La Corda d’Oro 2: Koei’s second symphony

The first game in the series immediately impressed me thanks to the serious, earnest approach it took to its classical music theme—and also daunted me with the myriad interlocking systems required to play them well. My musical skills were split between three genres (this was on top of experience in each song), I was expected to chase after temporarily visible fairies for new sheets of music, worry about the accessories I wore to each performance, and pick out emotive keywords after viewing additional explanatory scenes related to these pieces, which ideally should match the ones requested of me at the start of each pre-recital training session. It’s exhausting just to type out, never mind do, which is probably why the second game’s manual is stuffed with help and advice, the first of which is literally “Play on the easy difficulty setting before anything else”. La Corda d’Oro 2 itself opens with a choice of easy and normal difficulty levels (hard can be unlocked later), with a little…