Sometimes Kickstarters are not what you expected them to be, sometimes
they have all the potential to be awesome and end up being little more than awful.
Sometimes you make a mistake and back something made (or not made) by Ken Whitman...
Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s everything you hoped for...
This is Feng Shui 2
I always liked the original game, if I’m honest, it was one of the
first games that got me into the over the top world of high fantasy martial
arts films. I hadn’t broadened my
horizons much at the time at which I got the first version, and the idea that
you could do phenomenal things without breaking the rules, that you could mow
through hundreds of nameless nobodies with no more thought than how cool you
looked getting rid of them, simple things that we all take for granted now.
Back then, this was a revelation...
Prior to this I’d played Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, even Space Master, and I’d
found that every person you fight had a chance to kill you, not so here, this
was Big Damn Hero land, and there was a legend to be carved out.
The group I was with at the time had a penchant for escalating things
beyond the ridiculous and into the insane, and eventually, when Feng Shui was
not enough, it went to Exalted, and the rest is history, but back to the matter
at hand...
The new version is everything (literally) that the old version was, the
only difference being more content, better artwork, revised rules that don’t
let you cycle infinitely (both a good and a bad thing I know), and more
settings to work in...A lot more settings...
It’s an improvement on the originals in every way, and the originals
weren’t half bad. It’s the same game
that we played all those years ago, but with a few (I would say subtle, but
like the setting, they’re really not) changes.
The characters have been streamlined, less stats, more focus on what the
character can do rather than trying to define them in terms of numbers. Schticks are still there and in greater
number, there’s a larger degree of embellishment on the various factions,
enemies, weapons, in fact pretty much everything...
The question of course, is whether it’s still something of interest in
this day and age, back when it came out, it was groundbreaking in a way that
most couldn’t believe, but it’s twenty years later, and the worlds had chance
to catch up...
Here’s where my objectivity fails me, I always liked this game, I liked
the absurd things you could get up to, and it got me into a number of other things
that before this, I would never have considered, so I’m going to be biased...
My wife however...
Never played the original, has no real experience of Hong Kong Action beyond
Big Trouble in Little China, and has never really played anything like this,
where most of the bad guys are little more than fodder for cool stunts. I gave her this to have a look at and within
ten minutes, she’d found Kaiju Patrol, and we’ve got a game being asked for...
And that is where I rested, more when we get a game going and see how
well it plays after all these years, but it’s a definite win so far, and goes
some way towards restoring my faith in Kickstarters...
