Wagyan Land 2 plays pretty much identically to the first Wagyan Land. You’re a cute green lizard dinosaur thing, and you walk to the right and shoot various syllables out of your mouth, which don’t actually hurt enemies. They just remain frozen for a certain period of time, depending on how powered-up your attack is. Once you get four power-ups you become invincible, and you can finally kill the damned things. Which doesn’t happen often.

So, how can you defeat the bosses with a crappy syllable that can’t hurt anybody? Why you play minigames with them, of course! The whole game’s pretty frustrating, with the whole “one-hit-and-you-start-the-entire-level-over” thing that’s so popular in the world of videogaming. Honestly, it’s fun and all, but I don’t understand why the game needed to have two sequels.

While this isn’t quite as polished as Mida’s translation of the first Wagyan Land game (the title screen, for instance, and the GYA syllables that he shoots out are left in Japanese), it’s still all in English, and pretty damn fun to play. You can just pretend those projectiles are magical, uh, runes, or something.

*July 2009 Update* The translation is incomplete. An ending was left untranslated and was even removed if the patch is used (as the author’s notes state so). The unofficial addendum released April 2008 only added additional graphics, but the ending is missing.