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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
I enjoyed this quite a lot. It's a great spectacle that actually does some pretty interesting things with its focus on QTEs. I played through the DLC portion of the game too, since I heard how important that supposedly is to having a complete story, and it definitely is.
This game is a really strange but compelling experience. It's pushing really hard on this idea that this is more of an interactive anime than a normal game. It's not just how it's mostly cutscene and QTEs, but how it's broken up in to levels that are presented like episodes of a show, down to even having mid-episode bumpers and "next time on..." sections at the end. It works really well. The pacing is fast and energetic, with a really satisfying escalation throughout. It does find time to slow down and take a breather occasionally, but that is pretty rare in the nonstop action and perpetually expanding scope. The cinematography is fantastic too. The shot composition is dynamic and artful, the pacing of scenes is breathless and exciting, and it sells scale and spectacle incredibly well. There are so many moments that really wow you with what they are showing. I also appreciated how it plays around with focal length a lot. When games try to imitate the style of shonen anime with CG, that's one thing they tend to stumble on. It wasn't neglected here.
There's some fantastic aesthetic design here too. The character design is really impressive, and the whole visual style is really lush and full of personality, taking a lot from Buddhist imagery. Colours are used really well, and again the scale and spectacle are some of the best out there. I also really liked the way characters were shaded. They're cel shaded, but with a sort of brush stroke shader applied to them as well, and it makes them look as if they were crafted out of clay or something. It's a really unique look that gives characters a tangible feel to them.
While I usually don't tend to like QTEs, I do think they can definitely be done well, and I have enjoyed them plenty times in the past. This game does mostly get it right with proper design of the mechanic. Prompts don't get in the way of the action, but are still decently readable, and they do a good job of punctuating the moment and upping the intensity and making you feel involved. The inputs it has you doing stick to consistent rules, and mirror those of the manually controlled sections. But perhaps it's not right to say the QTEs should follow those controls in this game given how the focus of the game is far much more on the former instead. It's also thankfully not punishing with missing inputs too. It doesn't stop the action, and it just keeps going. Only punishment being dropping your score most of the time. So they work really well at connecting you to the experience, and don't get in the way or feel arbitrary. The final act also gets pretty creative with how it puts a twist on those mechanics too. I don't want to spoil exactly what it does, but it shows a mastery over what makes them compelling, and has some fun with it at the same time. It's a real shame that it waits until the DLC before it explores that stuff.
It's not all QTEs of course. Those manually controlled sections come either in the form of traditional 3D brawler mechanics or rail shooter/shmup sections. While they are still in the minority, there were more of them than I was expecting. Through a long boss fight they will often have a couple of these sections thrown in between the QTEs. They're okay to play, but they definitely feel like supplemental parts of the game that are nowhere near as fleshed out as the QTEs. They're mechanically quite simple. They're fast paced and responsive enough to control, but can often feel rather chaotic and button-mashy, with how they can be visually messy. Sometimes the brawler sections can have some interesting patterns to dodge with bosses, and you can pull off a very basic air juggle combo, but there's not really anything more to it than that. These parts are okay, they're good to break up the other parts, but generally not the real draw of the experience.
The story is alright, but there's not much to it. It's very much in service to the action scenes, and does very little beyond that. It's very simple, full of obvious tropes, and most of the characters are paper thin. But it does what it needs to do, setting up these larger than life characters to clash against each other. It has some good interactions here and there, but there isn't really much to say about it beyond that. The DLC is definitely a necessary part of it though, which is still a really cynical move. The standard ending of the game is alright on its own though. The good guys defeat the bad guy in a big bombastic climax, and the world is saved. It feels a bit simplistic, and leaves some threads hanging, but it works okay on its own. But then there's also a "true" ending in the base game that feels like a middle finger telling you to buy the DLC. If you didn't know that was coming I'm sure it would come off as very insulting. But that DLC act is actually really good, and feels like a much more satisfying ending than the base game. It ups the stakes as far as they'll go, brings closure to everything in the story, has some of the best visual design of the whole thing, and of course has those really fun twists on the QTE mechanics. It's a real shame this game was broken up like this, because that ending really is an essential part of the experience.
This game also emulated surprisingly well. This is the first time I've tried emulating a PS3 game that would be potentially pushing what was possible, and I was pretty impressed how well it managed it. Performance is really good throughout. A solid 30fps through the whole thing, except for a few of the shooter segments when there's an excessive amount on screen. It also seems like it runs better than on an actual PS3, as it looks like that version has really bad screen tearing that you can totally eliminate here. You can also unlock the frame rate if you want, but I decided not to mess with that in case that was pushing things too far. I can see it messing with the QTE timing as well. I did get a few very minor visual bugs at moments, and in the first few levels it can take a second for shaders to load in, but overall this worked really well.
So yeah, I liked this game a lot. It's a very unique experience that bucks trends and triples down on a mechanic at the height of backlash against it, and makes it work impressively well. It feels like this was a big passion project for someone, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually very hard to make, given how much custom animation must be in it. It's a shame that it had to be carved up with poor business practices, but it's still a great time regardless.