I always called them "Beat 'em ups" and while that sounds kinda dumb I still prefer it over "character action game"

I see beat 'em ups as games like Street of Rage or Final Fight. Games known as character action are the 3d evolution of that genre for sure but I think it's something else. Dynasty warriors I'd be fine with calling a beat 'em up. It is certainly not character action.

@demoskinos: "Character Action Game" just seems a bit redundant to me. And it only seems to be coming up a lot more since Brads DmC review.

Just generally considered these games to be "action" and that's it. Also I always considered "beat em up" to be the ones mindless and mashy while hack 'n slash to be the ones with more in depth combat.

And I thought this reply was going places.

Sure, but why would someone be playing the same chapter for ten hours? That, and I highly doubt the cut-scenes will be numerous or lengthy enough to make an impact on the clear time.

Not to say that this game will be any less great because of it, of course. It just ensures that I will be renting it, rather than purchasing it, especially when there are plenty of games coming around the corner that will provide more content for the same price.

I liked Vanquish and that one was pretty short too. In fact, I think Vanquish might have been a tad too long for my tastes. It felt like they had run out of ideas by the end and the game recycled some boss fights.

So I guess short isn´t always bad, especially if you can replay the game a couple of times. New Game Plus on Mark of the Ninja comes to mind!

Character action game has always made sense to me because they are action games about learning to master a given character. Ninja Gaiden is a character action game whose character you learn to action the game with is Ryu Hayabusa. DMC3 is Dante, DMC4 is Dante and Nero, Bayonetta is Bayonetta, Rising is Raiden. Hack and slash sounds too mindless, like a Dynasty Warriors game. Beat em ups are games like Double Dragon or Streets of Rage.

Replayability or not, 5 hours is simply too short for modern games at full retail price. I enjoy the genre, but I also was NEVER into leaderboards or getting every last achievement, or even completing the game on higher difficulties. Typically I play a game once all the way through and sometimes I'll go back to get some achievements if they seem easy or fun enough. So a 5hr game is too short for me when I'm paying $60 and don't plan on really sticking around all that much after I beat it.

That doesn't bother me at all. I finished DmC in a little over 9 hours according to the game clock, and had a great time.

Yeah, exactly. Vanquish is my most replayed game ever, I've beaten it around 7 or 8 times. I actually kinda prefer shorter games at this point in my life. Longer games will get played by me exactly once (usually RPGs and the sort that are tens of hours long), and it's a shame whenever they have extra content, difficulties, etc. the second time through, because I'll personally never see that stuff. Character action games tend to fall in the short, replayable category most of the time, so I don't find this estimate surprising at all. If it's fun, then I'm in!

@gunnerjensen said:

He's not saying you're actually gonna replay a chapter for 10 hours, he's just making a point. Every time you get a game over and restart, the time you spent on the segment you'll have to replay doesn't count. It'll add up.

As for cutscenes, I don't know how much of that there is in the game, but think of it like this: just 20 5-minute cutscenes, which is not very much at all, would add an hour to the clear time.

As for "plenty of other games providing more content for the same price", that's not necessarily true at all. Bayonetta, for instance, had a ton of optional content: a plethora of hidden challenges, a secret boss fight, unlockable characters and weapons, higher difficulty settings that actually change the enemy configurations etc. It only took me 10-12 hours to reach the end on my first playthrough, but I then went on to spend over 50 hours more on the game and I still have plenty of stuff left to beat and unlock. If I had rented it and returned it once I reached the end I would've missed out on an immense amount of content. I don't know exactly what Rising has to offer in terms of optional content, but I do know that it at least has two difficulty settings above Hard plus a number of VR missions, some of which supposedly are quite challenging and can take a good amount of time to clear.

The game will have a DLC wooden sword which speaks to Raiden as Snake.

The game is worth it for that alone.

game of the year confirmed

Well put, and I concur. I'm not going to discount the people who like the Dynasty Warriors games but putting them in the same genre with something as dense as a Bayonetta is just...wrong.

Games like this tend to burn out if they are too long anyway. Five hours seems fine, especially if there's reason to go back.

Of course. I just don't think that I'll enjoy this game enough to play through it numerous times, especially when the higher difficulties are bound to be more of a frustrating ordeal. Someone was running a stream of this game recently who was supposedly playing on a higher difficulty where two hits meant defeat. That's not something I'd be into. I'd rather save my cash for something like Crysis 3 or the new Gears of War, where I could spend dozens of hours online.

But that's just me, I don't mean to put the game down in anyway. I'm sure it'll be good in it's own right, but I think it'll come up short when compared to Bayonetta or Vanquish.

I had a crisis in terms of devil may cry vs metal gear (i am a huge fan and love vanquish, a game made by the developer). But this makes it clear that I need to wait until the price is right.

I'm just glad it seems awesome... all that matters to me

I don't mind short lengths cause I usually buy a game when it's cheap anyway. One of the most damning offense of this was Spec Ops: The Line's 3 hour one. My steam profile literally says that, 3 hours total play time, and I beat it. But I didn't mind as much cause it was a pretty interesting journey that did as much as it can with what it was. And I got it for like 10 bucks too.

It didn't feel that short to me, my completion time was also 4 hours 30 mins.

So much crazy crap goes on, I can't blame it for being that long. It's a dense experience is the way I'd put it, apart from the first stage of the last boss fight I thought it was great start to finish.

I'd suggest playing on hard anyway, I didn't know whether to expect Bayonetta level of difficulty and went with normal. Turns out I didn't die in combat, only on some QTE's. I'd try to learn combos but the enemies were too squishy for them, so yeah - go with hard mode (you'll likely pick up the parry system quicker too).

Spent at least 9 hours on the game though. There's a lot of cutscenes and optional codec dialogue and and the timer only counts when you're actually playing. Just blazed through it on easy to see it as I was actually pretty short on time before leaving home for a few weeks. So yeah, I guess I'm more for the plot and spectacle of video games and don't really care if they last you at least 20 hours or whatever arbitrary number people obsess over these days.

Girth.

There are a lot of good "shorter is better" quotes in this thread to pick out but this one speaks to me the most. I find action games and shooters tend to over stay their welcome very quickly. It's nice to know this one likely won't and that makes the idea of replaying it that much more appealing.

Speaking the truth. Besides, even if it was short, I'd rather those hours be quality, than a 20 hour snooze fest like RE4. Length does not equal quality.

@mrbalmer: Mario 1 can be beaten, no warping, in under 30 minutes (if I'm not mistaken).

However, I've gotten many multiple hours out of the damn game. I definitely understand wanting to get your money's worth out of a game, but Length =/= value. Especially when we're just discussing length from first start to first finish.

Not complaining about your post, I just want people in general to reconsider what they look for in games, even if in the end they still favor length.

Glad to see a lot of reasonable people here.

Jeff's Rising review (I bet it's 3/5) will probably criticize the length based on some stuff he said on Tumblr.
Although I would very much like these assumptions to be wrong

Right on mang. Me too!

Isn't life about the journey.....not the destination?

Are you guys sure that Bayonetta calculated time like that? My save is saying that I have at least 20 hours on it.

On another note: FFFF... I accidentally clicked on the Flag button in the first post instead of hitting the next page. Sorry OP.

I think you'd see this amount of time played in general if more games adopted how Platinum counts your play time, only it being the time you actually played and your best time. Including cut scenes and having walking "cut scenes" make games artificially longer.

Not the best example in comparison to action games, but when it comes to Binding of Isaac a good run where you beat everything will almost take you an hour. Yet, I have over 60 hours logged into the game. That is because the game has replay value and I think these kinds of action games are supposed to have that and it is what the developers have in mind when it comes to the players.

That's too short. When it goes down to $20 I will consider it.

Though I love Platinum, I just cancelled my pre-order. I feel bad, but I will get the game when it goes down in price. I can't pay this much for a game that's so short.

Don't care how long the game is. If I beat the game and feel I didn't play enough to get from the beginning to the end, I'll play it again on hard.

Problem solved. I'm not depriving platinum of my money for such a trivial reason.

@themartino: I wouldn't say the length of a game is trivial. Look how many people are being turned off because of this. Not liking a game because the characters hair is different is trivial. The length of an experience that you are paying a decent amount of money to enjoy is not.

@mrbalmer: It kind of is trivial when the only reason people are saying the game is short is because they're seeing the end timer say about 4 hours or so when it is not counting cut scenes and retrying, etc. Like I said before, if more games adopted keeping time this way I'd bet that all these types of games would be about the same amount of time this game is.

A four-hour traditional RPG suggests a poor value proposition. A four-hour action game is absolutely the standard as far as Platinum goes.

But seriously, that final boss. Yeesh.

@sanious: Thats not the only reason people are saying the game is short. Jeff said he finished it in an afternoon and I started the post with saying i finished the game in 5 hours or less. I think it is a poor way to measure the time of a game because it just isn't true. If i die 3 times in a level and it takes me 20 mins then tell me.

@rebgav Most action games fill this time out better than i feel Rising does. The games story just takes off in the last 20 mins and you're just left feeling like there should be more. It might be because this is one of the only Character action games ( perhaps because it's a metal gear game ) that leans on it's story as a main focus.

I really want to play this game but I'll wait for a price drop.

I don't think that really makes any difference, it's still a short ass game.

I think it is a great way to measure time considering your time is measured how much time you actually played (succeeding). I don't see how it is relevant that the game tells you that you played 20 minutes while failing, you still sat there for 20 minutes trying. Your problem is that it doesn't tell you that you played for 9 hours trying and it only tells you the amount of time you succeed. I highly doubt this game is less than 5 hours including cut scenes and retrying.

It might be 4-5 hours of play time without cut scenes and dying, but that is true to a lot of games. These games just count everything when it comes to time.

I beat Assassins Creed 2 in less than a day as well and many others. So beating a game in an afternoon shouldn't really mean anything, especially considering this is the type of game with the mindset of replay value and getting better at it.

I don't have a problem with short games...... When they are price appropriately, so combine Raiden, 60 dollars and 4.5 hours of gameplay it becomes a pass until I can buy it for 20 bucks on amazon used.

Jeeeesus!

I think I clocked about 15 hours in AC2 before I realised how little of the main story I'd actually done. My final time was around 30 hours.

You must have woken up at 6 and ploughed through the story until midnight to beat that game in a day.

@geteveryone: When I beat it in a day I didn't do everything, I mainly did story.

What sucked is that I did 100% it later and then I ended up losing the data/achievements anyway.

It doesn't matter what the developer is. If you're charging people $60 for a videogame it should have some length to it. You can't just bank on replayability.

It's the only game I've ever Platinum('d) and all my data was wiped, too.

I feel your pain.

Yeah I think I agree with you now. I can't spend that much money on a 4 hour game. It was launch morning and I was getting ready to go pick it up and wondered to myself what I'd feel like when I finish it, regardless of how great it is. Waiting until it gets cheaper.

Chapter "0" overall took me 15 minutes the game said. The first chapter took me 45, I am going to be keeping reference to the end level times. So we'll see how long the rest of the chapters take me on normal. And I consider myself to be pretty competent at these games, beat the first boss in one shot. Was a pretty good fight too.

So the display time was 15 minutes, but in reality you played it for 45?

That seems pretty accurate, given people have been bandying about the 3.5 hour completion times, while others are saying it's taken them about 9 hours to run through.