- Spoiler: show
After playing Majin I’ve had the works of Game Republic on my mind again, so I played through this one as well. This was their last game, which was a flop and got a critical mauling, that likely killed the studio. I have to say, the slating it got in reviews was not really undeserved, although it does have some redeeming qualities.
This game is quite a bit different to the studio’s previous work. It comes across like it was an example of a struggling Japanese studio attempting to court Western tastes to try to turn around its fortunes, as many others were doing at the time. It veers away from what the studio was doing before and instead goes for a grimdark aesthetic in a more traditional fantasy setting, with a focus on bloody, violent combat. Many of the games that went down this path around the same time ended up stumbling hard, and lost the character and appeal that their creators had in the first place. That is largely true in this case as well, but not entirely. Despite the huge departure this game made from the developer’s usual wheelhouse, quite a lot of their signature style can still be found peeking through.
The story is nothing spectacular, but it’s one example of this game not being as dull and morose as it first appears. It’s a very simple story about this knight and witch duo teaming up to take down a bunch of other witches who are trying to destroy humanity as revenge for how they were treated by them. At first it seems like it’s going to be gritty and dour, with miserable humourless characters. But it turns out there is a bit of lightheartedness in there. It’s not much, but you do get the sense that the game isn’t trying to be exclusively dark and edgy, and that it wants its characters to come off like they actually care about stuff. There are signs of inspiration similar to what this studio has done in the past too. A lot of the characters take their names from fairytale figures, and they do make a point to empathise with the witches’ desire for revenge by touching on the injustice of witch trials that took place in the real medieval era. In practice it doesn’t amount to much though, it’s a fairly humdrum fantasy adventure. But there was at least an attempt to make it something a bit more than that. Maybe if this game got more time in development, it could have done more with it.
The combat that you spend most of the game doing makes a good first impression. It is pretty stiff and clunky, as you play as this enormous hunk of meat with a massive scythe for a weapon. But it does a good job of making that feel appropriately chunky and like every hit has a huge amount of power behind it. Ripping through enemies feels pretty satisfying, and the sound design is fittingly heavy. Your witch companion who you are protecting also has powerful magic abilities that play in to fights as well. It feels like an evolution of what Majin was doing, but more fleshed out this time. While in Majin all you could really do was hit a co-op finisher move when the prompt appears, here you have a range of spells that have different effects that you can set off on demand, which you can then follow up in to a synchronised finishing move. So there can be some good moments when you’re ripping enemies to shreds and then seamlessly ending a combo with a big spectacular magical spell. That feels like what the game is trying to achieve with its combat, and it’s pretty good when it goes like that. But it definitely doesn’t manage that a lot of the time.
You have access to a bunch of different combo strings in this game, somewhat similar to the lock-on direction relative stuff of DMC, but also in the light and heavy attack string style. Very few of them seem to be worth bothering with though. A lot of them don’t have much practical use, some don’t seem to come out when you try to perform them. There’s a launcher that can also be used to knock enemies over, and that’s the only one I found to be useful outside of just doing the basic light-light-heavy kind of thing. The game just eats inputs a lot of the time as well, making it feel pretty unreliable to attempt anything more technical. The camera is also atrocious. It very frequently gets stuck in a corner during fights and jerks around erratically making it hard to tell what’s going on, and has a habit of pointing up at the sky or down at the ground unprompted. One of the worst I’ve ever seen in an action game. The lock-on isn’t much better, as the target it selects feels random, and it will sometimes just switch target by itself for no reason. The bosses are also just awful. The character you play as in this game is immortal, but your witch companion is not. Bosses can just erase her health near instantly with no warning. A good run at a boss can be stripped away from you in seconds because they did some ridiculous attack that fills the entire room and she gets caught in the middle of it. And although you can’t die yourself, your body can get destroyed, at which point you have to mash a button to reconstruct yourself. It takes way too long to do and is very frustrating to have to do in a boss fight when the witch is also dying and there’s nothing you can do to help. For some reason the game also has a habit of putting instant death pits around the boss fight rooms, which the terrible camera doesn’t help with. And to add the perfect capstone to all of this, boss fights end with an instant death QTE sequence, that if you fail, you are sent back to the start of the previous boss phase. Not the start of the QTE. So that means you’ll have to do half of entire boss fight again, just to have another go at it. Baffling design. These problems with the boss fights are so bad that if just they were fixed, it would honestly make the entire game a much better experience.
The last third of the game has some serious padding issues too. You reach a point where you’re getting towards the final confrontation, but then an antagonist appears and throws you in to a literal pocket dimension that you have to spend a handful of chapters trying to escape. These levels reuse a lot of the areas from earlier chapters, sometimes even multiple times, except this time they’re all completely grey like they’re made out of ash or something. It also splits up the duo you usually play as, having you switch between playing each of them solo. At first it’s actually pretty fun to play as the witch directly, but this whole section goes on for far too long and feels like such an obvious point of trying to cheaply extend the runtime that it runs out of that good will by the time it’s done. Not having access to the most interesting part of this combat system gets old pretty fast.
The aesthetic is another mixed bag. At first the game does seem kind of ugly. An uninspired medieval fantasy world, filled with drab, dirty colours. When one of the major strengths of this studio has been their visual design, it’s pretty disappointing. And while this game definitely doesn’t have the vibrancy or uniqueness of their previous works, there are actually still elements of it that show imagination and the same kind of sensibilities that defined stuff like Folklore and Majin. It’s most clearly seen in the design of the magic related things in the game. Namely the spell effects of your witch companion, as well as the designs of the bosses, most of whom are the other witches. The magic spells you have access to in combat have a cool thorn motif to them, but with a glassy, purplish material to them. They are animated really intricately, which is definitely a factor in how fun they are to pull off. This purple thorn theme extends to the UI as well. To be honest, it is a bit garish, but I like it. It adds some character to the game, and feels in line with the ornamental design this developer has always done. The boss witches all have really outlandish and colourful designs as well. Some grotesque, others impressive and imposing. It’s a shame they are so miserable to actually fight, because they are the stand-out moments of the game from a visual perspective. Some of the environments do have their moments too, despite the mostly generic dark fantasy settings. They tend to improve as you go through the game, starting out in fairly bland locations, but later on you end up in some places that do actually show some imagination and interesting use of colour and lighting. It’s a shame the game doesn’t put its best foot forward in that area.
So this is a game that I cannot really recommend. While there are some parts to it that can be enjoyable, and there are signs of artistic ambition that occasionally shine through, it is far too flawed an experience to look past.