Well folks, I'm afraid the journey continues yet again with this game, that I will refer to as OSL henceforth. I was a bit excited about it because it appeared to use old-school controls and at first kind of reminded me of an arcade-style game the likes of which were very common on the system that I played more than any other in the Sega Genesis. Often, throwback games like this with updated graphics and sound can appeal to me but in the end I think that all of us have evolved as a gaming audience and something like this just isn't going to have widespread appeal.
We are far more difficult to appease as a consumer-base now and while this brought back all the good feelings from when I was a kid for a little while, in the end there just wasn't enough innovation in this title to keep me interested for every long and I was done after a couple of hours.
The game is actually quite good for what it is but in the end I think I am beyond the part of my life where I am going to stay interested in a side-scrolling action game with RPG elements for very long.
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When I see a title screen or cover art that looks like this it is normally pretty clear to me that the designers are going after anime fans and perhaps this one actually was an anime at some point. That's all fine by me but I also fear that the games are going to be story-heavy which makes sense if it actually is an anime and the people playing it are already heavily invested in the characters. For me though, I did so much of playing games like this is the 90's that it really has to be something incredibly special to hold my attention.
NOTE: Turns out this is NOT from an anime but is instead a reasonably popular series of games that began in 2007 and has had regular releases ever since.
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In many ways it is very similar to side-scrolling beat-em-ups that were the mainstay of arcade games during the time when arcades in a general sense were on the way out everywhere in the world outside of Japan. It seemed like at that time that almost every game functioned like this with the ones that stick out in my mind the most being Double Dragon and TNMT.
This isn't exactly like those though, because the game is much longer, has the ability to return to previous areas and has an RPG skill tree of sorts to attempt to keep things interesting. You play the role of a Valkyrie sort of character and you are heading towards some sort of objective because the script calls for it.
I will give them this: The game is extremely easy to just pick up and play. It starts out extremely simple with only a basic and heavy attack being in your arsenal and then your skills gradually get more and more powerful in a way that you choose, which is nice.
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This could end up being something very visually pleasing later on as you have a great deal of custimization available to you and your preferred playstyle and it may actually be my own fault for putting the game on "normal" setting because the basic attacks were more than enough for me to blaze through the first 2 hours of the game without really facing much difficulty. So my recommendation to you people out there in the gaming world that are almost certainly more adept at gaming than I am, would be to put the game on a harder setting so that the upgrading of certain skills actually feels necessary rather than simply a randomized choice that you make and then never actually end up using. I never really felt the need to use anything other than the basic attacks.
I actually do appreciate them stepping away from 3D exploration because I agree with the lead designer when he said back in 2006 "3D gameplay is stagnating." Think back to the early to mid 2000's and what was being released and it is easy to understand why someone would have this viewpoint.
You run through a map system picking up chests from defeated enemies, gathering consumables such as healing tonics and currency to upgrade your skills and then when you finish an area you have the option of carrying on to a number of following areas or to repeat that level if you want to grind for xp and what not. I never opted for the latter.
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I quite like this sort of map system because while it does proceed in a sort of linear fashion, it reminds me of other games that were 2-D but also had the feeling of a real area kind of like Bloodstained or Ender Lilies.
Item collection isn't really all that important, and I only ever made it to a single boss before I walked away but perhaps this gets more involved if someone were to get in there and truly be dedicated to progression. I didn't feel like doing this but it did remind me of this one time where I got paid to beta-test a game and had to log 50 hours on the game even though I was sick of it after the first 4. This has the opportunity to be one of those games that gets a lot better if you get really invested in the entire game instead of just expecting it to continually throw new things at you to appease our modern-day low-attention-spans.
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Bosses will fill up the entire screen and just like a ton of other games that have come before, the entire strategy is to dodge out of their clearly marked hit areas and whisk around the screen getting some hits in in the enemy's downtime. You do have the ability to fly up high above them and their position is indicated on the minimap and I would imagine that this becomes an essential part of gameplay later. In the beginning though, it is entirely unnecessary and you can just "whack whack whack..... dodge roll to the other side whack whack whack" until it is dead.
I couldn't really tell you what the story is because I skipped most of it and here is another plus for this game: The story is completely skippable. Perhaps I missed out on some of the game because of the fact that I didn't bother with knowing any of what was going on
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Although I walked away from this one, I am going to keep it in my library because it seems like a good downtime game where you can go and play something a lot more complicated and then when that starts to grind at my nerves I can return to this one and just get in there and kill stuff with relative ease. I don't believe, based on my two hours of gameplay or so, that true dedication to combos or complicated attack sequences is really necessary in this one. Even on the normal setting this game seems very casual and well, that is the sort of player that I am.
That being said, the gameplay did become awfully repetitive after an hour or so and I found myself not being that engaged. I suppose the near complete absence of the fear of death is a big part of the reason why I walked away and I will admit that I am very difficult to please in this department: Make it too difficult and I walk away... make it too easy and I do the same thing.
In the end this is one of those games that I would have never even contemplated playing had it not been offered to me for free on the PS-Plus network.
Will you enjoy it? Well honestly, probably not. I do think that if you have a PS-Plus account that you should at least give it a look, especially if you were alive for the Golden Axe, Double Dragon, TNMT days.
When it comes to gaming, the choice of a game a persin usually plays influences them even if a little. I remember i played games till i dream of it.
it's funny that you would mention dreaming of games. There was a time long ago when an epic game the likes of which nobody had ever seen before. It was called DOOM and it was truly wonderful, scary, and unique. I played that game so much that I did in fact literally dream about it at night. What an epic innovation in gameplay that was.
Wow you were a seeious gameplayer like myself.