the Arm of Orochi sword to help destroy the body.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the previous game, Wang was a normal dude whose chi powers were justified by his pact with Hoji. Here, he's a badass ninja that uses chi powers himself.
  • In general, Wang took a massive leap in badassery, as he can now fall from any height, traverse huge environments, air-dash, and wield any and all weapons with accuracy and skill.
  • The Yakuza appear once again, and are much more threatening then in the first game. Although their weaker members can be carved up with any melee weapon, they're much faster and don't fly apart in several sword strikes, their gun users deal more damage this time and they have all gained the ability to jump incredible distances. In addition, they have Shade Fanatics and Elite swordsmen among their ranks, who can easily match Lo Wang at close range and block many of his attacks while unleashing a flurry of sword slashes.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: Between the two games, Ameonna went from demure, fragile Yamato Nadeshiko to air-headed slut. There is a reason for this - she was already screwed up from the power games her siblings used her in, but Hoji being torn away from her and poisoning her AND getting killed in front of her, along with countless millennia of being sealed away in isolation and emotionally manipulated to forever cry to keep the Shadow Realm alive (as her tears powered the realm and brought nourishing rain to it) didn't do any wonders for her mental stability.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Mezu goes from one of the more honest of Enra's henchmen to a snooty dickhead rapist who makes it extremely clear he considers mortals worth less than dirt.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Continuing the trend from last game, Xing is now not only the friendliest Immortal, but he's also a cheerful friend of Lo Wang who actively exchanges banter with him, a far cry from the brute who poisoned Ameonna a long, long time ago.
• The Unfought:
  • Gozu. Just when you were about to fight him, he disappears with Ameonna. Instead, you fight the acolytes and a few other enemies. Mezu also gets away with his crimes, by dint of being the only Immortal who is fully against Ameonna's scheme.
  • Mamushi Heika. When it's time to confront her in her private mansion she hides inside her panic room and commits Seppuku when Wang breaches it.
  • The Kyokagami Twins are not fought directly. You "fight" both of them in mech suits which in the end they weren't even piloting themselves.
• Trash Talk: Lo Wang does this all the damn time.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: Mamushi Heika, Ameonna and the Kyokagami Twins all end up betraying Lo Wang during the course of the game. Being a cynical guy and due to having dealt with the Kyokagamis before, only Ameonna's betrayal, borne out of her desire to destroy Kamiko's soul even if it means killing him in the process, takes him by surprise.
• Tsundere: Kamiko is a type A. While she's hardly nice to Wang most of the time it becomes clear by the end she really does care about him.
• Unbroken First-Person Perspective: After the introduction cutscene, the game and all cutscenes are entirely in first person.
• Unorthodox Reload: Not even physics can stop Lo Wang and his ninja buddies from reloading in some impossibly cool ways, such as catching shotgun shells with the gun's chamber, or tossing magazines into the air and swatting them into an Uzi's stock.
• Viking Funeral: Masamune Satoru's request to his grandson and student, Smith Masamune. After his death he was placed into the forge, and Smith used his remains to create a sword.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Lo Wang's relationship with Xing. Wang already cherishing some moments with him including with listening to his afternoon moments with his niece, Kamiko.
  • Smith and Lo Wang share a straight-man-wacky-man relationship, respectively.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Zig-zagged. Kamiko's dismissive of her father at the start of the game, noting she never met the guy and the closest thing she had to a parental figure was Mamushi Heika. She wavers between dismissiveness and annoyance he wasn't there when she was doing things like become a child prodigy and infiltrate Zilla Corp, but once it's revealed not only is her father a demon god, said demon god thinks nothing more of her than a pawn in his schemes, she's both even MORE annoyed he does nothing to acknowledge her beyond a dismissive insult about not caring for mortals, and wants him dead.
  • Then she finds out that not only is she the child of a demon god, she's also a Child by Rape. When Mezu is called out on this by Wang, he callously brushes it off as a necessity. Kamiko loses it.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: The Bladez of Zaibatsu.
• Weak Turret Gun: Certain gems allows you to put down machineguns, rocket launchers, and grenade launchers as turrets. Unfortunately, said gems also massively decrease the weapon's DPS and reload speed, tend to have lousy accuracy and range, and the turrets have limited duration AND must be reloaded manually. While it's novel, and can be handy to have a second gun firing at the same time, it's so massively inefficient even at the higher levels/rarities that it's oftentimes a waste more than anything.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Mezu's apprehension towards the Collision seems profound. He wished the Collision never happened and was actively sealing the demonic gates long after they cracked to prevent a second Collision. Problem was, his plan to reseal the gates involved raping Kamiko's mother, so that Kamiko's soul could be sacrificed as a power conduit.
  Lo Wang: Oh. So you're secretly a good guy.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Ameonna, In the first game she is a more or less benevolent spirit whose crying controls the rain in the Shadow Realm, with Hoji giving her a sleeping potion every now and then so she wont cry too much and flood the place. Unfortunatley, Hoji fell in love with her and started an affair. This caused a massive drought since she didn't feel like crying anymore due to being so happy with Hoji and as such, Hoji was punished by having his face flayed, but not before he put her into eternal slumber. In the second game she awakens again, and seems benign at first, until you learn she is completely insane now and wants to destroy the world. The reason she went insane isn't entirely clear, but likely is due in part to losing Hoji.
• Womanchild: Despite seemingly being in her 20s or so, Kamiko is very immature and tends to complain like a little kid a lot. There is a reason for this: she's half-demon and literally only three years old.
• Yakuza: With the breakdown of normal modern society, the Yakuza have returned with a vengeance. They will protect the towns under their watch with ferocity... for a price, of course. At the start of the game Lo-Wang is an enforcer for a countryside Yakuza clan. Yakuza thugs are also encountered as enemies.
• You Know I'm Black, Right?: At one point, Lo Wang jokingly calls Smith 'white'. Smith, who is half-black and half-Japanese, takes this as an insult, though it may have been to annoy Lo Wang in return.
  • He may have also just been confused, as 'what do you mean we, white man?' is a somewhat obscure joke from around the 1960s.
  • Lo Wang later tries to get Kamiko to discuss Smith's (after Kamiko deliberately guesses everything else but the fact he's black, to piss off Lo Wang) heritage, as the Japanese A) tend to be... discouraging of mixed-race, and B) the Masamune bloodline is, well, Japanese. Kamiko explains he's half-Japanese, the son of an American G.I. and a Japanese woman.
• Younger Than They Look: See Born as an Adult.
  Lo Wang: Oh. My. God. You're three years old. There's a three year old running around inside my head.
  Kamiko: A three year old half-demon.