PaRappa the Rapper 2 - Max Difficulty Longplay (w/o Stage 8, sorry)
5Yes, this is what was alluded to during the Smash Ultimate video where I mentioned testing out my new upscaler.
Any errors that you may catch mean that it still isn't exactly perfect. This video's purpose is to see what a long recording of a PS2 game would turn out to be like. From the looks of things, if I keep it in 720p and 30fps, I'm good for this and Gamecube stuff in the future.
So why PaRappa the Rapper 2 and why this Maximum difficulty? Well, people seem to like my Rhythm Heaven stuff, so I figured I try out another rhythm game for a one off video. The maximum difficulty comes in because of a video series made a couple years back called the 'Black Hat' playthrough by oddMLan. This was basically playing through the 8 stages of the game utilising a cheat to force the game to be played on its maximum difficulty level of 16. Since the game has unlockable hat colours to represent difficulty, he also modded the colour of PaRappa's hat to be black to symbolise a black belt from the teachers. In the descriptions of those videos is an edit that explains that this difficulty mode can be accessed without modifying the game, so I used the trick explained there in order to play at this harder level.
I think that this difficulty is pretty fun and challenging, especially if you enjoyed your time getting to the yellow hat in order to unlock this mode. If you have the game yourself on either the PS2 or 4, I encourage you to give this a try. It's a pretty solid tie-over from Rhythm Heaven to more... dextrous rhythm games. Even if you screw up, you can save the line if you can flow well.
Alright, the video itself. I cut out the map screen transitions as they are mostly the same thing over and over again (walking to the next level, pressing the stick down, entering it and watching the loading screen). I also trimmed down the loading times in a couple areas. The loading screens I tried to make it loop twice to keep things flowing. With the rap gameplay itself, I tried to keep things in the good rating as I don't really want to waste your guys' time with spamming in Cool mode. Lastly, I only showed the first practice segment because, yeah, it's kinda obtrusive. I've tried looking everywhere to see if there's some kind of button input that completely skips the practice segments and just plays the full story cutscenes for the level, but I've found nothing. It's likely that all those videos online of the full playthroughs showing the cutscenes just cuts those out as well. I dunno, maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.
...oh, and if it wasn't obvious when you saw the map screen, I was able to play the 8th stage. Once I got the Cool mode crown on it, I never went back to it because, honestly, it's not one of my favourite songs to play. Even before then, I noticed that it took a while for my disc to completely load the cutscene in order to play the rap. I even replayed the game with a fresh save file to see if it was just an error with getting the Cool mode on it, but that was not the case as it still wouldn't load on that fresh save file. Sorry again if you were looking for story closure.
Edit 29/10/20: I may have figured out what the problem was, and it's sad to think of it being the case. I think it's something to do with the laser that reads the discs being weaker at reading certain parts of a disc. I know this because I tried out a couple CDs in my PS2 and they worked as intended up until the last few tracks, where the audio would either get pretty choppy or not play at all. I hope that something like that is easy to fix on your own, otherwise there goes my PS2.