There's an interesting corollary to the assumption that Chapter 1 is the most important part of any work, and that is the function of Chapter 2. Intermediate-level players know that Chapter 1 can often feel sluggish in comparison to the rest of the story, since it has the important job of explaining the world you are going to be occupying, and so by Chapter 2, you need to get good or the players can be more confident the game will never get good.
Chapter 2-1 is a platforming segment, nothing particularly special other than introducing you to water, a few more high-up platforming bits to fall down from navigating. 2-2 and 2-3 are the real nasty ones, though: A mission consisting of running around a badly booby-trapped mansion that's barely started before it's over, and then a long grinding session for Rubees unless you look up the eight-digit code. And you've gotta find the safe, too. Merlee's Mansion is a massive series of jokes, and this does show what tone the game wants, but it's a dangerous game to continue to hold back your best effort after a slow opening, especially when you're following up a popular formula with a less tested one.
2-4 has a dungeon, with a maze full of doors to repeatedly loop back on and an invincible monster to chase you down. The small number of rooms helps soothe the frustration of returning to many of them frequently, but it also hides the fact this chapter is about as short as the other two in Merlee's Mansion. It's doesn't feel quite so gleeful about wasting your time, however, with the Mimi jokes and the... attempt at good fun that is That's My Merlee!, but if there was a second part of Gloam Valley and the Merlee's Mansion stuff was packed together into just two pieces rather than three, it probably wouldn't bloat the chapter too badly. It would also make it take a little longer to get past Chapter 2 at all, though, so it's a bit of a wash whether the chapter being altogether short makes up for it coming up short.
Plot-wise, we went into Merlee's mansion, found out Mimi had set up a trap, blundered right into it despite knowing full well Mimi was up to shenanigans, broke our way out of it because Mimi left the vault in our reach and/or complying with her until we agreed to her terms, and then plunged into the basement to find the real Merlee and, after a brief stop playing "spot the doppelganger", took out Mimi. Town Stories are not this game's forte, especially considering the lack of towns to terrorise, but you can really tell there's nobody in the plot you're encouraged to care about. Yes, we want to win, we want Mimi to lose, and Mimi has done some serious damage with the whole "slavery" thing... but we don't care what happens to any of the chained up Gloam folk. Hell, we barely care about Merlee. The story just hasn't built anything up to pay off, leaving this chapter more about progressing the overall story by tapping Merlee's fountain for loose Prognosticus lore and getting her Pure Heart. And "there are four Heroes" is hardly the most entrancing lore to work with. This is something later chapters fix, which just makes it all the weirder they just kinda... didn't bother for the first two.
Mechanically, we've been introduced to Peach, Boomer and Slim, with... mixed results. Little combat means little utility of Peach's parasol shield, while Boomer has been treated as utility and Slim has... well, honestly, very little was saving Slim. Constant switching has now been introduced, and honestly, good thing there isn't much of it, because this is only going to get worse the further we get in the game. If the switching bothers you, that won't get better. I wish this game had Gamecube controls so there was a button to map a quick swap to, but somehow I don't think that would've been implemented even if there was. This entire chapter feels like it definitely suffered from the developers making this game a platformer when they didn't have any real investment in playing to the genre's strengths, although this mechanic of Hero/Pixl switching is going to be something the game's dealing with the whole way through.
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