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03/01 - Halo 3: ODST (Master Chief Collection)
06/01 - Halo 3 (Master Chief Collection)
09/01 - Hotshot Racing
25/01 - Halo 4 (Master Chief Collection)
29/01 - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
03/02 - Heavenly Sword
05/02 - Need for Speed: Carbon (Battle Royale)
09/02 - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
20/02 - ICO
24/02 - Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD
25/02 - Halo 5: Guardians
05/03 - Asura's Wrath
09/03 - Shadow of the Colossus HD (Normal mode)
30/03 - Shadow of the Colossus HD (Hard mode)
30/03 - Forza Motorsport 3 (100%)
01/04 - Muramasa: The Demon Blade
11/04 - Forza Horizon 2 (100%)
17/04 - The Darkness
20/04 - The Darkness II
25/04 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Normal)
29/04 - Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
29/04 - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (X360)
06/05 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Hard)
07/05 - Castlevania: Lament of Innocence
10/05 - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS2)
18/05 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Very Hard)
21/05 - Umurangi Generation Special Edition
27/05 - GRID Autosport
29/05 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Revengeance)
02/06 - Lost in Random
03/06 - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
12/06 - Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix
13/06 - God Hand
25/06 -
Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams
I started off enjoying this one, but honestly I am kind of lukewarm on it overall. My feelings towards it soured somewhat as it went on, and by the end I was just waiting for it to be over. Fun enough, but I can’t say it’s anything special, and it really drags in the latter chapters.
Combat is okay, and satisfying on a base level, but there isn’t a whole lot to it. Sound design is good, and some of the special abilities are pretty cool, but it’s fairly shallow and flawed in several ways. You have a handful of moves apart from your basic single button attack string, but they are very inconsistent in their efficacy. They’re sort of DMC-esque, involving pressing a button while pointing the stick forward or back, which gives you like a launcher or stab attack. Not all of them are actually useful, and they are often really fiddly to input. Even the more useful ones don’t do much. You might be able to knock an enemy down with one, but that then just makes them harder to hit. There isn’t much room to do anything especially interesting. It’s often more effective to just keep mashing the basic attack. The dodge is pretty useless too. Doing a perfect block lets you do a string of dash attacks through all nearby enemies, and that’s really fun to do. You’re supposed to be able to do it if you attack at the last second when a hit is coming your way too, but I could never get it down. Only ever did it by accident. Bosses also aren’t great. None are particularly memorable, and they are frequently weirdly harsh for a game that seems to be going for a more relaxed pace generally. The final boss is also extremely tedious, involving standing around for most of the fight waiting to be allowed to do damage. There’s also a Devil Trigger-like ability, but it takes an eternity to charge up, pops automatically when you run out of health, and can’t be turned off manually. It’s very easy to waste, and is usually not there when it would be most needed.
You can also upgrade your character’s abilities pretty extensively, but it always felt a bit pointless. While this is how you unlock some of the more interesting directional attacks, a lot of what you can put points in to is really unclear with what effect it will have. It’s hard to know if you’re just dumping points in to something useless until you’ve done it a bunch already. I suspect maybe the reason I couldn’t seem to get that last second attack thing down is because I didn’t upgrade it enough, as that was the case with the block version at first. But I did put a significant number of points in there, with there being no discernible benefit. Ultimately the system feels somewhat redundant.
The story is nothing to write home about either. Very standard tale of adventure and defeating evil. Doesn’t have anything unique or compelling about it. Not even any interesting or entertaining characters that might make up for the cookie cutter plot with fun dialogue or anything. By the end of the campaign it was starting to drag a lot, felt like it was wearing out its welcome. This game is definitely longer than it needs to be. That probably has just as much to do with the gameplay not evolving over time as well as the story failing to capture the imagination.
It’s quite aesthetically pleasing though. The setting is well realised and character models are good. The level of graphical detail is also impressive. It cleans up pretty well in higher resolutions on the emulator. So much that it’s kind of staggering how much gets lost in that originally pixelated presentation. There were some minor visual bugs though when it came to certain effects, which was a shame. Through most of the game it’s not a big deal, but in the last few hours the visuals heavily utilise these effects which are broken when not using software rendering.
While I didn’t hate this game overall, there’s too much about it that stops it from rising above mediocrity. In an earlier draft of this post I put a more positive spin on it, but having the full game done, I have to admit I’m left somewhat disappointed. The gameplay being decent on a basic level and the art design make it an experience I can get at least something out of, but that only goes so far. In the end it’s pretty average. I was hoping this could be a fun discovery for me, uncovering a new favourite that passed me by at the time, like Zone of the Enders or Drakengard were, or more recently Metal Gear Solid. But turns out it’s simply alright.
I think it’s an interesting game to think about though. What conversation (or lack thereof) this game generated, and the context surrounding it. As I was first looking in to this series, the idea of this one being an entry more focused on more complex action gameplay than the previous ones made it seem like the most appealing one for me to check out. Reviews at the time were supposedly pretty positive too. But no-one talks about it now. On the rare occasion this series comes up, it always seems to be about either the first or third games. It’s also interesting how this game came out almost the exact same time as DMC3. Maybe that is why it didn’t have much impact. Perhaps people who were into the kind of thing it was going for all gravitated towards that instead. And given the links both these series share, and the clear similarities in mechanics, honestly the comparison doesn’t reflect well on this game. Reviews don’t necessarily reflect the player reception of a game at the time either. I wonder what they saying about it back then.