The previous game, The Stick of Truth was well received, finally giving South Park fans a decent game based on the licence. Everything about the game made you feel like you are watching an episode of South Park; with the crude humour and controversial aspects. The Fractured But Whole is more of the same, although I do feel that there are far fewer controversial aspects this time.
The story of the first game was partially based on their fantasy role play; Humans versus Elves. This time, it follows their Super Hero groups in their battle for the biggest franchise; Coon and Friends versus Freedom Pals.
You begin by creating a character and class. You can choose a race, hairstyle and clothes. Throughout the game, you end up finding all kinds of make-up, hairstyles and glasses. This time, there is no incentive to change your appearance; in the previous game the equipment gave you different armour benefits. You can change your appearance purely for cosmetic reasons. In order to boost your stats, you just equip Runes and these have no visual impact. You choose between three classes: Speedster, Brawler, and Blaster. At certain points in the game, you add extra classes (from a much larger selection), each giving you access to new attack moves.
Once again, you play as a silent protagonist known as “New Kid”; a continuation from the first game, although there's no feature to carry over your character's look; so you can completely change their race and gender. The New Kid is skilled in controlling his farts and uses them to manipulate time. You join Eric Cartman's Coon & Friends and are initially sent out on quests in order to flesh our your character. Coon & Friends are on the search for a missing cat which comes with a $100 reward which would help fund their superhero franchise. On their search, they find out that many cats have been stolen and they need to work together to fight the mysterious criminal mastermind behind the whole operation.
Everyone seems obsessed with their phones, and you try to get many followers on the Instagram parody “Coonstagram”. Some people let you take a selfie with them straight away, sometimes you have to reach a certain level of popularity, or sometimes you need to complete a simple side-quest. This selfie functionality soon grows old.
The battle system is different from the first game. Previously, it was a turn-based battle system like the Mario & Luigi/Paper Mario series where you time your button presses for successful attacks/blocks. In this game, the battles are turn-based but you can move your character within a grid. Each of your attacks has a different range and effect. Many attacks can only be used forwards or backwards but not to the sides which makes you consider your character's position.
I think the battle system could have been developed more. Some battles early on have obstacles that are in your way, and you can smash them, or knock your enemies into them for extra damage. This idea didn't seem to be used in the majority of battles though; it seemed to be quickly forgotten.
In the boss battles, there may be different ideas to shake up the formula. You may have to focus on the boss and ignore the respawning minions, you may have to flee to a certain area, or push enemies into a certain area.
The choice of characters to join you in battle changes depending on the story mission, but there are plenty of characters over the course of the game.
You initiate battles by walking into enemies, but punching them gives you the first attack. In the first game, you could sometimes take advantage of the environment to skip the battles such as shooting a weak-point to drop an object on enemies heads. I only saw a couple of instances of this in Fractured But Whole, so this seemed another idea that was forgotten.
The town of South Park is pretty much arranged in a grid, so the navigation is very straightforward. There's many quick-travel points around the map too, which makes use of Jimmy's Flash-like speed. Since I played the first game a few months ago, walking around South Park felt a bit boring because it lost its original charm. There are a couple of areas that are different, but the majority of the town looks the same. Many areas such as the school are cut-down areas.
In the first game, meeting each character put a smile on my face, but since I played the first game recently, seeing returning characters has also lost its charm. There are some new characters and references which did make me smile though. I was overjoyed when I encountered the Member Berries who always cracked me up on the show. “Remember collecting all 120 stars in Super Mario 64? Oh yeah! Remember Chun-Li's thighs? Ooooh yeah! I really remember them.”
I felt the first game would still be enjoyable to someone not familiar with the show. However, I'm not fully convinced that is true with this game. Sure, there are plenty of things they would find funny, but I think some aspects require knowledge of the episodes to either make sense, or fully flesh out the characters.
I think the game really suffers with its pacing. In the first several hours, not much has happened, and it only starts picking up once you find who the criminal mastermind is. When you reach what you think is the final part of the game, there's a lot of interesting plot points, and the final section ends up lasting a few hours. It took me an extra 7 hours to complete compared to the first game, and it's hard to justify why, because it feels like the first game had more content.
Just like the first game, it is a great recreation of South Park. Even though they tweaked the battle system, I felt like more could be done with it.