The only place where you'll ever see the phrase "crap tempest."
By Video_Game_King 2 Comments
The Last Blade
( Something about this blog just feels a bit weird to me.) Maybe it's the fact that this took longer than I anticipated; maybe it's that this game broke past the 7.0 range, something I haven't seen in a long time; or perhaps it's just that I'm having trouble coming up with something to say about anything, but something about this blog just feels weird. But despite the odd feeling that something horrible is going to happen, I'm going to write this blog, probably tempting fate.Anyway, The Last Blade is a Japan-only fighter from SNK, the self-crowned king of fighters. The story is communicated through a cool FMV intro as this: it's the 19th century, and samurai are awesome. That's all I could decipher, really, as the entire game was in Japanese and I skipped anything resembling a cutscene. Hell, I somehow managed to skip the load screens and go straight into the game, I'm that awesome. And by at least looking at the story from time to time, I suspect it may be a bit awesome two. Two reasons: it has samurai whacking each other with swords until victory, and unlike other fighting games, The Last Blade actually tries to have a story. Sure, every character still ends up killing the same dude for reasons I never bothered figuring out, but they different, more clearly defined paths to that guy, sometimes running into friends/enemies along the way. Sure, it fucks around with the music a bit, only playing limited tracks at specific moments, but in its place is some cool ambiance stuff, like animal sounds and people doing nothing about two assholes beating each other up in a public square. I'd go into greater detail, but again, it's all in Japanese.
So instead, I'll ramble on about the one part of the game I actually understood: the gameplay. It's a lot like Samurai Shodown (IE it's a lot like any other fighter, only with Japanese warriors and swords), but with a few convenient twists. For example, you now get to choose between assigning your character under either Power or Speed; Power allows you to do a super-move you'll never pull off ever, while Speed makes performing combos easier. I think. I never bothered switching away from Power because I'm incredibly lazy (not that you'd know), but I see why you'd want to use one or the other: multiplayer. Depending on what character you pick, it could make the fight either a strategically balanced, enjoyable bout or a succession of Quick Time Events you keep winning.
For the most part, I got the latter, partly due to the second convenient twist: instant special moves. Rather than having to fiddle around with a clumsy d-pad to get Random Samurai X to fart fireballs, you can now just press one of the L/R buttons. If that's too much of a hassle for you, then worry not, for you can also pause the game and see how each move is performed, probably while you're dividing by zero and playing Duke Nukem Forever, you nonexistent shit (hey, he's not real, I can do whatever I want). This all sounds convenient, and while it is, it leads to something quite bad: the button-mash-a-thon I mentioned earlier. I found that I could win entire fights by spamming quick slash moves and cornering the computer. Hell, one of the characters allows you to spam one move that teleports you into a cannon and launches you at the enemy in a near-unblockable ball of destruction. Choose the wrong assignment for your character, and the fight becomes a joke you don't want to hear.
Is what I thought for quite some time. However, something odd happened during one of the fights. I was employing my "tape a woodpecker to each side of the controller" strategy, yet somehow the enemy managed to sneak in a hit. Or he would have had I not accidentally hit the counter button. I found out then that characters could use the sheer force of their greatness not only to negate an attack, but also to stun the enemy for enough time to heap on some punishment. Suddenly, things changed; fights were more interesting, more challen-OK, I'm lying. Enemies still dropped faster than flies under an atom bomb, but there's a good reason my love for this game skyrocketed when I discovered the counter moves: multiplayer. I know that I'm never going to play these games with another person, but sometimes I like to imagine I live in a strange world where I'd play multiplayer and perhaps be sexier than the great Bushwald Sexyface. In that world, this counter system thing would actually be pretty cool, since it would make lightning-quick reflexes even more important than they were before. If possible, try to enter my universe if you wish to play The Last Blade, for that is where it will rock. Or maybe get a friend who isn't playing Modern Warfare 2/Left 4 Dead 2/another random game, whichever works best.
Review Synopsis
- Matches aren't really fun when you can just mash L1 until the button fuses to your skin.
- But they are fun when you're trading slashes and counters like in every samurai movie you've ever seen ever.
- Overall, good enough to win an actual award: The Underappreciated Personal Favorite Award.
As you guys should know, I love Panzer Dragoon. That is why I wept at the sight of the intro to the original game in the form of some shitty anime:
Xexyz
( Again, the shadow of that dark deal casts a...dark...shadow...thing on my gaming life.) More and more, Schmidt's statement that the NES had a bunch of crap is becoming more and more true. Worse yet, I still have four games left, two of them licensed material. Given the current trend of most of the games being crap, I don't have much faith for any of them. And given that Xexyz hasn't bothered to break that trend whatsoever, I have even less faith than before.Xexyz is a game whose name I can't pronounce and looks like somebody horribly screwed up typing the word "sexy." If you think that's random, then you haven't played Xexyz, as nothing about this game makes sense to me. Not even the story, which is extra weird, since it's, like many old school games, practically non-existent. There's a princess, I think, and you have to rescue her, I guess. Somehow, this involves invading random fortresses and stealing aircraft for the sole purpose of lining the walls with bullet holes. Again, I don't understand the story, but unlike The Last Blade, this isn't due to a language barrier; Xexyz is just that screwed up.
As further evidence, I cite the gameplay, which exhibits clear signs of multiple personality disorder with shocking regularity. First, it masquerades as an innocent platformer: you'll find yourself hopping through levels, shooting anything with pixels and getting stuck in gap after gap, when you come upon the exit. "Well, that was easy", you'd think to yourself if you had a brain. However, something's not right: the exit will not let you in. Try as you might, but for whatever reason, the game will not advance to the next screen. This is when I found out that some of the holes I passed along the way were actually doors that looked very hole-like in nature. So you go back, try the doors, and this is when you find out that you're supposed to hit a certain pillar 5 times to get a star that allows you inside the building. You do that, and now the game becomes a bit Metroid-y.
Things get a bit more random from there, but I'll just skip to the meat of the situation: after all that comes a shooter part. It's like every other shooter, only instead of weapon variety or actual fun, you get "diverging" paths. I put diverging in quotes because I found out that it was nothing more than a trial-and-error way to make you play the same portion of the game twice. And then you "fight" a boss, fight being a code-word for "hold down the fire button and watch the fireworks at the end." Now repeat this about 6 or 7 times, and you have the Xexyz experience. A bit weird, but how can you fuck that up? Well, there are quite a few ways that I haven't mentioned, and no, being totally weird beyond all mortal comprehension is not one of those flaws.
The first of these flaws has to do with the shopping aspect of the game. What, I didn't mention that before? Oh, right, I didn't. Anyway, in some of the aforementioned doors, people will pay you for some random act, the concept of being paid for your work being a totally alien concept to me in video games. What do you do with the money? Shove it into power-ups and weapon upgrades, of course! Somehow, the people at Hudson managed to screw this up, too. You can only buy one thing at a time in a shop, and if you picked the wrong menu, guess what? That counts as buying, idiot! Oh, and for whatever reason, you can't buy items until you've come across them in the game world, adding a weird element of luck to the whole process. So, that's shopping. Any other ways the game screws things up? *checks notes* Ah, a final boss that amounts to an easier, crapper version of Tempest. Great. Might as well give it the Extremely Clogged Toilet Award for Being a Crap Tempest.
Review Synopsis
- How do you screw up shopping mechanics?
- Who got shooter in my platformer?
- What the hell is going on here?