- Spoiler: show
This is a game I have known about for a long while, and have given a shot before, but only bothered to go through completely now. It’s a hack-and-slash from Konami, that was curiously only released in Japan and Europe. It also shares a lot of the technology and talent from the PS2 Castlevania games. It’s supposedly based on The Wizard of Oz too, but only in an extremely loose sense.
The unique hook here is that you play with a party of other characters, and you toss enemies between each other, continually juggling them in the air to build up energy to do powerful special attacks. It can be pretty fun, but it’s very one-note, and outside of that single gimmick nothing else about the game is well constructed. It can be genuinely satisfying to pull off a really long string of juggling an enemy, and getting the payoff at the end of the big flashy move. But the mechanics are pretty shoddy all around in a way that makes it not feel great to play, and can often feel like they’re not really up to what it expects of you. Even though it doesn’t actually ask that much. Controls feel really sluggish and unresponsive, there’s a lot of end lag on many moves, the reach of your weapon is poor, and there is hardly any depth to your abilities. The camera is also achingly slow, which can be a real problem when you need to see stuff flying at you.
I discovered a patch for the emulator that allowed this game to run at 60fps, and I think that definitely helped a whole lot to make the gameplay more tolerable. It was still clunky and stiff, but at least with the better frame rate it looked a bit smoother, and maybe helped me judge the timing for things better too. Having that, as well as the ability to exploit save states liberally probably did a lot to help me push through and actually finish this thing.
Levels are very bland too. It’s usually just a string of nondescript rooms in a cave or something like that. There’s not much going on, and no sense of place to any of it. In a sense though, you could probably say that the levels in the PS2 Castlevania games share a similar construction and level of geometric complexity, but they manage to be much more interesting because the Gothic aesthetic means that textures can be used to give locations much more character and detail. No such saving grace here. The visuals of this game are not very pretty. At least when it comes to the 3D assets. Some of the 2D character portraits and chapter title cards are actually pretty nice to look at. Shame they couldn’t bring out that look in the game itself.