"How does it stack up against the original?"

How does it stack up to the first game? Let's see.

Graphics:
The artistic style is similar but the characters look a heck of a lot better. Also, the videos have substantially improved. The videos in Legends 1 (now to be referred to as L1) were pretty good but the opening video alone in L2 is worth watching several times over.
Winner: L2

Sound:
Not a lot of changes here. The most significant difference is that we no longer have to endure the voice acting of whoever played Magma in L1. Dang, she was annoying. Most of the characters say cool things like "I'm the best at what I do" or "Forgive me mein freund" but certain characters get pretty annoying (ie Gambit constantly yelling "wooo-weee, this is better than marti gras). Overall, the voice acting has improved.
Winner: L2

Difficulty:
L2 can be much more challenging that L1 if you try to play it the same way. The fact that you can gimp your characters (I'll get to that later) and that you cannot change out your entire team at every save point and still keep up with the bad guys are the main reasons that L2 is more difficult, which isn't a good thing. Even if you build your team well, I found the later parts of the game to be moderately challenging compared to the cakewalk that L1 became halfway through.
Winner: Your pick

Characters:
Big improvement here. L1 had the horrible problem of having too many characters that we exactly alike. Iceman, Gambit, Magma, Jubilee, and Psylocke all had the same completely useless projectile attack and were more or less clones of each other. L2 got rid of 3 of the 5 and made Iceman and Gambit more unique. The addition of the 4 Brotherhood characters, Bishop, making Nightcrawler not useless like he was in the first game, 2 secret characters, and getting rid of all the lame ones from the first game helped a lot. Honestly, if you could pick between Jubilee or Juggernaut, who would you pick?
Winner: L2 by a landslide

Role playing elements:
Big step backwards, here, I'm afraid. The power system is waaaaaay too complicated. The main problem with the new level system is that you can now gimp your characters. For those of you that don't know what gimp means, it means that your character has become useless because of the way you leveled him up. The time taken to level up is insane and the annoyance of putting points into Storm's lightning, knowing it will not help you later sucks. In L1, you had one lightning bolt skill. When it got high enough, it became chain lightning. Now they are two separate skills which leaves you with the choice of saving up points and being weak in the beginning, using them on low level skills and being weak in the end, or spending money to "redistribute" your skill points. The fact that they made a system knowing that players would want to change where they put their points is testament to how stupid the system itself is.
Winner: L1

Powers:
In the L1, every character had a primary and a secondary (which often sucked) attack, a boost, and an xtreme. Each power had its use (except for emma frosts fear power, which served no purpose) and every xtreme was at least cool to look at. Not so, anymore. Now we have powers out the wazzoo. This is okay for some, like Wolverine, who have several combat moves, but you can tell that they had to stretch for some characters (ie Iceman can summon a snowman to help fight and Gambit can kinetically charge the whole team to do more damage? Since when?). Some of the xtremes are now absolutely lame and instead of doing a lot of damage and looking real pretty do things like increase the amount of tech bits (money) that enemies drop. YAWN. For every 5 new powers, you will only want to use 1.
Winner: L1

Enemies:
Again, L1 outshines its sequel. In L1, we fought soldiers (riot cops, special forces), mutants (morlocks, acolytes, brotherhood), sentinels, and whatever weirdness is in the astral plane. They all made sense. In L2, we find ourselves fighting giant bugs at the beginning, with the explanation that they were genetically engineered by Apocalypse. Okay. Apparently, we are meant to assume that all future enemies were also genetically engineered by Apocalypse because they make no sense. Now we are fighting Deadpool look-alikes. Now we are fighting "energy demons" that look like they are out of Diablo II. Now we are fighting invisible mutants called undercloaks. Now we are fighting mystical robot temple guards. I'm not sure who came up with the idea to throw in hordes of bad guys I've never seen before in anything X-Men related, but he should be kicked in the nuts at least once for it. Another thing they tried to implement was shielded enemies that you had to perform certain combos on to damage. While this forces you to not just hold down R2 and hit X every time you see a bad guy, it feels really unnatural to have a bad guy that was invincible except to an uppercut.
Winner: L1

Bosses:
Even though the generic enemies suck, the bosses have greatly improved. No more are the days where a team of 4 X-Men take 20 minutes just to beat Toad (who must of lost his ability to turn invincible that he had in L1). Now we get to go up against bosses like Omega Red, Mr. Sinister, and Holocaust from AoA. Sadly, these bosses often fall into a pattern of attacks, which detracts from the overall experience but at least you have yourself a decent boss fight, unlike L1 where the battle against Magneto was easier than the first boss of the game. If you thought they used up all the cool bad guys in L1, think again.
Winner: L2

Storyline:
I find the overall concept for the story to be an improvement. It is a strange combination of the Age of Apocalypse and Apocalypse: The 12 storylines, both of which I enjoyed. Every little mission has its purpose, but when I stop to look at the big picture, ie when I stop to ask myself why I'm in the savage land, the answer is "I have no freaking clue." Oh, no wait, I remember. We went there because Beast wrote "the savage land" on the floor before the bad guys captured him. Apparently Beast can see the future and know where he will be taken before it happens but is too stupid to think of escaping and apparently Apocalypse and Co are too stupid to erase it. Point being, sometimes it seems a little unclear why we are doing what we are doing. Overall, though, an improvement but maybe that's just because the boss battles aren't so anticlimactic, which took away from L1's story.
Winner: L2

When it all comes down to it, I think L1 and L2 are pretty equal. I strongly suggest you play L1 first, mainly because it has a more "yay we get to be the x-men" feel while L2 has more of a "lets get serious because we have to save the world" feel to it which can put off new players.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/06