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 >_<)

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…).

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!

Hello people, I’m sorry to have skipped last week’s edition. I was busy setting things up for my upcoming trip to Cuba. So let’s get back to the main theme. This week’s cosplay features the babes of Guilty Gears. I’m not much of a fan of the series myself, but the cosplays are still very interresting. Enough with the chit-chat, here are your pics! :p

All right! that’s it for today, cya next week with more sexy cosplay!

Sorry everyone, I have been trying out a new game and completely forgot about our weekly dose of sexy cosplay. Hope you guys didn’t suffered too much sexiness withdrawal!

As I was browsing my collection just now, I noticed that I had quite a few pictures I couldn’t fit into any category. So this week, we will have a Name that Cosplay game. Go ahead and try to figure out who are those people cosplaying.

~ And here’s a bonus for this week!! ~

Oh god. Golden Axe. A cult classic, one of the really good beat ‘em ups back on the arcade, or, where I remember it, on the Sega Genesis. This game kicked an immeasurable amount of ass. The fighting was fun, the spells looked cool, you had multiple characters to choose from which varied the gameplay, it became quite challenging, and it was a pure blast to play with a friend. Golden Axe was truly Beat ‘em up perfection (well, just after Ninja Baseball Batman). With it’s last appearance in 1995 on the Saturn, the series was pretty much dead.

In 2006, Sega announced a sequel to the series. Little was known until October 2007, finally, in October 2008, the game is finally  out, but nothing could’ve prepared us to the total awfulness of this game. Like many Golden Axe fans, I was psyched to see this coming back. In my mind there was nothing that could’ve gone bad considering they had an incredibly solid foundation for the game. But oh boy was I wrong.

I’ll just make a note here and say that no, I didn’t finish the game. For good reason too, because it’s god awful and I never finish bad games. So unless there’s some big breakthrough past the fourth chapter and the game somehow becomes good… Nah, won’t happen. Take this review as you will, but I’ve put more than enough hours in this piece of crap to tell you how bad it is.

Read on! And I’ll try to keep this as short as possible, the less I talk about this game the happier I’ll be. 

Graphics
Well the first thing I’ll mention is Tyris. The girl from the old game. She looks nothing like before.
  
Yeah, a bit different. Hair color changed, hair length changed, new slightly less revealing suit (though you eventually unlock the classic look), weird makeup, completely oversized and weird looking sword(you don’t see it here) . She’s not really similar… She is a sexy woman, but that’s the only similarity.

Otherwise… well, as you can see from the screenshot, the characters don’t look too bad… oh wait, that’s during cinematics, which look pretty good. The actual graphics aren’t really good. Just a step above the best PS2 graphics, which isn’t exactly saying much for a next-gen system. The animations are stiff, lifeless and just completely unnatural, except for the beast which move… slightly better than the rest. Graphical glitches are everywhere. And the environments are really lame and have no variety until you get further in the game. The first 3 “worlds” look exactly the same, with slightly different background… meh. Overall, the game doesn’t look really good. Considering how good the cinematics look, it’s strange how dated and lazy the rest looks.

Gameplay
The gameplay. The most important part of a game. If the gameplay isn’t good, no matter how good the other elements are, the game is gonna suck. And the gameplay here… Really, really, sucks. But I’ll go in just a bit more detail.

Fighting
Well the fighting is relatively simple.  X does fast attacks, square does powerful attacks, and both at the same time does a knockback attack. You can link those together to do different attacks. You can jump with triangle. And Circle will either do one of your 2 magic spells or use the Golden Axe (which is useless! at least up to where I was) depending one what you’ve got selected.
The controls are simple, and… they really suck… Okay, there’s no difficulty curve and they’re easy to use. That’s not the problem. They’re just unresponsive.  Sometimes your attacks lock-on to enemies, sometimes you’ll be attacking someone and turn to another target that’s out of range. It’s really all over the place.
Anyways… well fighting is all about evading enemy attacks and countering. Similar to Heavenly Sword, enemies start glowing or something to tell you what type of attack they’ll do next, and you have to do the proper maneuver to “catch them off guard” and unleash combos or attacks.  Orange means you must evade with L1, Blue means you have to block with R1, green means either will work and Red means you either have to get away or jump. This works pretty good… When there’s only 1 enemy fighting you. If you’re fighting multiple enemies, and they both unleash a dfferent type of attack, well chances are you’ll get hit. A lot. But the worst is the unresponsive controls, or just the completely screwed up timing to avoid some of the attacks. You see the orange sign, so you press your button, but it doesn’t work. Try again with another timing won’t work either. It’s almost random. Sometimes you do it too early and it works. And it’s even more confusing when you’re surrounded by enemies. Bosses are pretty boring to fight too, with simple patterns you must learn and when you know what to do their lifebar goes down relatively fast.
Magic is mostly used for “puzzle” “solving” (yes, I quoted both words) but can also be used to fight. as mentioned before, the  Golden Axe is useless in it’s incomplete form, but the fireball is pretty strong, and the fire shockwave can go okay damage to a bunch of surrounding units which can really help. This uses up potions, which you have 6 of. The fireball uses 1 and the shockwave uses 2. The Golden Axe uses nothing. Along with attacking with magic, you can also take a few tries to figure out the timing to evade or reflect magic. Which is pretty hard, especially if 2 enemies are shooting magic at the same time. The spells don’t look nearly as good as before (which is sad).

There’s a variety of enemy types… Armored melee enemies, strong melee enemies, medium-range melee enemies, weak melee enemies, medium melee enemies, more strong melee enemies, something between medium and weak melee enemies and 2 types of spellcasters… OH and enemies riding beast (which you can steal from them if you want). Armored enemies you need to chip off their armor until their helmet is gone before being able to damage them, and the rest is pretty much self-explanatory. The rest die either fast or take a big amount of slashes to die. And sometimes it’s random. Some enemies a fireball will kill them, but the exact same type of enemy a few minutes later won’t die and will require a few combos to kill.

Overall, the fighting is really not fun at all. The timing is stupidly hard for certain attacks, and when enemies start bashing on you your lifebar will go down fast. It’s completely unbalanced at parts and insultingly easy at others.

Camera
Yeah, the camera sucks enough for me to make a sub-section about it.  You control the camera by moving the right stick, but even when you move it to a desired location, don’t worry, the game will do its best to make sure you don’t see what you need to within seconds. The camera is literally always moving. It’s hard to focus on one thing, and during battle against multiple enemies, don’t expect to be able to see a lot more than 2 enemies properly at the same time. This means it’s hard to evade any kind of attack when you’re surrounded (moreso than if the camera was actually good). If you’re fighting a bunch of melee enemies nd there happens to be spellcasters out of your range… well the magic attacks will pummel you since there’s no way you can possibly see them coming.

Beast Riding!
One of the trademarks of the original Golden Axe games was that you have some cool beast to ride. Undescribable pink things, dragons, whatever, they were fun to use and some of them gave you an advantage over the enemy. Well… That’s not exactly false here, but it’s not exactly true either. Well first things off, the beast control badly. Not surprised. They move incredibly slowly if you’re not pressing the run button (yeah, there’s a run button, Tyris alone can use it too), their jump is somehow worse than Tyris’ and graphically glitched (yay) and they control like tanks. If you’re not running, turning is long, and if you are running you have to do detours to turn around. Lame.
Each beast has 3 attacks, using the same buttons as Tyris for different attack types. Special attacks, using Square, take off a Beast’s lifebar. Lame. Normal attacks, using X, change depending on the monster you’re using. Other than the one from the bigger monster, they all suck. The hit detection is pathetic with the weird thing on the cover of the game, and the cat-like thing just pounces randomly but somehow always passes next to your target.

The beast riding is really lame. Bad controls, lame attacks, and sometimes it’s just more effective to just fight normally.

Other Stuff
Well now I’ll just complain mindlessly. Because I don’t feel like going too much in detail with any of this.
Golden Axe was a great multiplayer game. Here, there’s no multiplayer. This is stupid. It might not have made the game any better, but at least it could’ve stayed true to the originals.
You can only play as Tyris. Sure, you see the badass dwarf guy early, and you might see the big muscle dude later on, but they most likely do nothing(the dwarf gives you the golden axe and tells you to repair it, but that’s it). SURE, I only used Tyris when playing the original Golden Axe, but that doesn’t mean a little variety wouldn’t be nice.
The puzzle solving is incredibly simple so they hide things in completely random areas to keep you running like a headless chicken until you finally find it by using the horrible camera.  And it’s always the same thing. Either destroy statues with the golden axe, light up torches, press switches or kill enemies.
The gnomes from the previous games are back, and they’re more annoying than ever. They carry food, potions and… money I guess? But unless you’re running and not on a beast and only using fast attacks, you’ll never hit them.
The devs also think you’re really stupid and that you really suck at games in general. You can never see healing circles or potion giving circles in certain levels (which automatically and infinitely heal either your life and magic), but in one level you’ll see 2, and they’ll be there DURING long fights. Why? You can just stay near that and you’re sure never to die.  Do they really think you suck so much you can’t go through 15 enemies without needing to get to full health every 30 seconds? Seriously… Such randomness.
Speaking of randomness, well the game is surprisingly quite easy, so to try killing you, the game will randomly place traps at parts where there weren’t any before in hope you’ll die. Of course, they do minimal damage and there’s a fucking healing circle right after the traps, so what’s the point? It’s just slowing me down.
The story sucks. It makes little sense, and it barely ever advances at all. At first it looks almost okay, but after the first chapter, there’s nothing. Lame. I’ve gone through 3 chapters now and started the fourth, and nothing happened. I fought stuff and found a piece of the Golden Axe, but that’s barely story advancement.

There’s probably more I can whine about, but I’ll stop there, the review is long enough as it is.

Overall
After writing this, I’m not playing this game anymore. It’s just so bad. It’s incredibly disappointing (almost insulting) to Golden Axe fans, and it’s not a good enough game to stand on its own so non-fans will not like it either. The game is just plain incomplete. The game as a whole just feels like they tacked on a bunch of random elements and gave it the Golden Axe name to get more sells. It’s not a finished game at all.
The gameplay is barely worth mentioning, the lack of multiplayer makes it even lamer, only 1 playable character is sucky and, overall, it doesn’t feel like Golden Axe, and it shouldn’t have been approved for release at all, no matter if it would’ve had the Golden Axe title or not. Finish your damn games before releasing them!

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!

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!

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(^_^)

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.