The Spirit Engine 2 starts off with the anti-hero of the party running across a man dying in the road. Confused (as any person would be), he (or she) moves further down the road to the nearest village. There he finds the village in turmoil over attacks on the populace. After teaming up with another potential hero, they make their way towards one of the kidnapped children and defeat the monster holding it. Once the child has been released and the party makes their way to the searchers' camp, the game begins proper, as the tutorial has ended.

The story of The Spirit Engine 2 has political intrigue and interesting character interactions with the best of them. The humble start given above leads into a big conspiracy involving cults and luring two nations into committing themselves to war. There's a lot going on behind the scenes of the story, and you can't really get all of it on the first playthrough, as there are 27 different party combinations. Each has dialogue that is unique to that particular configuration, which means that a lot of writing love went into The Spirit Engine 2. It definitely shows. The biggest downside to all of this is that some of the writing is stiff and stilted. While you may be dazzled at the excellent writing of one scene, the next might make you groan with unnecessary exposition and verbose characters. If we had to pick one thing to fix about The Spirit Engine 2, it would be this. Make the writing more consistent! Right now, it is good on average, but we'd love it if the whole game was great, rather than great mixed with awkward and bad.

If you love pixelated artwork and classical music, The Spirit Engine 2 will be a godsend. It's one of the best-looking 2D games we have ever played, with excellent hand-drawn animations and gorgeous portraits for every character. The music is also stellar, fitting somewhere between classical orchestra and epic fantasy in terms of style. When we say that The Spirit Engine 2 has the best presentation out of any game we have covered here on Freeware Friday, we are not kidding. It's plainly stunning, and the amount of detail that went in everything from the characters to the environments is breathtaking. It's always good when you get to play a game as thoroughly amazing as this one. The basics of The Spirit Engine 2 are entirely linear. You control a party of three characters that stick with you through the entire adventure. Each character can be one of three classes: melee (Knight), ranged (Musketeer), magic (Priest). You don't get new characters, which is both a disappointment and a blessing. The lack of new characters means that the developer focused on writing for the current characters, which makes their dialogue excellent. Unfortunately, it also leads to a potential staleness of combat, as you can't expand your horizons without starting a completely new game. Still, the game is fun enough that we don't mind.

Movement and combat in The Spirit Engine 2 take place along a linear plane. You move from point A to point B, fighting any monsters you encounter along the way. It's linear in both story and combat, which may put some off, but the stellar writing should keep you hooked. The combat is relatively simple: choose an action for each character, who will then perform that action when their energy reaches the point that they can. There's a bunch of modifiers to damage given and taken, though. For example, if you score a big combo on an enemy, you might get an extra 30% damage against that enemy, which gradually ticks down until it reaches normal levels. All the normal damage and resistance stats are in play in The Spirit Engine 2, so you do have to balance out your attacks intelligently. The game stops pulling punches immediately after the tutorial as well, so you definitely need to pick it up quickly.

Each character is, as we have mentioned, unique. At least in terms of class. Each class has a number of skills that the player can pour points into in order to boost their effectiveness in battle. Only one skill is shared between all classes, and it increases health. The rest are unique per class and offer bonuses such as extra armor or a higher chance to dodge. Skill points are the only way that you can enhance your characters, as there is no attributes system like in most RPGs. Your characters are the skills they have, and it's best to specialize characters how you want. Most skills are combat skills, such as hack or blessing, which come into play as you start to perform skill chains. The skill chaining system is the heart of the combat in The Spirit Engine 2 and it is what sets the game far apart from its peers.

In short, you can create skills for your characters to use. Skills are comprised of a timeline of smaller skills, and by creating or modifying skills, you can increase your damage or effectiveness. For example, you might have a skill called "Blessed Heal" that casts blessing, then heal, on the entire party. Once it triggers, the character performs the minor skills in order and waits until he can perform the skill again. There are two kinds of skill chains as well: individual and party. Individual skill chains are things like the aforementioned "Blessed Heal," while party chains tell the party to act all at once. If you want your whole party to unleash a massive combo on a boss, party chains are the way you do it. It's stunning to see your team being relatively uncoordinated for the majority of the battle, then switching to a party chain and unleashing a flurry of destruction. Alongside each character have unique skills and skill chains, there's also the matter of inventory and journal. The inventory is your character's equipment, and helps to determine how much damage they will be inflicting on their upcoming foes as well as reducing the amount of damage they take. In other words, just like normal equipment. The journal serves less of a gameplay purpose and more of a plot one, as it details each of the characters' personal thoughts. While the characters will often talk among themselves while out on an adventure, the journal is the only way to really get a look into their motivations.

The issues with The Spirit Engine 2 are very few and mostly related to variety. As mentioned before the writing is a bit stilted at times, leading to some very awkward sentences and thoughts that don't seem natural. The lack of other characters to join with you makes going through the game more static, and while it's cool that we get to focus on the three main characters the whole time, some other options would have been nice for gameplay purposes. The skill chaining systme is excellent, but when making a skill chain you can't see how much energy it will use, only if it will exceed the maximum amount of energy you can have. The interface could also use some reworking, and the tutorial is a little unfriendly to those unfamiliar with RPGs.

All of these complaints, however, are extremely minor. The Spirit Engine 2 has compelling, strategic gameplay, a great story, and a beautiful presentation. It's one of the best independent and freeware games we have ever played, and certain the best role-playing game. You can download the game from the developer's website. We also suggest donating if you enjoyed the game, as it was originally a retail game and it's always good to support independent developers you love.

For another look at freeware games, take a look at Joystiq's Free Game Club weekly feature!