The monstrous Metagen Remnant really had me on the ropes, crushing me repeatedly with a swipe of its tail, but that stoic, pink-haired woman just wouldn’t let me forget the power of duty, friendship, and anime.

I recently attended a closed preview event for Code Vein II, upcoming sequel to Bandai Namco’s 2019 3^rd-person action game with anime aesthetics and narrative. Hosted at a dramatic cathedral church in Los Angeles, I played several hours of a curated demo and took part in a group interview with series director Hiroshi Yoshimura and producer Keita Iizuka, both of whom are returning from the first game to make a bigger and better sequel.

One of the original Code Vein’s main mechanical hooks was the variety of NPC partner characters that you could team up with to overcome the game’s challenges, and Code Vein II has doubled down on that. Yoshimura summed it up well that what he “think[s] defines Code Vein and its identity is really traversing these difficult dungeons and encounters with your partner, and that sense of achievement you get from overcoming them together. So that’s one [piece of positive feedback] we got from Code Vein, one that we’re definitely leaning into more in Code Vein II.”

Same but Different

If, like me, you never got around to the original Code Vein, you don’t need to worry about missing the story. Code Vein II remixes much of the first game’s imagery—powerful, vampiric beings called Revenants in a post-apocalyptic world—into an original setting and story. Fans of the first will no doubt find plenty of rhymes and resonance, but new players need not worry about studying up on the lore to understand what’s going on.

That’s not to say that everyone will easily follow along with everything. A big part of Code Vein’s appeal is that it’s anime as all hell, with a plot that’s as melodramatic as it is convoluted and laden with proper nouns. This time around it’s a time travel story, no less. According to Iizuka that’s why they decided to have it be unrelated to the first game: “If we had done this as continuation of the previous world/character/game, then that could possibly mean players would affect and change events that have already happened in [the original] Code Vein. And we didn’t want to take away from that, because what players experience in Code Vein, we think, belongs to the players.”

Josée and the Pussycats

Code Vein II takes place in a world on the brink of collapse. Humans now live together with Revenants (vampiric beings that had long existed in the shadows). 100 years ago, Revenants worked together to try and defeat a cataclysmic force called The Resurgence but failed to seal it, creating a new entity known as Luna Rapacis. The result was that the Resurgence was only delayed, and Luna Rapacis is turning Revenants into mindless horrors that accelerate its progress.

You play as a Revenant Hunter tasked with saving the world. In order to do that, you have to defeat Fallen Heroes of the Resurgence—the Revenants from 100 years ago that tried and failed to seal it away, and have since been corrupted into monsters and sealed into cocoons. With the help of another Revenant with a unique time travel ability, you must first go back into the past, meet these heroes in their prime, and help them out in their personal quests before returning to the present and defeating them in their monstrous form. According to Yoshimura, “the overarching mission is going to be to defeat all of these heroes, the order of which is up to the players themselves,” so in a very real way, the gameplay and story are structured entirely around these partner characters.

For the demo session we played parts of the section for Josée Anjou, a short, fierce Revenant with a giant sword, pink hair, and an eyepatch. She’s a stoic protector, burdened by guilt from her past. In her present we were helping her cleanse polluted water from the Sunken City, a flooded urban ruin, by fighting our way down to defeat an enormous, sphinxlike beast called the Metagen Remnant. Our exploration down towards the boss was punctuated by flashback scenes in which I’d run past tableaus from Josée and her sister’s past, learning more about her personal story. Eventually I returned to the present to do battle with a monstrous (and monstrously difficult) Josée, burdened by the full pathos of knowing this creature’s tragic backstory as she pounds me into the tile over and over again.

Formae and Function

Combat is the real star of the show. Code Vein II comprises an intricate lattice of interconnected systems that I could only begin to wrap my head around in a few hours of play, but I imagine they’d be engrossing when built up over an extended game. The foundation of stamina management, light/heavy attacks, and dodging should be familiar to anyone who’s dabbled in the Soulslike genre. Code Vein II then heaps on layers and layers of customization.

Rather than committing to fixed stats, Blood Codes return from the first game, acting as hot-swappable classes to rescale your stats for different builds. In addition to a variety of one- and two-handed weapons with different base move sets, Formae (a rework and expansion of the first games Gifts) are powerful special moves that you can find over the course of the game and slot into compatible weapons. These cost a resource called Ichor to use, which you replenish by landing special drain attacks.

The resource for using your special abilities being generated by attacking adds a risk/reward dynamic to combat, and keeps it aggressive. In all ways, Code Vein II wants to empower you to experiment and play in your own style, with Formae and Blood Codes allowing you to completely rebuild your strengths and moveset at any time.

And my Greatsword!

Partners take a prominent role in that combat customization, each offering unique passive bonuses to you that improve as your relationship deepens. You can either Summon them to have them fight side by side with you as normal (and as any Elden Ring player knows, just having a summon pulling enemy aggro can make all the difference in a tough fight), or you can Assimilate them into you, absorbing additional power and stats. This enables proud players that want to Let Them Solo Her still engage with the partner system, as it’s so central to the game’s narrative.

One of the biggest benefits I drew from my partner was the Restorative Offering, where they would sacrifice themselves to bring me back when my HP hit zero, before respawning soon thereafter to continue the fight. This brought me back from the brink countless times during the two extremely challenging boss fights in the preview, and can serve as a great buffer to keep you in the fight a little bit longer.

When I asked about mitigating difficulty, Yoshimura emphasized the role partners played here too. When faced with a difficulty spike, you can explore to level up and find more equipment, Formae, and Blood Codes to experiment with. The leeway given by partners pulling attention and reviving you “increase[s] this trial and error cycle, [and] I think that will keep the difficulty balance in check in a way that the players won’t hit this wall or feel this huge level of frustration, because the partner opens up that window for different ways of exploring encounters.”

The difficulty spike between exploration and bosses was enormous, and it’s clear that they will demand a lot, but Code Vein II provides so many different tools and levers for you to tweak that it will really feel like your own victory when you finally do overcome them, even if you did have a helping hand.

You can meet and defeat Josée and all the other partner characters yourself on January 30 when Code Vein II arrives on Xbox Series X|S, available for pre-order now. A character creator demo also releases on January 23.