Tails of Iron II: Whiskers of Winter is a brutal side-scrolling combat videogame that, following on from its predecessor, tells another story about human-like rats in a medieval kingdom fighting back from annihilation after an invasion by a genocidal army. I play as Arlo, the unknown bastard brother of the first Tails of Iron’s King Redgi, who was hidden away as a baby in the fortress Winter’s Edge at the far northern limits of the known world. History repeats, and the ruler of Winter’s Edge is killed, leaving it up to his heir to rebuild the fortress and rally all the animals of the north against a new enemy: The Darkwings, an army of bats who outmatch the rat warriors with powers of flight and necromancy. Arlo must master a challenging combat system featuring four magical elements to overcome this new threat to the animals of the north and lead them all to victory.
When I first begin playing, Tails of Iron II feels disconcertingly similar to its predecessor. It has identical graphic design with thick, flat characters that pop against a 3D environment, simultaneously resembling a popup book and a medieval embroidered tapestry brought to life. Both conflicts are incited by similar events. The protagonists are going about their daily life when their noble father is suddenly killed by an invading army. Barely surviving, they arm themselves with the nearest broken scraps and fight off the invaders who have remained to pillage the wreckage of their home. Both videogames follow similar structures, with their player characters completing quests that fund the reconstruction of their fortress while amassing a colossal armory of weapons and armor specialized against different enemy types. Both stories even forego dialog and quest text, conveying their plots and goals through pictographic instructions and expository narration delivered by Doug Cockle using the voice of The Witcher’s Geralt.
These feelings do not fade as I progress through Arlo’s quest against the Darkwings. They are clarified. Instead of a transformative sequel to the first installment, Tails of Iron II is a developmental one. Its simple open-ended world is much grander in scale, encompassing several diverse environments containing multiple animal cultures Arlo must win over to his cause. Its combat is more refined, with new features that add layers of strategic depth and resource management. Most of what is written in my review of the first Tails of Iron also applies here. If you liked that videogame, you will like this one. Some refinements, though subtle, still result in substantial differences.
Tails of Iron II is focused entirely on its combat mechanics. Every other activity that Arlo does, from exploring the world to accepting quests to rebuilding Winter’s Edge, is a function for embroiling him in yet another fight against the next group of opponents.
Tails of Iron’s combat is distinguished by an unusual sensation of weight. A combination of animation and sound design emphasizes the burden of the armor and weapons Arlo ladens himself with before heading into battle. He moves at a deliberate, hunched gait. His jumps are slow and floaty and he strains with his forearms to pull himself up when he dangles from a platform. This heavy sensation is carried forward into combat. When Arlo swings one of his weapons, it is a labored and committed action. Once the swing begins, he is committed to it. This can get him into trouble if he attacks aggressively. Arlo is never more vulnerable than when he is trying to damage an enemy.
Enemy attacks are presaged by familiar visual indicators that indicate how Arlo should defensively respond. White motion lines coming from an enemy’s body means the coming attack may be blocked with Arlo’s shield. Yellow lines means the attack may be countered if Arlo raises his shield just before it connects, stunning the enemy for a moment and leaving them vulnerable to a few strikes from Arlo’s weapon. Red lines means the attack is too powerful to be blocked, but may be safely avoided using the split-second of invulnerability provided by Arlo’s slide. Red circles—and often, a highlighted red space on the ground—means a devastating attack with a wide-ranging effect is coming which Arlo should avoid with a rolling dodge activated by tapping the slide button twice.
The weight of Arlo’s equipment and attacks, combined with the neverending pressure even standard enemies place upon him, encodes a rhythm into the combat. Early on, my impulse is to play like Tails of Iron II is a twitch reaction videogame, arhythmically tapping the attack button and presuming I can press the dodge or block button in time to avoid the next oncoming attack. This strategy leads to many frustrating losses as invariably Arlo has already committed to another swing when the enemy’s next attack begins. Over time I learn to wait a half-beat after every swing to see what will happen next. This is just enough time to allow the next enemy attack to begin and respond, or to see they are not going to act and safely execute another weapon swing. Arlo does not excel against his enemies until I recognize this rhythm and adapt my playstyle towards it.
This rhythm is only broken when Arlo needs to recover the damage he has taken in combat. He carries a flask he may fill with nectar from casks found in major settlements or, conveniently, at checkpoints just before a boss fight. Healing is slow as Arlo gorges himself on the flask’s contents, restoring his health meter at the same rate the flask’s fullness meter drains. If he has taken a great amount of damage, this can take several seconds. It isn’t especially dangerous to do this in combat, as Arlo may raise and lower the flask much quicker than his weapons, but the time commitment it takes to recover greatly disrupts the flow of battle.
New to Tails of Iron II’s combat systems are magic spells. As Arlo explores the countryside around Winter’s Edge, he comes across four effigies carved into rat-likenesses of the Norse gods. Each statue bestows him with a new spell.
Spells are simple. They only have an effect in combat. When Arlo strikes an enemy with his weapon, it individually builds the charge of each spell. Once a spell’s charge is full, it may be cast for no additional cost at any time. Spells do not overcharge so Arlo is incentivized to use them as soon and as often as possible. Despite their simplicity, spells have a massive impact on battles. Every enemy Arlo encounters is vulnerable to at least one element. Unleashing a spell they are weak to not only deals a good amount of damage, it can even disrupt their current attack. Even if it doesn’t, Arlo is immune to damage in the moment it takes him to cast. Using a spell at just the right moment can pull Arlo through a sticky moment.
As Arlo explores and battles the bats, bugs, frogs, and birds that lurk around the north, he amasses a vast collection of armor and weapons as rewards for completing quests, for killing difficult enemies, and by paying blacksmiths to forge them with the parts he prizes from enemy corpses. Nothing is more important to Arlo’s success than what he is wearing into battle.
Each weapon and piece of armor Arlo can use has a weight rating. Typically yet not necessarily, the heavier a weapon is, the more damage Arlo will deal with it, and the heavier armor is, the more protection it provides. Using heavier equipment also comes with penalties. Arlo’s weight status shifts between light, medium, and heavy depending on the combined weight of everything he wears. The distance his slide and dodgeroll carries him is lower at heavy weight than light or medium. At times, it may be more prudent to leave Arlo more lightly defended if it allows him to more ably dodge attacks from a swift opponent.
Almost every weapon and piece of armor also has an elemental alignment. Weapons imbued with a specific element will deal additional damage to enemies weak to that element, while armor will protect against that element. Almost every enemy Arlo encounters has their own elemental alignment to their attacks and defenses. The only reason to seek out non-elemental equipment is sheer stubbornness. The first thing I do in nearly every fight Arlo gets into is re-equip items from his inventory that will give him the greatest advantage against his current opponent. This is tedious, especially when Arlo’s armory swells with dozens of different weapons and armors, but the advantages it confers are indispensable.
There is another important reason to defend against an enemy’s elemental alignment. The most powerful attacks from the most powerful enemies often leave an additional elemental effect lying on the ground. If Arlo occupies the affected space for too long, he becomes momentarily stunned, leaving him open to the enemy’s next attack. Raising his elemental resistance gives him extra precious time before the stun takes effect. Even with stacked resistances, these area effects are still troublesome. Some of them are difficult to see against the foreground and background elements, particularly the ice effects in snowy areas. Rare bosses with two elemental alignments are also capable of affecting two areas of the battlefield at once. These are among the most frustrating and difficult bosses as they make it difficult for Arlo to stand anywhere on the battlefield without becoming stunned.
The importance of Arlo’s equipment is drilled into me from the beginning of his quest. Following the attack on Winter’s Edge, nearly everything he owns is destroyed, reducing him to using a fire-damaged sword and shield recovered from the wreckage. Tails of Iron II is an intentionally difficult videogame, though never moreso than in its first few hours when Arlo is forced to fight with equipment that does not exploit his enemies’ elemental weakness. It takes hours of thorough exploration to assemble a collection that gives him a potential advantage against every possible foe. Once Arlo claws his way over this early difficulty hump, the remainder of his quest is still a difficult one, but losses feel far less discouraging.
Though Arlo’s mission is ultimately to thwart the Darkwing army that threatens to sweep across the north, much more of his time is spent completing favors for the different animal cultures with which he hopes to create alliances. On the outskirts of Winter’s Edge is a rat village called Mossbug who have their farms menaced by wild porcupines, wyrms, and vultures, all ordinary animals scaled up to dinosauric size. In the Golden Forest, a parliament of owls needs help with wild centipedes and a cult of their own rogue citizens who can transform themselves into part-owl, part-bear berserker hybrids. A third major area is The Rift, where a solitary merman blacksmith plans the rescue of his kidnapped daughters between a cave of giant spiders on one side and a tribe of insatiable frogs on the other.
When Arlo first visits an area, he volunteers his services as hunter and warrior to the local leadership to gain their trust. This leads to a plot-justified confrontation with a monster. Once the monster is defeated, Arlo is free to leave with the community’s support added to the reconstruction of Winter’s Edge. In a nice improvement over the first Tails of Iron, these story quests don’t feel as inane as what its protagonist is tasked with doing. Every problem Arlo solves feels urgent and important and not like videogame filler whose sole purpose is to enrich the player character’s coffers so he may buy fortress upgrades.
If Arlo sticks around after winning a community’s favor, new sidequests become available. There are two kinds: bosses and infestations. Despite this categorization, there is no actual difference between the two. Every sidequest tasks Arlo with hunting down a boss in the immediate area and killing it. Infestations require killing a few extra enemies before the same boss spawns, which Arlo will likely also encounter while completing the standard boss sidequests anyway.
Many of these sidequests are rematches with a monster Arlo fought as part of the main story. Some are against boss-tier versions of the regular enemies that serve as speed bumps for his travels across the map. Once a sidequest is completed, it may be repeated by visiting its initial quest giver. It’s not even necessary to activate these sidequests to challenge the bosses they contain. The same bosses also randomly appear on the map once the local story quest is completed, their presence marked by a silver badge.
Arlo’s matches and rematches with the same monsters are repeated, almost to the point of absurd repetition, for the purpose of acquiring monster parts. He needs these to create and improve his armor and weapons to keep pace with escalating enemy power. It becomes habitual to look at what equipment will be most useful to Arlo against the current boss, then to break away for a few minutes to farm the monster parts needed to upgrade that equipment. The purpose of the sidequests is less to add texture to each animal culture and environment and more to provide a mechanism for spawning the exact bosses Arlo must defeat to get monster parts. Tails of Iron II demands I perform a moderate amount of grinding and, short of allowing enemies in the current story beat to gain an unfair advantage, there’s no way of avoiding that.
If I were to examine Tails of Iron II’s map divorced from the combat videogame it is attached to, I might mistake it for a non-linear platformer. It has many hallmarks of one. Arlo’s exploration of a cave beneath Mossbug is impeded by a heavy wooden door. He is unable to open this door until he returns later with a mighty two-handed weapon given to him by the merman blacksmith. Not far from there is a barrow that can only be unsealed by four runes scattered across the world. As Arlo explores and meets new characters, he discovers trading cards which are of interest to an eccentric and powerful collector.
These features give a misleading impression. The world may be explored in a non-linear order, but there is little reason to visit most of its locations until a quest or sidequest sends Arlo there. A door barricades a cave beneath Mossbug, but it is the only such obstacle Arlo encounters. Collecting lost runes and trading cards does culminate in hidden areas, a bonus boss, and rare supercharged equipment, but they are Tails of Iron II’s only secrets. It’s another design choice it shares in common with its predecessor, which also had a nominally open-ended world that made few allowances for leaving the shiny, polished track. If the narration or a map marker isn’t directing Arlo to a place, I may safely assume there’s no reason to go there.
Nothing better underlines Tails of Iron II’s philosophy towards exploration than the chef at Winter’s Edge. By delivering ingredients to the chef, Arlo is rewarded with a sumptuous meal that permanently expands his health meter. In a non-linear platformer, these ingredients would be hidden around the world, incentivizing the player character to thoroughly explore every area to ensure they are prepared for their next major battle. In Tails of Iron II, the ingredients the chef wants are purchased from another non-player character standing right next to them.
The cold north lands around Winter’s Edge are an explorable world with nothing in it to find. The reward around an unexplored corner is always another fight, not another treasure.
Tails of Iron II: Whiskers of Winter is a worthy followup to the first Tails of Iron. It doesn’t challenge itself with re-evaluating any of the design choices it made before, and then it chooses them again. It’s a bigger and more refined videogame, and for that it is certainly a better one. If it has a major flaw, it’s that it makes no effort to attract new players or pull back those disillusioned with the original. If a player dislikes how difficult the first videogame is, how rigidly structured its scenario is, or how little mystery or discovery there is to its world, they will feel similarly about what’s offered here. If they were not attracted by its grim setting and violent combat in the first place, nothing about the new premise will make them reconsider. It’s a similar videogame, perhaps to a fault.