The crown jewel in the Kyrandia series, so to speak, is its second installment, where at last the developers have figured out the best balance in tone and substance to craft an engaging, intuitive, and fun gameplay experience. It’s irreverent without being self-parodic, a well that the first and especially third games occasionally dipped into. It’s challenging and dangerous without being pointlessly combative to player progress. It has a lead who isn’t bland, irritating, or insipid. Who knew this series could produce an installment with the same charm and panache as any of the LucasArts classics?
Which is not to say that Book Two is without flaws. The inconsistent pacing and tone of the first Kyrandia returns in isolated moments. A few puzzles are as counterintuitive and impenetrable as ever. And plot-wise, the series has always had a cheeky disregard for its own established rules and themes, but rather than maintain the vague tree-hugging, forces-of-nature motif from the first game, Kyrandia 2 plants itself firmly in comedic territory from minute one and stays there. Zanthia reprises her role as the slightly hapless mystic in a world populated by even more hapless friends, and enemies. Her constant frustration at the ineptitude of her colleagues among the Royal Mystics and Kyrandia’s Court (which remain mercifully offscreen after the opening cutscene) is an amusing and welcome change of pace. As far as she’s concerned, the wheels of fate are turning against her, and the unseen forces of existence conspiring to make every step of the journey into an obnoxious ordeal. Which, as it turns out, is precisely what is happening.
Unlike the first game, your mission is determined from minute one: something is wrong with the actual, physical Wheels of Fate, which is making portions of Kyrandia vanish from existence. The Royal Mystics, with help from a giant walking hand, come up with a possible solution and appoint Zanthia to carry it out. That most sacred and reliable staple of adventure games comes into play as soon as you have control of Zanthia, wherein all of her resources have been lost and/or destroyed, leaving you at square one. And so the first section of the game is inevitably to find your cauldron and spellbook, and raise enough gold to take the ferry out of the swamp (what happened to that lush meadow just one game ago, I wonder?). It goes without saying that things don’t always go as planned for Zanthia, and that the wheels of fate often turn against you, to unexpected and often comical effect. The incidental characters are colorful and entertaining, including incompetent hunters, terrified trees, volcano-dwelling con men, an animated scarecrow, and pirates who brawl over the finer points of iambic pentameter. And while an irreverent, unserious tone permeates most of the proceedings, the central conflict is just enough of a driving motivation that it doesn’t lose itself in the silliness. A goofy, hapless love interest for Zanthia who keeps trying to save her and gets himself into more trouble than she’s in is especially inspired, and even manages to add a touch of poignancy to the zaniess before the end. 
Unlike the first game, where exploration is perilous at best, Kyrandia 2 dials the wanton player punishment down to a level of sensible, but ever-present caution. You can die in about three ways in the swamp, but all of them are easily spotted as danger zones ahead of time. There are very few cheap deaths and no unwinnable scenarios as far as I can tell, and the graciousness of this gesture by the developers improves the experience in spades. The worst Kyrandia 2 will do to you is a few somewhat tedious puzzles near the end, but neither are as bad as the most merciful puzzle from Kyrandia 3.
The interface succeeds where Malcom’s Mood-o-meter (and to a lesser extent Brandon’s Pendant) failed beyond their novelty value. Zanthia obtains a cauldron and a spellbook before leaving the first section of the game, and obtains torn-out pages with more spells throughout her travels. The recipies call for certain objects to be combined in the cauldron and then put into flasks, which are scattered around the world. The spells have a variety of uses, and obtaining the objects required to make them ranges from simple to stunningly fiendish (the “toad stool” play on words in the swamp is just plain evil). Once dropped into the cauldron, the object is lost, so one wrong ingredient spoils the entire recipie (kind of like cooking, actually). The potential for creating unwinnable scenarios here is palpable; thankfully, Westwood decided to have objects reappear once “flushed” from the cauldron, a great visual gag in itself.
Where peeking around corners in Books One and Three typically result in getting smacked in the nose, Kyrandia 2 reveals pleasures in the exploration of its world. Subtle touches like Zanthia’s screen-specific commentary upon clicking her, or the ability to read characters’ thoughts with the alchemist’s magnet add a welcome level of depth to the proceedings. It could be argued that some of the challenge of the first game is lost in making things a little easier; ceratinly the second go-around is the most linear of the bunch. But the result is less of an ordeal and more of a traditional adventure. The nonlinearity of the other games comes from tedious backtracking, trial-and-error exploration, and a kick-the-tires mentality with examining anything. I felt like I was keeping a wary eye out for the invisible hand of the developer, ready to smack my character dead and send me back to the beginning for not being impossibly careful, chortling with glee at roadblocking any progress I made. How ironic that the adversary in Book Two is a literal disembodied hand, and yet the experience is so much smoother, more polished, and more rewarding. 9/10.
