The Blog of Infinitely Confusing Titles. Ongoing umbrella.
By Video_Game_King 13 Comments
Silhouette Mirage
( About a week ago, I read a blog about how awesome Treasure is.) Here's the blog, and here's why the company is so awesome: in an industry driven by sequels to sequels to sequels to games that weren't really that good to begin with, Treasure is a company that has always tried new things, avoiding sequels at all costs. (That is, until, Sin & Punishment 2. You bastards.) They've come up with tons of ideas, like a game where you throw your head at enemies, a game where you shake babies at the behest of Master Roshi, and tons of games where you shoot the shit out of everything with a pulse. However, there is one game Treasure has never made: a bad one. Until now, that is. In their eternal quest for creativity, they made Silhouette Mirage, a game that plays like a cross between Ikaruga and Mischief Makers.
Actually, its more like Ikaruga than Mischief Makers; all enemies are either red or blue, and you must shoot them with the opposite color in order to harm them. Within that premise, I've already spotted the problem that it limits the artistic variety of the game (everything has to be either red or blue), but wait, it gets worse. Unlike Ikaruga (I hope), you can only harm enemies if you're the right color. You may wonder what's wrong with that, but I forgot to include that you switch colors by facing a certain direction. So if you're squaring off against a foe they're in the wrong corner, chances are the fight will consist more of trying to wedge yourself between them and the invisible wall than it will actually shooting.
Go ahead, shoot all the red bullets you want at your red enemies, it won't do you any good. OK, it will drain their MP and give it to you, and the only thing your MP does is allow you to switch colors without doing so for direction. A lot of you reading this have now decided the entire review is crap based on that one sentence, but LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY!!! Even at full MP, you can only switch colors thrice. If you knew what thrice meant, trust me, you'd be pissed. But what pisses me off more is the inconsistency; you can blast enemies for all the MP in the world, but no such thing exists for HP. Instead, you're limited to buying health restoration at a few shops throughout the game that only accept currency you don't come across too often.
Also sold at said shops: weapons that you'll never use, since they cost too much and your regular gun works just fine (even if it could use a turbo function). Why they're even sold is something that confuses me, along with a lot of the game in general. For example, the story: it's the far off future, and all of Earth has apparently been drafted into that Halo 3 machinima. As the Messenger of Justice, you, a little girl, must reset Edo to save the world or something. I couldn't really follow it, and things just went downhill from there. For example, after discovering a chameleon wizard guy, you must fight him, suffer through a cutscene with the villain, watch a load screen (you'll see a lot of that), and cut away to the same wizard helping you for the rest of the game. OK, Silhouette Mirage actually tries to explain that, but to me, it came off as "we couldn't come up with any other way to get her from level to level." Throw in an end portion of the game more confusing than half the things going on in the Pokemon universe, and you can see why I don't count this as one of the game's strong points.
OK, in all seriousness, now is the time for some actual compliments. The art style is still as distinct as ever, the dialogue is memorable, and the bosses all retain that unique Treasure feel. Sure, they're kinda easy, but at least they equal Trouble Bruin and the final boss of Gunstar Heroes and all the other Treasure bosses in creativity. Still, not quite enough to redeem all the other flaws in Silhouette Mirage, so I still have to give it a crap score. Oh, and the Stupidest Name, Even in Context Award. To put that in perspective, imagine if Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance was called "Beorc Laguz." Or if Gears of War was called "Cog Locust."
Review Synopsis
- You have to unlock the music. Enough said.
- Kind of like Ikaruga, if it was a very limiting platformer.
- Sparse opportunities to heal make this a kind of hard game.
And now for something completely different:
KiKi KaiKai
( Holy crap, it's been a while since I've even looked at the TurboGrafx-16!) What was the last game I beat for it? Samurai Ghost? That piece of crap? Of course you wouldn't remember that, nobody posted in it. Anyway, I touched this racist-named game because it's the precursor to Pocky & Rocky, a cool top-down shmup for the SNES. KiKi KaiKai, being related to that game, is exactly that: a cool top-down shmup. Yet unlike P&R, this game is not about a little girl blasting through demons for the hell of it. I think. I don't know, what little text there is in KKKK is in Japanese, so I was unable to understand the game on two fronts. The following is just a rough approximation based on the bosses and what happens in my insane mind. It's ancient Japan, and all the gods have been stolen. You, an androgynous.....Japanese....um....human...., must venture through Japan to rescue the gods and make sure they get to the party boat in time. How shall you do this? Well, you have two very important weapons at your disposal: a deck of playing cards and one of those crappy rhythmic ribbon things.
The gods sound fucked, don't they? Worry not, for the weapons here are actually kind of decent. So decent, in fact, that the developers thought you wouldn't need any type of upgrades ever. Hold on, what!? That's f'ed up. Most shooters are fun due to the varied weapon library and challenging & approachable enemy waves, and while there are enough enemies in KKKK to invade a small country, it fails on the weapons count. In my entire playthrough, I only encountered one extra weapon and one weapon upgrade. Pathetic. So it should be bad, right?
Surprise, it isn't! I know, weird, right? How can this game still be good, despite violating the two conditions I set forth for the genre? Well, it's the small things that count, like the addition of a turbo button. Unlike Silhouette Mirage, I can just hold down a button and watch as all the demons die again (they're demons). It even works for bosses! The bosses in this game are easy, one of them so much so that I didn't have to move, but they're not so easy that I have to do what I did with that one boss in this one game. The only boss who is that easy is the final boss, who isn't the one I described before, since I had to move around.
However, the weird thing is that the final boss isn't the end. As I mentioned, the gods must get on a party boat, but they lost their tickets, meaning you must now spend an extra level searching for them all, for some reason. It's harder than it should be and feels completely out of place in every sense of the phrase; in addition to coming out of nowhere, it doesn't fit well with the other, more linear, straightforward levels in the game. Sure, the other levels have diverging paths and multiple ways to approach a given portion of the level, but none of them turn into a glorified game of hide and seek. You know what, I think I should stop complaining about the final level. After all, there is more to KKKK, like....uh......the bland graphics, and......the small music library? OK, I should have stuck with complaining about the final level, but I didn't. I made this decision, and I have to stick with it. Log Award for Simple Fun. *leaves*
Review Synopsis
- The open ended levels add replay value to an otherwise short, easy game.
- You only get two weapons, if you can call cards and ribbons weapons.
- Still a good game to play in short bursts.
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