Clockwork Knight 2 (Saturn) review "Saving the princess (again) ain't an easy job, and you realize this when taking your toy knight, Pepperouchau, through a bathroom stage in Clockwork Knight 2. As you ride on Barobaro, your nearsighted donkey, through puddles of water and on a narrow track, your toy opponents do everything they can to assure you won't make it to the stage's end. Octopuses riding on boats will come at you up ahead, while knight helmets running on beach balls will charge from behind, ensuring that you'll hav..."

Saving the princess (again) ain't an easy job, and you realize this when taking your toy knight, Pepperouchau, through a bathroom stage in Clockwork Knight 2. As you ride on Barobaro, your nearsighted donkey, through puddles of water and on a narrow track, your toy opponents do everything they can to assure you won't make it to the stage's end. Octopuses riding on boats will come at you up ahead, while knight helmets running on beach balls will charge from behind, ensuring that you'll have a hard time navigating. That is, unless you're quick enough to destroy them before having to jump through gaps in the track. And you'll wanna do that jump right, because as you cross the gaps, giant toy sharks will pop out of the water in hopes of taking a chunk out you. You won't be stuck on one narrow track, either, since you'll have the ability to bounce to the track in the background if you so choose. Whichever path you decide to go through, however, you're guaranteed to see quite a sight with all this stuff going on at once. Did I mention the part where you get to bounce off a sea lion's nose like a ball?

Amazingly, that one stage singlehandedly puts every stage in the first Clockwork Knight game to shame. Thankfully, the other stages in CK2 are just as good.

Playing through this side-scrolling game, you'll get a feeling of depth that the first was really lacking. The first stage alone has so many paths and secrets, making it look like a maze compared to the original's keep-walking-to-the-right first stage. Exploring every nook and cranny is encouraged, and the study room's stages are a great example. With the help of multiple cannons (don't ask me why they're in a study room), you can shoot your little toy knight between two fields. The developers take good advantage of this, making sure that you need one of the fields to aid you in getting something from the other. Like in the background field, where an area with items you'll want is blocked off due to the platform you're standing on. What do you do? Well, by shooting yourself into the foreground field, you can search for a rocket toy, hit it, and watch it fly off into the background field, thus destroying that platform that was blocking you. Pretty cool, eh? And that's just only one small part of the stage. You'll be doing other things like opening books that reveal either desirable items or enemies, and even navigate through the dark before picking up a lighter you can use to light up candle sticks.

With all the platforming fun you'll be having, however, you'll wish there was more of it. CK2 has the same number of stages as its predecessor, eight, and even though it's a bigger game this time around, you can still finish the whole thing in about an hour. Don't get me wrong, you get a lot out of each stage, but the game leaves you wanting more when it eventually ends. The developers seemed to have realized this, so they included some extras to prolong the life of the game.

Selectable right from the start, you'll be able to choose Bosses Galore, where, as the name implies, you'll be fighting only the bosses. But you won't be dealing with just the bosses in this game, however, they actually give you the opportunity to fight the ones from the first game as well. This gives you a grand total of 10 bosses to mess around with, from the Transformer and the crazy tv from the first, all the way up to the singing chameleon and the giant pirate octopus in the second. It's actually quite a challenge at times, considering you only have three gears (your health), and it doesn't replenish as you go into the next fight. Getting that Master ranking at the end won't be an easy job.

To top it all off, you get a batch of funny mini-games after accomplishing a feat. They're just silly, like Horsey, which shows that Sega has a sense of humor. Basically, you take control of Barobaro, and you race on a track that you have to complete in under two minutes. That's not what makes it great. It's the fact that it's mapped out like a Super Mario Kart race track. In Mode 7. Come on. And while Cannon 1 is great for its spoof of Space Invaders, I just love Cannon 2 for its insanity. The goal is to shoot down 100 objects (I honestly don't know what they are), and it starts off simple as they slowly move down the screen. But, as you destroy around 20, things get a bit crazy. They start moving around oddly, making them hard to catch. Eventually, as you get near 100 hits, some start moving in groups, floating around the screen. Once you get all 100, it doesn't end, because now you'll have to fight a giant that throws little ones at you. It's a tough, but very neat, mini-game.

The basic game itself was good enough, but the extras you get, like the boss mode, cute mini-games, and other interesting stuff (like special title screens during holidays) turns this into quite an entertaining disc. Shoot, if that's not enough, you get to view a music video where Pepper shakes maracas while dancing to the beat of a salsa song. You can't beat that.

Community review by dementedhut (March 18, 2007) "Excellent! I cried. "Elementary," said he.