Well this is something I was interested in. What I saw of the gameplay concept before playing it seemed very interesting, and the art looked good. So, while I wasn’t SUPER hyped for this, I definitely wanted to check it out.

I missed out on checking out the demo, so I went at it light-heartedly, and what I found surprised me. A lot.

So read on and see why!

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: January 11th 2011
Platforms: Nintendo DS

Genre: Point-and-Click Adventure Puzzle Game (sort of)
Rated T for Teen… sort of surprised it’s not rated M, but then again there’s no blood despite character dying all the time

What’s good about the game

Visuals
I actually have no idea how to describe the visuals here, so I’ll just compare them to something else. They look like fairly unknown classic game “Out of this World”, but there’s a lot more detail both on the characters and in the backgrounds, since there’s a lot you can interact with. I’m not too sure how to say this properly, but the characters in the scenes, while fun to look at, cartoony and colorful, still have a very serious feel to them. During dialogues, you have very nicely drawn big sprites, full of detail and emotion. I really like the general look of the game.

And the animation is fantastic. There’s no animation during the dialogues, but outside of that the characters move awesomely. I think the moment that really clicked with me is the first time you see Inspector Cabanela dancing down the stairs, then I really got into the great almost life-like animation style of the game. May it be background objects that you interact and move around, or cool animations from the characters, the game looks great in motion.

Gameplay
The gameplay is actually fairly unique. You play as Sissel’s soul (I’ll go a bit more in detail later). You can go in the “Ghost World”, which enables you to move the spirit to different objects, or to corpses, or to people you’ve saved before (so you can talk to them). There’s a certain distance you can go, so sometimes you have to interact with multiple things to get to your destination. Outside of the Ghost World, you can look around the area, or interact with the object you’re in (you’ll see on the top screen if there’s anything you can do with the object, which is very handy). When you’re not in timed puzzles, you generally have to find your way to different parts of the level, or to the nearest phone to get to other parts. This is very intuitive with the touch screen (though it CAN be played with the buttons).

There’s also timed puzzles, where you see the last 4 minutes of someone’s life before they get killed, and you have the move around through that moment and try to stop the character from dying. That generally requires really creative thinking on your part to figure out what to do, especially in later puzzles where you get a second ghost to help you out (not spoiling who it is). Certain minor things will let them live longer, which acts as a checkpoint in those segments that you can go back to if you fail. And some puzzles require timing certain actions right, or going into certain objects at just the right time, which requires very good observation of what’s going on. Some puzzles really require thinking out of the box, making for really interesting moments.

Story
The story here is simply amazing. No if or buts about it.

You play as Sissel, who has just died. For some reason (explained later), he gets the ability, as a wandering soul, to move to objects and manipulate them. Along with this power, he also gets the ability to go to a corpse and go back in time to 4 minutes before their death. Using that power, he can try to prevent that person from dying. That gives him a link to that person, so he can communicate with them later on. That’s the basic concept.

The base story is fairly simple: Sissel lost his memories (zomg cliché… that’s actually really well explained later on so it’s not as bad as in other games), so he wants, before his soul disappears after an arbitrary time limit, to regain those memories of his past life. In doing so, he ends up interacting with multiple characters, like detective on-the-run Lynne, weird dancing inspector Cabanela, Missile the cute little doggy, and a bunch of other characters. He investigates mysteries, resolves murders, gets into deep international conspiracies and basically changes people through all of that.

All the characters here are very interesting and deep. You see various facets of their personalities as you play through the game, and every character evolves through the events of the game. Very little of that character development is really forced upon you, you generally see the characters progressively changing as the story advances, which I really enjoy.

The dialogue is also really awesome. It’s serious when it needs to, and really funny at other times. It takes the gamer seriously, so it’s not just wacky nonsense all the time. The comedy is well written and really interesting, and every character really adds something interesting to the conversations.

As the plot progresses, the mystery gets deeper. There’s HUGE plot twist after HUGE plot twist, most of them really unexpected. You spend most of the plot wondering just what the heck is going on, and every time you get an explanation for something, something else happens that just changes everything, or adds something new to the story. You’re always on your toes, constantly trying to guess what’s going on.

The ending is a bit weird. I loved it, but at first I wasn’t too sure about it. Not going to spoil anything, but since it involves time travel there’s definitely some weird things about it. Anyways… as the ending goes on, after the whole “but… wait… time paradox…” thing, I was just really loving it, the dialogues were interesting, and the story was wrapped up nicely. And then, thinking back on various points in the game and part of the ending made me realize how damn well the game as a whole was written. Clearly the writer knew what he was doing. I don’t think any holes are left in the plot really. Oh, and Missile is an awesome, amazing character, if you don’t love him by the end of the game you’re heartless.

What’s bad about the game

There is very little bad about the game, so no need to make huge paragraphs here.
One “problem” with it is that there’s basically no replay value. If you play through the game once, there’s very little reason to play again, since you know everything. I can see myself playing through it again in a year or so, kinda like the Phoenix Wright series, but there’s no immediate need to replay it.
Then there’s the difficulty spikes. The game is basically fairly easy most of the way through, or at least easy enough to figure out, and you can never lose (you always go back in time if the person you’re trying to save dies). And then some puzzles come along where you REALLY have to think WAY out of the box which makes some of the puzzles really hard to figure out. Not really hard, and you’ll eventually figure everything out, but some of those are really crazy (especially when you get a second ghost with new powers). Not entirely a bad thing, but some of it is annoying.
Some people might complain about the linearity… but those people are morons.

Overall

The game definitely feels a bit more like a book, or a movie, than it does a game, kinda like the Phoenix Wright series (which is also awesome). Sometimes that’s not a good thing (case in point: Heavy Rain). So why is it a good thing here and in Phoenix Wright when it’s not in other games that try to be like movies? Well, simple: the story is amazing, the characters are great, but, most importantly, the gameplay elements are REALLY fun (all elements that Heavy Rain completely failed at). If the gameplay weren’t compelling, I wouldn’t have cared for Ghost Trick no matter how great the story would have been, but, since the gameplay is great, I could get greatly immersed with the story.

The gameplay basically feels like a mix of point-and-click adventure game and…. The Incredible Machine (remember that awesome PC game?), and it works really well with the story. The story is more than interesting enough to hold your attention all the way through and is definitely a story you won’t be forgetting anytime soon. And it’s filled with interesting and memorable characters.

Just like the Phoenix Wright series, Capcom has another masterpiece here, it’s an excellent game overall. Not sure if this is going to end up becoming a series, but it does potentially leave itself sort of open to a sequel.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Amazing Story
- Awesome characters
- Great gameplay and puzzles
- Very interesting visuals and animations
- Missile!

Cons
-Very little replay value, if at all

The Save Factor

The game is 30$ new, and I’d say it’s well worth it. Great gameplay experience, tremendous story, memorable characters… seems well worth the full price to me.
(Note: an iPhone version is coming up too (probably, since it’s out in Japan)… but the fact that you’ll have a big finger blocking your view at all times, and the lack of a second screen, will make it lamer… go for the better version)

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If you know me, you know I’m a relatively big fan of games NIS America bring over to America. There are some exceptions, of course, and I’m more partial towards games developped by NIS itself.

This game caught my interest for a number of reasons:
1. Published by NISA
2. Etna
3. Various Darkstalker characters
4. Interesting-looking gameplay
5. Costumes for all the female characters
6. SCHOOLGIRLS!

Read on and see if the game is actually good like I was expecting, or if it actually deserves the stupidly low 3.5/10 rating from IGN.

Looks and sounds
The game uses 2D sprites. Standard Definition 2D sprites. I wouldn’t mind too much, but I was expecting a bit more from the game graphically. The sprites are okay, but they have a big lack of detail. To make the game look weirder, there’s some enemies that are 3D models. Relatively low-quality 3D models. Mostly for big enemies that take multiple squares. The animations during battle are quite good though, well detailed and cool-looking attacks. The animations otherwise (in the world map and in dungeons) are pretty bad though. Graphically, the game is sub-par PS2 level when it comes to 2D. I don’t mind, but I would’ve loved to see all those characters in high-definition 2D instead of sub-par PS2 level…
Oh, but the bigger sprites used during conversations and in the status screens look fine. Oh, and did I mention that changing a character’s costume won’t affect their battle sprite? That sucks ass, I’d love if I could have an army of schoolgirls pwning the enemies, but I can’t. Blu-Ray discs should have more than enough space for a few thousand extra battle sprites(counting each separate frame of animation, of course) for each female characters, there’s no excuse.

Sound-wise, the game is all over the place. Really. The music ranges from really fun to crappy. The battle music is fine, some character themes are a bit weird, and some music just sucks. The sound design is pathetic. In cutscenes, when characters are walking, the sound of footsteps is always the same, no matter if there’s 2 characters or 10 walking at the same time(the only exception is when there’s 1 character walking), and there’s no synchronisation at all. Other sounds during cutscenes are also badly synchronized. The voice acting is pretty good though… When there is voice acting. Cutscenes range randomly from having voice acting to not having voice acting. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the scene is important or not. An important story scene might not have voices while a totally optional and random Hot Spring scene (involving prinny trying to get a glimpse of all the naked girls) will have voices.
The sound design in the game, in general, is pretty bad. And with Blu-Ray, there’s no excuse not to have voices on every scene.

Story
The game takes place in a world composed of souls, or something like that. Souls are sucked into this world, making the world sustain. Someday, some people(from various different worlds) are sucked into the soul-sucking world without their souls getting absorbed. They learn about what the world is, and decide to release souls who haven’t been absorbed yet, and find a way back to their own world. On the way they find other people who got sucked in this world, and enemies, who ALSO got sucked in this world, who were ordered(by some “unknown” being named The Empyreal One) to kill the good guys. You have the find the truth of the world, and get out of there,

That’s basically it. The interesting part is that there’s multiple endings. You get one ending for clearing very specific conditions and basically finding everything in the game (Truth End), and another ending if you miss certain things(Bad Ending), and another ending if you get the things that prevent the bad ending but miss other things that are required for the good ending. Since the conditions are very specific(like keeping some enemies alive in certain story-battles), there’s tons of things to do to be able to get the truth ending, and if you want it you’ll most likely play through the game multiple times and check online for the conditions.

Overall the story is okay.It’s a bit standard, which is weird considering the potential the story has, and it’s not OVERLY good, but it’s still interesting enough.

But the character interactions are not too great most of the time. The conversations are lame, or borderline embarrassing at times. There’s exceptions, of course, but they’re rare. I was definitely expecting more from this, with so many characters from different games. And all the characters other than York and Miko lost their memories, so some characters who should no each other just vaguely remember their names, making for some awkward conversations sometimes.

The characters come from games like Disgaea (sadly there’s just Etna and Prinnies), Darkstalkers, Ar Tonelico, Mana Khemia 2 (coming relatively soon over here), Spectral Souls series (which I’m not very familiar with, other than the lame PSP SRPG which sucks) and there’s a few original characters (York, Miko, the 3 bad guys, Troy and a few others).

Gameplay
So finally the gameplay. Well, it’s a turn-based RPG with a twist. First things first:

Navigation
There are 2 types of areas you can navigate in. First, the world map. Basically, it’s a big empty map(there’s multiple “layers” of the world, and each layer has different areas you can go to). Yes, empty. There’s a few things you can do here. Moving around, which raises the “encounter” meter and battles start when it’s red long enough. There’s Sealed Stone Tablets that prevent you from moving on until you pass certain conditions. Pressing Square makes you search. Searching can find 3 things: Events, souls and save points. Events are where the story advances, or random non-sensical things happen, for some extra comedy/randomness. Souls go towards an invisible variable that determines which costumes get unlocked, go towards the “release ratio” for certain Sealed Stone Tablets, and they give items. Those are needed for various things as well. Save Points, contrarily to what the name says, are not used to save your game(you can actually save anywhere, other than in dungeons). This is where you can shop, do alchemy, check the database for titles and costumes, use a wider area search function and revive unconscious allies.

Searching is a HUGE factor in the game, as you’ll be doing it a lot. Some events you’ll find increase your Search Level, enabling you to find things you couldn’t before. And you know what that means? It means you have to go through all the previous maps to find new souls and events. That is until the final Sealed Stone Tablet tells you there’s only 1 soul left for the release ration in that area of the world, then you can at least skip that one map until you get Search Level 10. This does get a bit tedious, but it can enable you to get in more fights, find more item, and unlock costumes, which is a good thing.

The other type of area is dungeons. They’re handled in a side-scrolling matter. You can jump and double-jump… and that’s about it. You get battles in dungeons the same way you get them on the world map, though it does offer some different enemies. Each dungeon has a bunch of rooms, and exploring them fully is needed to find new items. Just get to the end and that’s it. There’s no challenge really, since there’s no actual obstacles in the platforming.

Battle
Battles are really interesting here. There are 2 sides: the enemy side and the guys you control. Each side is comprised of a 3 by 4 grid, with 1 character per square. Your team is made up of 4 characters from your fairly large roster of characters. Each turn is made up of 2 phases: the Enemy Phase and the Player Phase. In the enemy phase, you opponents attack, and there’s nothing you can do. The player phase is the fun part.

You can choose which character will be attacking with L1 and R1. You choose the target with the D-pad. Each character can have up to 4 attacks assigned to the different face buttons. You set the attacks in the equipment menu, where you have a number of slots for attacks. Each attack has a range, so the placement of your characters on the grid is important. Each attack takes up AP. AP is a set stat on the character, which can be boosted with active skills and certain equipments.  The starting AP is the character’s base AP stat. Their maximum AP is twice their base, and each turn they recover the same number of AP as their base amount. Each attack also has an area of effect. While multiple attacks just hit one target, some attacks target part of  line, some target a whole line, whether it be vertical or horizontal and some attacks hit a set area.

So when you launch an attack, the attack hits, and then you have a timer. During that timer, you can change characters and launch more attacks. These add up to a combo hit count(and each attack has a number of hits it can do). When you hit an enemy, of course his HP comes down but there’s 3 other meters that you can affect: Burst, Break and Down. Different attacks and combos affect different meters. The Break meter basically increases the number of hits(and slightly different animations) that will come from a Branch Combo attack (more about that later), and when it’s down each character attacking at the moment or in a branch combo get a nice AP boost. The Burst and Down bars break the guard of the opponent, increasing the number of damage your attacks do(and from what I understand a given enemy type will only be guard broken from one of those 2 bars). As for the HP, after it gets to 0, the enemy stays alive until you let the timer go down (or if you press left on the left analog stick to end the combo), so you can continue attacking it, and there’s still more HP to remove. Hitting the enemy enough will Overkill it. Overkilling basically gives more chances for item drops and sometimes some rare item drops too.

Branch combos are what you’ll be using to bring that combo hit meter up. Basically, during an attack, if specific attacks follow each other, you’ll get a Branch Combo attack going on. Those usually have special animations, and can involve multiple characters. Some branch combos can be done with only 1 character as well.

EX attacks, which you can access by pressing R2, require not only large amounts of AP, but also the EX bar. The EX bar raises when you get hit, and when you hit. When it’s high enough you can unleash the highly damaging (or healing) EX skills. You get more of those as you level up as well.

When enemies die or you stop your attack, you can end your turn, use items, move your characters around the grid and switch your characters with characters that are out of the battle. All of those (other than ending your turn), use a set amount of AP as well. A valid strategy is to skip your first turn to get tons of AP on your second turn to deliver tons of damage.

Overall, the battle system is very fun to use. It has a little of a learning curve, but by the time you reach the second save point it should be no trouble to use at all. Trying to set up your team to do optimal damage and number of  hits is really fun(number of damage and hits are needed to open up certain titles, which equals more items, money and points). The only annoying thing is that running away ALWAYS works.

Leveling and other powering up methods(and other stuff)
Winning a battle gives you 5 things. Experience points, gold, TP, EP and Party Points. Experience adds up to each character, and when they reach a certain number they level up.  Characters that were not in the active party get less experience points than those that are, so they still level up, but at a slower rate than active party members. Gold is used for 2 things: Synthesis and buying stuff. TP is used in the Save Points to search a large surrounding area, and you can exchange them for items at the database. EP is used for item upgrades, and party points are just like Use Points (which I’ll explain later) but that the whole party can use.

In the Save Point, there’s tons of stuff to do. The Alchemy shop is probably the most important, since you can synthesize, upgrade and enhance items. Each item starts at level 1. If you have the right amount of EP, you can distribute it to the item to raise its level, up to a maximum of 5. Items, after upgrade, can be processed to become different items. Those items are usually materials or active skills(which I’ll explain later).  Synthesis is fairly simple. Find recipes, either in souls, dungeons, or in the 2 shops in the Save Point. Those recipes are then added to the Synthesis menu, and if you have the right materials(which are listed when you highlight the item) you can make them. When you make an item, other than a few exceptions, the item is added to the shop. Also, synthesis will fail, producing a different item than expected. Sometimes it can be good, sometimes it can be bad, it’s random. Finally, each item has a “grade” stat. In the alchemy shop, you can take enemy drops and embed them within your weapons. Each item has a different stat boost, and each item has a different grade requirement. You can put as many things as you want in the items, as long as you have Grade left.

The other thing you can do to power up in the Save Point is use the database, where you can get titles and costumes. Titles have a set of requirements, and give money, PP, TP and items. The requirements range from doing high hit combos, high damage, killing a number of enemies, killing a specific number of specific enemies, finding certain items, finding souls, doing synthesis, and various other stuff, which can be pretty fun to do. Costumes are the interesting part. By getting side-events that have to do with certain characters, you unlock costumes for them in the database. When they’re unlocked, you can see the required conditions to actually get them, and when you get them, you can equip them. For the male characters, it’s really just a stat change. For female characters, it not only changes stats, but also the appearance in the status menus and conversation sprites. The stat changes can be either positive or negative, or sometimes both. Costumes are basically classes. And sometimes they’re just there for the LAWLZ, like Etna’s school swimsuit uniform, which reduced her HP to 1 when I first equipped it (though now she’s a bit higher). The costumes are really a fun element… now if only the battle sprites changed, and the costume change animation was not as lame and cheesy…

As you level up, you get normal stat boosts, but you also get Use Points. Those points are used to add stat points to any stat you want. Each stat has a different requirement of Use Points to be boosted, and that requirement rises as you level the stat up. And different types of characters have different requirements for each stat. For example, mages take less Use Points to boost their intelligence.  In addition to Use Points, you can use Party Points in the same way, by pressing Triangle on the Status option in the menu. This way you can really personalize the stats of every character like you want them. To add another layer to the personalization, there’s active skills. Those can give stat changes, slight behavior changes, or protection to certain types of attacks. Active skills are equipped directly to armor and accessories, which have a different number of slots each.

The leveling offers lots of ways to personalize your characters and really make the kind of team you want. There’s various different ways to boost your equipment and characters, and it’s fun to boost your team and make what works best for you.

OVERALL
Cross Edge has solid gameplay. The battle system is very fun. Sure, it gets a while to get used to, but after about 10 battles you’ll know exactly what to do. There’s a wide range of characters and attacks, so you can build your team like you want. Being limited to only 4 characters in your active party does make for some early decision making, but you can always grind your way to strong characters if you really want to. The leveling methods and various ways to boost your characters and equipment let you with lots of ways to make your characters like you want them.

The navigation is a bit weird and AWFULLY repetitive. Having to go through all the maps again when you search level increases (though some maps are only up to certain levels for that, so after level 5 some maps are okay until you reach level 10), and the world maps are nothing spectacular or incredibly fun. But it still works pretty well.

The gameplay is enough to make up for everything that sucks or are sub-par about this game. It’s fun and addictive, and in the end that’s all that matters.

Why did the game get bad scores?
Because, TECHNICALLY, the game is horrible. Nevermind the low-grade graphics(well, I do like 2D sprites, but most people don’t, so….) and the bad sound design, the whole of the game is a technical mess. Despite the game using low-res 2D sprites and low-res 2D in general, the game can’t run on the PS3 properly without lagging and slowing down constantly. On the world map, you’ll notice framerate drops all the time, especially when you’re using search. During battles sometimes the animation will stop completely for a few frames.  Sometimes the game will just slow down and not register your button presses. This is standard definition 2D game on a POWERHOUSE of a console, and it’s constantly slowing down. The game even slows down in menus. Oh, and while I’m at it, add BAD TRANSLATION to the mix. For the most part the translation seems fine(with a few hiccups here and there), but for some reason they managed to translate “Witch” as “Walorck”. So if you see a title that requires killing 15 warlocks, you actually need to kill 15 witches. Confusing AND stupid.

The other big problem is the loading times. There’s a 4.4GB optional install. You’d expect the loading times for a game like this to take no more than a second for map changes or room changes in dungeons. But the loading times for those can go up to 7-10 seconds long, and that’s WITH the install(can’t imagine how long the loading times are without it). It can’t be that demanding a game for a PS3, so why does it have so much trouble loading things? It’s probably that the code is badly optimized and it has trouble loading it.

Reviewers didn’t look past the technical difficulties, low-grade graphics and amateur-ish sound design. Because of that, it’s obvious that the scores for the game are far from stellar. Oh, and the fact that for some reason the reviewers had trouble with the gameplay as a whole, despite it not being very complicated. That lowered the score too. So basically they didn’t look at the gameplay, they just looked at the technical problems, and deemed the game to be BAD. But it’s not.

Also, I see a lot of people saying the menus are too hard to navigate… I think those people are morons, the menus are incredibly simple and self-explanatory, not much harder to go through than the average Final Fantasy menu.

So yes, the game is screwed up, it had so much potential but is ruined by badly optimized graphics, sounds and coding. The PS3 should logically have no trouble with the game, and there’s so much they could’ve done but didn’t (like costume changing the battle sprites for each character). And that’s why it got low scores. Because of lazy coding and graphics, and really not doing much good technically. Reviewers saw that(and seemingly lots of “normal” gamers), and didn’t look much further than that.

Overall
This is a really fun game. If you can look past the huge number of technical difficulties and bad sound design and low-level graphics, you have a fun and deep RPG with a variety of fun systems and a LOT to do.

NISA fans will find something to love here for sure, RPG gamers should like to see what it’s all about(with a rental at first), but I can’t suggest the game to anyone else really. Modern gamers are too stuck up to give a chance to a game with technical difficulties like this, really.

It deserves a much higher score than what IGN gave, that’s for sure. The gameplay alone is deep and quite interesting, warranting a high score by itself. My guess is that IGN, or any other big name reviewers, didn’t give it a chance and didn’t look further than the technical suckiness.

Yes, it should be on the PS2 (where the technical issues would probably not even be there), but it’s still a respectable game. Considering the lack of RPGs on the PS3, some people might want to at least check it out.

(this is officially my longest review, if not my longest post on the blog… 3600 words is WAY too long >_<)

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Let’s start with a bit of history. Oneechanbara was a game in the “Simple 2000″ series in Japan, made by D3 publisher. It was a relatively simple game (as the title suggests). The full name was “Simple 2000: The Oneechanbara”.  Simple 2000 was just a bunch of cheaply made games for the most part and most weren’t really good and didn’t become popular. But The Onechanbara one of the few titles in the series, if any, to spawn an actual sequel. Heck, it was so popular it even got a movie (which I reviewed), and it was surprisingly good. Like a good B movie, a bit campy but ultimately a fun watch, and one of the very few good video-game based movies.

That of course made me interested in the actual games, and as luck would have it 2 were announced in America: this one, and Bikini Zombie Slayers on the Wii. So I knew I had to at least pick up one of them (and i’ll rent the other later). And, like the movie, this was surprisingly fun.

So let’s go! Read on!

Looks and sounds
The graphics are okay. Pretty much like a really early 360 title. The textures are kinda meh, the enemies look average, and the girls are well done. There’s a few problems though. I saw people whining about the resolution. I didn’t have many problems with that, but what I DO see, a lot, is screen tearing. There’s tons of it. All the time. May it be during cutscenes or during gameplay, if there’s some movement on the screen, there’s gonna be screen tearing. Heck, I even get some when just running around with no zombies in the vicinity. And there’s some graphical glitches, like Saki’s mini-skirt disappearing to show her panties at total random, which was kinda weird…

The sound is average. I actually don’t remember any of the music in the game just by thinking about it, but while playing you know it does the job okay.  The voice acting is all in Japanese with subtitles, and for the most part the voice actors do a good job, though sometimes they seem to lack emotion. The sounds of the zombies are well done, either showing what weapon they have and such giving you proper sound cues to know when to evade gun fire and such.

Overall, the game looks and sounds fine though not as NEXT-GEN (current-gen would be the proper term, but whatever ) as other titles on the 360, keep in mind this is a budget title.

Story
After… Whatever happened in the 2 first games, Saki and Aya are teamed up and taking a break from zombie-killing. But that break doesn’t last too long, as zombies are attacking the city. So it’s up to them to get to the bottom of this zombie attack. It just so happens that some organization is after Aya and Saki’s Baneful Blood, which has… something to do with zombies, and they want to kidnap Saki (and actually manage to do so in the beginning of the game). Saki is saved by Anna, a gun-using policewoman in a skimpy outfit (surprising isn’t it?).

 

The rest of the story pretty much revolves around finding out about the organization behind the zombie attacks (since they have control over that) . Not a super-interesting story, but it’s not bad either.

Gameplay
This works like a basic Beat ‘em up. Go through a stage, come across enemies, go further in the stage, beat more enemies, and eventually fight a boss. The game’s basics are… really basic. But it still has quite a bit of depth. There’s various enemy types that require different strategies to fight, or different moves for faster kills, or different strategies by using different characters.

The basic controls are simple. You have a jump button, an attack button, a kick/alternate attack button and a third alternate attack/move button. You can lock on which gives you some evasion moves. You have a style change move which changes the weapons a bit ( Aya gets 2 swords instead of 1, Anna exchanges here badass dual-pistols for a shotgun and a machine gun and Saki gets NOTHING), a button to change character (most missions you get to choose 2 characters for the mission) and a button to clean your bloody sword or reload your ammo.  And the “Back” button brings you to the item menu so you can use items to heal yourself and get temporary stat boosts and such (the instruction manual doesn’t tell you that). You have various attacks, depending on your Skill level and what button combinations you use. 

The camera is a bit bad, it moves way too slowly, but it does the job most of the time, though it gets really jittery when you lock-on to an enemy.

Each character has a bunch of normal attacks and 2 special attacks. There’s a ” counter stance” attack that does massive damage in a small area in front of you, but it takes away from your lifebar. As you build up your combo, a yellow bar fills up near your character’s portrait, and as it gets higher you can use an ecstasy attack. Saki and Aya get a spinning attack(as seen in the movie!). Aya’s does more damage, but Saki’s does a shockwave which attacks far away enemies and Anna just mows away all that’s in front of her with her guns and during those attacks you’re invincible.

Aya and Saki also have 2 special mechanics. First is the bloody sword. As you kill zombies, your sword gets more bloody and loses its sharpness, sometimes getting stuck in zombies, so you have to keep your sword clean to prevent getting trouble with things like this. Anna doesn’t have that, but she has to reload her guns from time to time. The other mechanic is the Bloodlust system. As you kill zombies, Aya and Saki get covered in blood, and if there’s too much, they get in Rampage mode. This speeds you up and makes your attacks a lot more powerful, but you lose health as you stay in that state. The only ways to get out of that is to either use a goddess statue head or find a goddess statues on the map to purify yourself. Anna doesn’t have that mechanic, or something to replace it, because she doesn’t have Baneful Blood(sorry, no blood-covered policewoman for you).

Enemies are mostly zombies, may it be animals or humans or mud with hearts (yeah, weird), and they’re a bit different from usual zombies. Not Left 4 Dead fast, but still they can be fast(when they want to) and they can also use weapons. At first they can have chainsaws and such, or they can be burning. Later they can have handguns and shotguns. Enemies get dismembered when you slash or shoot at them, and that changes how they act. Zombies with guns, for example, can’t aim properly anymore if you cut their head off. When you cut their torsos, only their legs are left(why their legs instead of their upper body? I don’t know) and they can kick you, but they’re easy targets. There’s various other enemies. Zombie crows, zombie dogs, huge zombies, mud zombies that you can rip their heart out of for a fast kill and a few others. Bosses are a bit tougher. They take a lot more abuse and have more complicated attacks. But they have patterns and relatively cheap AI that are easy to fool. Also, against certain bosses, if you evade certain attacks with the perfect timing, you get some bullet-time and if you attack during that time you do massive damage to the boss.

Other stuff
In addition to the normal mode, there’s a survival mode and a freeplay mode where you can go through any stage with any character, but the most “interesting” is the Dress-up mode. This starts you up with the characters in their underwear and you can dress them up to make your own custom costumes. To get those costumes though is a really tough task, as you have to do various “quests” in the game, which aren’t all that easy. But after getting some and making costumes, you can use those costumes in any more in the game.

Also, there’s a leveling feature in the game. Enemies gives orbs when they die, and those give experience. As you level up you get 3 points per level which you can put in 1 of 4 stats: Skill (gives more attacks as it gets to certain levels), Vitality (defense/health), Power and Reach (for Anna it’s Gun, which makes her guns stronger, so power isn’t one of the really important stats for her). So you can pretty much customize each character like you want them to be. Cool stuff.

There’s a few other elements I could speak of like bracelets, but sadly I suck too much to get more than 2 consecutive “Cool” attacks (which somehow require pressing X while your sword is in an enemy… or something like that… I’m not too sure, but it requires consecutive “Cool” attacks on  Blood Mist monsters.

Overall
The game is fun. It’s like an old-school beat ‘em up, but with a bit more depth. If you like old-school beat ‘em ups, this could be right up your alley. Otherwise, it’s really violent with blood everywhere and, if it’s selling, it’s mostly because of the premise of bikini/schoolgirl outfit-clad japanese girls killing zombies with katanas, but look beyond that and you actually have a good game. Simplistic, yes. Repetitive, yes. But bad? No fucking way. Not the best game ever, but it’s unreasonable to expect that. It’s budget-priced, so it’s not like you’re losing THAT much trying it out. And the face of the store clerk(and other people in the store) will most likely be pretty funny when you bring that up to the counter.

What could make the game better? MAIDS. You get a bikini and cowboy hat-wearing girl, a schoolgirl and a policewoman, but no maids? Sucks. Maybe you unlock maid outfits as you finish quests, I didn’t get everything yet so I don’t know. Also, the instruction booklet is horrible, one of the worst I’ve ever seen, it says nothing about the game and you have to rely on IGN’s well-written guide instead (though they don’t say much about the controls, but you’ll figure that out easily).

*EDIT*
Good timing I say, DLC was just released for this. 6 outfits(2 for Aya, Saki and Anna… 1 for Aya is free and 1 for Saki is free, the rest are 200 points) and 3 new characters to play as (Reiko from the older games(she’s free), Misery and Himiko (those 2 are 500 points)) and there’s a pack with all the content for 1600 points (20$… kinda a lot if you ask me…).

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Hello people, I have been finding a lot of Yoko pictures recently so this week will feature some sexy cosplay of her!

Have a nice week!

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Hello people, it’s already this time of the week where you’ll be able to lay your eyes on some of the sexiest cosplay on the net. This week will be some cosplay from the Code Geass anime.  It’s a shame though that I don’t have a Lelouch cosplay though.

~  High-heels = a girl… Right ? ~

That’s it for today,

Don’t forget to post whatever you’d like to see in the future in the comments!

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Hello people, I’m Valkryst and I’ll be introducing a new feature on The Save Points! relating to cosplay.  I’ve browsed the Web over and over again to find the best cosplay there is and my job here will be to bring you the best of the best only. Of course, most of them will be the sexy cosplay type. Every week, I’ll post 5 cosplay pictures following most of the time a specific theme. This week is all about sexy maids. Feel free to post request on any theme you would like to see in the future.

That’s it for tonight! Look forward to next week too!

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Now that I’ve got your attention, please take a look on your right in the sidebar.

I’ve added a poll.

So now you can tell us what you’d like to see on our site through this poll.  Any ideas not on there? Well the comments are there for that.  So feel free to take a moment of your time and greet us and vote/post on the comments.

YES, I am shamelessly attracting new visitors! But according to Google, this is what people look for when they come here.  (^_^)A(^_^)

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This one does keep the usual Metroidvania style, but does a few things a bit differently. Is this game still as high-quality as previous DS/GBA Castlevania titles? Read on to see!

Story
This game takes place… actually I have no idea when. It seems like Mid 1800s, but it’s still pretty cryptic in that aspect, what with modern lighting, gasoline powered chainsaws, color cameras, robots… Yeah, it’s pretty cryptic as to when it takes places, but somewhere around 1865 sounds just about right.
Anyways, whatever year it is, the Belmonts are nowhere to be seen, maybe hiding or something until Dracula comes back to life, and a few other organizations are preparing to fight Dracula if he comes out and the Belmonts aren’t there to take care of him.  One of those organizations is Ecclesia, which seemingly only has 3 members. One of the members is Shanoa, a woman who can absorb “Glyph”, which basically let her use magic. So in the beginning of the game, Shanoa is preparing a ritual to seal Dracula forever, but is stopped by Ecclesia member Albus, who wants to prove himself worthy of going through the ritual instead of Shanoa. As a result of his interference, Ecclesia loses the Dominus glyphs which are supposed to be used to seal Dracula, Shanoa loses her memories and emotions and must start her training anew, and Albus is gone missing, Dominus glyphs in tow.
So basically, as Shanoa, you have to find Albus and the Dominus, as well as save the villagers that Albus kidnapped and imprisoned. I think the story is quite enjoyable, a few okay twists and everything just works well.

Graphics
The graphics are really nice. The sprites are well drawn and detailed (though, like most castlevania games, the sprites don’t have faces). The environments are really nice looking. Most are pretty dark and creepy, and overall give off a pretty good atmosphere. Last but not least, the enemies  look pretty nice. You’ve got the usual zombies, skeletons,  medusas, Death, axe armors, Frankenstein monsters and a couple other Castlevania staples, you also have a few new things like the big scary faces, Leatherface straight out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, weird screaming spirit girls, Nightmare (weird horse things), giant starfish, (historically accurate)Giant Enemy Crabs, shadow wolves and a few others. Monster design is overall really well done.

Sound
The sound is great as always. Monsters reacting to attacks or other of their sounds/talking/screams. Lots of creepy sounds too, of course. Shanoa’s voice acting is also pretty good, even if there’s not that much. Finally the music is great. It really has that classic Castlevania feel to it, and usually fits the atmosphere pretty well. Not much more to say here, the sound is great, as expected.

Gameplay
Ah, the gameplay. If I would describe it in one word, I would say “superb”. Map navigation is pretty much the same as older games, you go from room to room fighting monsters, some doors hide boss battles, and some rooms have breakable walls or floors or something to find hidden rooms or items, and finding save points and teleports. The basics from the various “Metroidvanias” hasn’t changed much, but some other gameplay elements have changed. The biggest difference from the previous titles is the Glyph System.

Glyph System
The big difference here is the Glyph System. Though it shares some similarities to the Souls system from Aria/Dawn of Sorrow,  it’s still pretty different. For instance, Shanoa doesn’t use weapons. Her attacks all stem from her use of Glyphs. Swords, rapiers, hammers, lances, fire, electricity, ice, light, darkness, all of the attacks come from the various Glyphs she absorbs.
Basically, you equip one glyph on each hand(Y button and X button) and one that can have various effects(used with the R button). Glyphs equipped to the hands can be used in combos by quickly alternating between the two buttons. Depending on the glyphs equipped, the rhythm to switch between each glyph is different, but proper switching enables to swifter attacks and better combat. Normal attacks uses MP, since all the attacks are basically magic based, so you can’t just attack non-stop, but MP recovers automatically fast enough.
In addition to that you have Glyph Union. With proper combinations, you can use different Union attacks, which combines two Glyphs to use a powerful attack. All combinations of the same glyph will have it’s own Union, but other combinations might create really powerful attacks. Those attacks use hearts, and a large amount of them, so they should only be used when they are really needed, especially in the beginning when you haven’t found many Heart upgrades.
Finally, as you kill enemies with glyphs(or find “Drops” items which boosts attributes), your attributes for each type will go up, eventually boosting their overall power. Not much more to say on that aspect, but basically the more you use a weapon type, the more powerful it gets.
The Glyph equipped to the R button can have various effects. The most important in the beginning let’s you latch on magnetized… things… and send yourself flying in whatever direction you want. Some make Shanoa transform into a few enemies, some give you stat boosts, one lets you fly, one lets you walk through certain walls. Basically, some of them are important to move on, the others can be use to complement your fighting style.

Quests
There’s quite a few quests in the game, given by villagers once you save them. The quests are mostly “go find X number of X items” and a few “kill X number of enemies”, but there are a few others, like “draw a waterfall” or “take pictures of a monster” or “find my cat”(though there’s a bunch of non-quest cats to find). Those quests give money, various items, or expand the inventory in the shop. So if you want some of the better equipment or just more stuff overall, doing quests is a good way to do that.

Equipment
Not much to say about this. Differently to previous Castlevania games, you don’t equip weapons, since all the attacks are handled by Glyphs. So you have armor, shoes, helmets and accessories. Most of the armor pieces can be found in the store after doing quests, and most accessories are found in treasure chests in dungeons, though a few can be found in stores when you do certain quests.

Going to different dungeons
This game, at first, doesn’t take place in Dracula’s Castle, which is currently nowhere to be found. So until you can actually go there, you go to various other locales, which range from forests to seas to caves to creepy dungeons and mansions. Those appear on a map, where new places appear when you complete previous areas. Very simple, but a different approach to the usual “going to different parts of Dracula’s castle”.

Overall, the gameplay is excellent. The Glyph System works really well, the combat is great and fast-paced, quests are fun to do, and exploring every area is good too.

Difficulty
This game is hard. Easily the toughest “Metroidvania” game in the Castlevania series. Except for the first boss, the bosses are all pretty tough, and each boss is harder than the last. They all have patterns, or at least visual/audio cues as to what their next attack will be, but it’s pretty tough figuring that out on your first try, and then evading their attacks isn’t always exactly easy. Not only that, but after a while bosses start doing a LOT of damage. One of them in particular, when I had 500 HP, did over 100 damage for each attack, around 160 damage for his “medium” attacks, and one of the attacks doing over 200 damage, you can imagine how fast I could get killed against him.
But it’s not just the bosses, even normal enemies can be a problem. Though not as bad as bosses, they still do ridiculous amounts of damage. Though it’s not too bad anyways, what really adds to the difficulty is the incredibly small amount of save points (which recover your HP). There is a LOT of distance between each save point, which are, for the most part, just next to boss rooms. Though some teleports help, most of the time they would still send you to a monster-filled room before you can get to a save.
If you want a challenge, this game definitely delivers.

Overall
So yeah, the game is awesome… Not much more to say here. Good characters, nice story, good graphics, nice soundtrack, incredible gameplay and really good difficulty. If you’re a Castlevania fan…. well you should already have it by now… If not, it’s worth trying out, though if you’re new to the series i’d pick up a different one to at least get used ot the gameplay. Overall great game, another masterpiece on the DS.

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Video game movies tend to suck ass. There are a few exceptions of course, but overall, for some reason movie makers can’t do any good when it comes to making video game movies.
But can you really go wrong with a movie with hot japanese girls in bikinis/schoolgirl outfits killing zombies with katanas that also parodies everything anime/zombie flick/action movie? The answer is no, you can’t go wrong with that. And that is really all Onechanbara is about.
 
Story (possibly slight spoilers)
Based on a game series by the same name(originally part of the Simple 200 series by D3 publisher), Onechanbara has a relatively simple premise. A crazy scientist from D3 corporation was conducting experiments to bring people back to life. Of course, that caused a huge zombie outbreak throughout the world. People who survived the outbreak are struggling to survive and trying not to become zombies themselves.
Enter Aya,  bikini-clad hot japanese girl out to find her sister, Saki, who is working for the evil scientist ho caused the outbreak and, after the outbreak, didn’t stop conducting his experiments. Aya has been, for a couple years, just randomly wandering around japan with some fat guy, killing every zombie in sight.
One night when fighting a bunch of zombies they come across some leater-clad girl with a shootgun that knows where to find Saki, so they head out towards the enemy’s… castle? Yeah, sure looks like it. Anyways, they head out over there, and along the way you hear about each character’s heart wretching past. Basically it all involves one of their loved ones getting killed or kidnapped by the evil professor/Saki.
The story isn’t incredible, but it works well and the characters, as cliche as they are, aren’t exactly that bad either(though the fat dude is pretty damn useless). Overall, entertaining story, it’s enough to keep the movie going and the emotional moments aren’t too bad. Not a bad story, but don’t expect anything incredible.

Action scenes
Now THIS is where this movie is great(well, other than the japanese schoolgirls/bikini girls). The action scenes are basically a big parody of anime and action movie action scenes, and wow they pulled that off really well. Just about everything in there parodies something. You get the anime-style “teleport dash”, auras covering characters/weapons, characters moving incredibly fast and being able to stop bullets and such. Realy, the action scenes really carry the movie on their own. Fast paced, exciting, and just really cool visually.

Zombie scenes
I did say it was a parody before, and the “zombie scenes” are just funny. They actually aren’t really scary and just exploit a bunch of zombie flick cliches. They keep popping out of nowhere, there’s body part getting ripped off, zombies just randomly eating people on the side of buildings… The visual effects really have a B-movie feel to them, and frankly i like that. They give more… realistic visuals sometimes than just badass CG. And if the effect is badly pulled off, at least you get a good laugh out of it.

Pictures
Of course I took a few screen captures.
Sorry for the low quality, but the video file i managed to find didn’t look that great either.

First appearance of Aya

Facing off against a few zombies. They're gonna get pwnd.

WTF is that?

Oh, they were clashing after powering up... wait what?

More super powers... I dare you to try stopping a bullet with a katana like that.Â

OVERALL
So is this a good movie? Well, yes, it is.  But you have to go at it with an open mind. You have to either have little to no expectations on this, or know that it’s just a big parody.
The visual effects are nice, the B-movie feel really helps, the action scenes are fun, the story, although really simple, is quite good, the whole parodying everything zombie/action/anime flick thing is really fun, and if you like anime you’ll have a blast out of the final battle. 
Bottom line: You like sexy japanese girls wearing bikinis or schoolgirl outfit? Check this movie out now. And if you want a good laugh and some nice thrill out of the fights too. Not a bad movie, and an example that movies based on video games can actually be good.

Other bottom line: I can’t wait for the Wii release of Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers in early 2009.(as well as an Xbox360 version… if i have a 360 by then)

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