Red Steel 2

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Red Steel 2 follows a nameless almost silent hero, who returns to his home town after having been banished by his clan only to find it completely overrun by a violent bike gang called The Jackals who attack him and take his sora katana. The hero has to work together with the only locals still fighting back, uncover the reason for the invasion and avenge his clan.

This game has completely abandoned the modern Yakuza setting of the first game and moved to a Cattle Punk setting, with a new hero, a new art style, and improved controls.

Tropes used in Red Steel 2 include:
  • AKA-47: All guns, including listing various fictional ammo types as upgrades when you upgrade their damage. Amusingly enough, they call the tommygun a "Johnnygun".
  • Awesome Yet Practical: The higher-level special moves can be chained together with skill, and you earn a ton of cash for each successful technique. If you finish with a special, however, you get a multiplier on top of the regular cash bonus, which can turn just a few random mooks into a gold mine.
  • Badass Longcoat: The Hero.
  • Badass Mustache: Songan.
  • Berserk Button: Okaji goes from being a cold, merciless, but hyper composed villain to a roaring raging psychopath when he is forced out of his armor.
  • BFS: Okaji's.
  • Big Ol' Eyebrows: The Hero whenever you get a decent look at his face.
  • Black Knight: Okaji.
  • Bloodless Carnage: Well, sorta: while it's not red, every slash, stab and gunshot is accompanied with a large burst of sand-yellow liquid, allowing the game to barely get away with a T rating. Arguably, if they had gone for red blood instead, they would've probably had to tone the actions themselves down a good deal.
  • Body Armor as Hit Points: Makes more sense in this game, where upgrading parts of your Badass Longcoat gives you layers of armor on top of your life bar that can take up to 4 hits before you start to take damage to your lifebar. The actual lifebar is upgraded via the parts of the clan emblem at the back of the said Badass Longcoat.
  • Boom! Headshot!: The Special ability "The Shot" does this if used as a finishing move with the revolver: other guns go for a pointblank stomach shot, a Pistol Whip followed by a quick vertical burst and an upwards-pointed pointblank chest shot. Getting a head shot normally results in an instant kill and being awarded $200.
    • Strangely, Headshots only insta-kill if you're far away. Presumably, this is so you can Finish Him! off.
  • Boring but Practical: The Tiger, a move that allows you to block an opponent's attack, is by far the least flashy of the Kusagari Powers. However, it leaves your enemies wide open for a while, and always works, even against Giant Mooks or bosses, making this one of the more useful moves.
    • And kneecapping and then finishing gun mooks or lowly sword mooks. It's not exciting, but it's the best way to take them out fast.
    • There's also the alternative - Aerate his skull with the revolver, then use the Rush on him. Gets old just as fast, but you get more money.
    • The double-barrel is incredibly effective against ninjas
    • Perhaps the easiest way to deal with the penultimate boss is to break his armor, then let'er rip with the machinegun. If it's upgraded enough, one long string of bullets is all it takes.
  • Cattle Punk: The second game is set in dystopian Nevada.
  • Cel Shading
  • Continuity Reboot: There is absolutely no connection at all to the previous game. It has a different setting, characters, location, backstory, gameplay, premise, and graphical style.
  • Cutscene Power to the Max: That fancy roll the protagonist does over the first boss's back? Would be nice if you could do that in-game.
  • Die, Chair, Die!: You may well kill more boxes than baddies in this game.
  • Doomed Hometown: Caldera.
  • Expy: Though not the straightest example, its pretty clear that The Hero is a mix between The Man With No Name's stoic personality, Vash the Stampede's gun slinging and fashion sense, and Samurai Jack's sword skills.
  • Five-Man Band:
  • Flash Step: Shinjiro uses this in the final boss battle.
  • Flunky Boss: Payne.
  • Freudian Trio: The Villains(Who also partially form a Five-Bad Band):
  • Giant Mook: Of the sledgehammer, minigun and naginata-wielding variety. The former 2 can only be hit reliably and finished off from behind.
  • Good Scars, Evil Scars: Payne, Shinjiro, and Okaji all have evil scars of some sort. Okaji himself has the worst of it, and is so horrifically scarred he resides himself to almost living in his armor.
  • Gratuitous Japanese: Less then the first game. In this game most of the Japanese tends to be either "katana" or specific clan names.
  • Heroic Mime: The Hero is just two lines of dialog short(Or too many)of being this.
  • In Name Only: This game has literally nothing to do with the first game aside from the same basic idea of a FPS that combines motion control based shooting and swordplay.
  • Katanas Are Just Better: Played straight
  • Large Ham: Payne, who is deliciously over the top. Interestingly enough he is voiced by the game's director Jason Vandenberghe.
  • Loading Screen: The loading screens are blatantly hidden behind opening doors.
  • Locked Door: This game features several variety of locked doors which can require either using a special switch you have to find, blasting the locks with your gun, whacking them with your sword, or just waiting until you have a mission that requires you to go through said door.
  • Lost Forever: Played through the game without getting all the upgrades? Those are impossible to get now.
  • MacGuffin: The Hero's sora katana.
  • Made of Iron: The Hero, especially in the game's cutscenes
  • Meteor Move: Players can use this on enemies after knocking them into the air with one of the Powers.
  • Mismatched Eyes: The Hero has one red eye and one green.
  • Nice Hat: The Hero.
  • The Obi-Wan: Jian (despite his obvious dislike of the situation) towards The Hero.
  • Obviously Evil: Oh come on! Just look at Songan's 'stache! There's no way someone with a stache like that can be completely trustworthy!
  • Offhand Backhand: The Storm, when used against enemies close enough to you that are behind you. It counts as an One-Hit Kill on any Mook and works on giant ones as well, who normally need to be finished off from behind.
    • That said, they have to be telegraphing an attack for you to be able to use the instant kill.
  • Point of No Return: Explicitly mentioned at the end of each level of the game, giving you a prompt on whether you want to advance in case you still haven't done everything. Annoyingly enough, the game still keeps giving you money after you've gone past the point where there's no way to spend it on upgrades, meaning you need to abuse the method described below to get enough of it before that if you want to upgrade everything before the end of the game. The Challenge Mode that allows you to replay stages doesn't help any either because you can't access any of the upgrade locations during it and any money you collect in the stages only counts towards your final score that determines how much of a money bonus you get in your main file, again meaning that by the time you can actually access the last 2 stages in Challenge mode, you have nothing to spend the bonus on either.
  • Press X to Not Die: There is one cutscene quick time event of the instant death variety. The standard finishing moves could also count, although they are entirely optional and the one you can perform at any given time depends on what kind of stun the enemy is currently in, which is again dependent on what kind of move you hit them with to begin with. And it's the only instance of this in the whole game.
  • Reward From Nowhere: While it does make sense that killing enemies carries a reward of some sort and finishing them off in a stylish way increases the amount, the fact that you can trap a single enemy against a wall and then fling Sword Beams at them until your hand gives out and get 500 dollars for each one pretty much rules out other possibilities.
  • Rewarding Vandalism: Oh so much. Every object that's not explicitly blocking your way in one way or another is practically made out of money, considering how much of it falls out when you destroy them.
  • Rule of Cool: Red Steel 2 loves this trope. Half the special attacks are probably impossible to do in Real Life. The Kusagari powers are definitely impossible.
  • Samurai Cowboy: Hell, we should rename this trope to Kusagari Style.
  • Shockwave Stomp: The Bear
  • Shout-Out: One of the missions is called You Have to Cut the Rope.
  • Spin Attack: The Storm
  • Standard FPS Guns: This game has four guns that include the handgun, shotgun, rifle, and tommygun, all of which can be upgraded in various stats including damage, reload speed and accuracy. Once you upgrade the main stats for each gun to max, you gain access to a final upgrade that adds an additional property to each gun's shots: revolver's bullets bounce off walls, shotgun breaks armor, tommygun pierces through enemies and rifle gains exploding rounds.
  • The Stoic: The Hero and Okaji.
  • Sword and Gun: The reason this game was made.
  • Sword Beam, Razor Wind: The Dragon. Not immediately obvious which it's closer to, since its main purpose is to push enemies away and stun them if they hit a wall and if not charged up fully, it does no damage whatsoever on its own.
  • Throwing Your Sword Always Works: The Crush, when used as a finisher.
  • Troperiffic: Hell yeah!
  • The Un-Reveal:( Neither The Hero's name, nor why he was banished from his clan are revealed.)
    • The latter is explained in a promotional webcomic.
  • "Wake-Up Call" Boss: If you haven't mastered the combat system yet, Payne will definitely make you....well, feel the Payne.
  • Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Speaking of Payne, he takes the cake for this one: Not only does he forgo the chance to simply kill the protagonist in the beginning, effectively dooming his gang and himself in the process, he also neglects to take away the hero's GUN!
    • He even pulls this in the boss fight... he has a move where he grabs you and slams you to the ground. Then, as you lay there stunned, rather than finishing you off with his sword or gun... he summons two gun-toting Mooks, giving you just enough time to get back on your feet so you can dispatch them in short order and return to whaling on him.
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