|
| BAYONETTA |
| Sega/Platinum Games |
| Action/Fighting |
  |
Years ago, a
team of developers known as Clover Studios released a
Playstation 2 game called God Hand. Designed to bring an
old-school sensibility to modern styles of gameplay, God Hand
was outrageous, challenging, and oh yeah, pretty awkward to
play. The clumsy
over the shoulder perspective and badly dated graphics split
the gaming community with all the violent precision of a
freshly-sharpened axe, with fans and detractors on opposite
sides of the rift.
God Hand’s supporters, typically members of the gaming
counterculture, turned a blind eye to the game’s faults while
praising it as an unrecognized masterpiece. The critics were just
as adamant in expressing their frustration with God Hand’s
cumbersome control, an unwelcome holdover from the early days
of Resident Evil and Tomb Raider.
Fast forward
to January 2010.
The same studio, now known as Platinum Games, has taken
another shot at the formula, serving up a double helping of
the sweet insanity of God Hand while stripping away nearly all
its flaws. The
robotic turn-walk-turn control has been replaced with
satiny-smooth combos capped off by devastating finishing
blows, and the graphics are vastly improved, shattering
peoples’ expectations even in an age where technology has set
the bar for visuals impossibly high. The haters will
recognize Bayonetta as the game God Hand wanted to be, while
the fans will point to it as proof that they were right all
along. However,
there will be no debate about its quality… Bayonetta is a very
hard game to hate.
Just who is
this “Bayonetta,” anyway? Don’t bother looking
to the game’s jumbled mess of a plot for answers… you’ll be
even more confused than when you started. All you need to know
is that the star of the game is a brash British witch (or
dominatrix… it’s hard to tell from the outfit) who’s not
afraid to use sex- and anything that’s not bolted down- as a
weapon. Take
equal parts Supernanny, Xena: Warrior Princess, and your
favorite hardcore porn star, then pour them all into a
skintight outfit, and you’d be on the right track. Her enemies rain down
from the heavens and come in the following varieties: angels
who look like gold-plated turkey vultures, tiny heads with
dove wings, armored griffons that fight with the ferocity of
starved lions, and bosses so colossal they often rival the
size of the stages themselves.
Don’t worry too much about the sultry
sorceress, however… she’s more than prepared to take on these
holy harbingers of death. A gun strapped to each
limb (yes, even the legs) allows Bayonetta to pick off weak
enemies from a distance, without the hassle of locking onto
targets. The
beefier foes will require strings of punches and kicks
delivered at close range, followed by a death blow delivered
by Bayonetta’s transforming hair or, once the magic gauge at
the top of the screen has been charged, a torture device
powered by hammering buttons on the controller. When enemies strike
back, you can tap the R2 button to slip through their attacks
and activate “Witch Time,” which temporarily slows down the
action and lets you pound your adversaries into angel dust as
they’re stuck in molasses.
The combat
system is both keenly responsive and brimming with strategic
possibilities, a balance that’s hard to achieve in a beat ‘em
up for a modern game console. If you want to take a
casual stroll through Bayonetta and power your way through
fights with a minimum of effort, that option is available to
you, but you can also take your time and learn to play the
game like a pro, stretching your combos out to infinity. This opens up the game
to practically anyone who can hold a controller, but rewards
those players who go the extra mile and learn the finer points
of combat… the right combos to perform, the right weapons to
equip, and the right time to dodge each enemy’s strikes. Bayonetta encourages
players to improve without punishing those who haven’t
sharpened their skills to a razor’s edge, a far cry from the
punishing God Hand and an excellent template for future
releases.
Bayonetta also
makes the wise move of breaking up the battles, not with
cryptic and tedious puzzles like its kissing cousin Devil May
Cry, but with fun mini-games that keep the action fresh and
unpredictable.
The most frequent of these is Angel Attack, a simple
shooting gallery with Bayonetta unloading a small clip of
bullets into a circling swarm of angels, but at other points
throughout the game she’ll hop on car rooftops in pursuit of
her enemies, race a motorcycle over a crumbling freeway
overpass, and do her best Dr. Strangelove impression, riding a
missile to a mysterious island city. These scenes play like
Yu Suzuki’s arcade hits from the 1980s, complete with remixed
versions of the Space Harrier, Hang On, and Out Run
soundtracks. This
is a good thing for players old enough to remember them and an
even better thing
for Sega, because without these cheeky references, it would be
exceedingly easy to mistake Bayonetta for a Capcom
release.
It’s an
improvement over Devil May Cry 4 and a quantum leap ahead of
God Hand, but there are still some ugly wrinkles in Bayonetta
that could stand to be ironed out in the sequel. Some of these are
unfortunately exclusive to the Playstation 3 version, which
suffers from an abundance of load times and severe slowdown in
one of the later stages.
Other issues are more deeply rooted, and annoying
regardless of which system you own. The mini-games
mentioned earlier will bore you to tears long before they
actually end, the developers are clearly more attracted to the
cartoonishly sexualized Bayonetta than any player would ever
be, and the ludicrous cut scenes can’t be skipped unless you
sign forms in triplicate and hand-deliver them to the
president of Platinum Games. There are even life
and death quick-time events that punish you harshly for
missing a single button press in what appears to be another of
the game’s many film clips. It’s just Hideki
Kamiya’s own little way of saying, “Don’t put down that
controller! Or
else.”
For all
its annoyances, Bayonetta is a big success for both Platinum
Games and Sega.
It’s a tightly designed, lavishly illustrated, and
richly rewarding action title that never forgets its roots or
its obligations to today’s more demanding players. In short, Bayonetta is
everything fans of God Hand loved about that game, without all
the stuff the critics
hated.
| DEMON'S SOULS |
| Atlus/From Software |
| Action/RPG |
 |
Comparing video games to drugs was probably
clever once, but it’s become such a well-worn cliché over the
years that you start to expect at least one reference to crack
or heroin or at least a good stiff drink in a review of an
especially addictive release. However, Demon’s Souls
is the kind of game that demands a narcotics analogy… for the
worst possible reasons.
An unsavory friend will hand you a copy, probably
hidden in a small paper bag, saying, “C’mon man, this stuff
will blow your mind.
What are you, a mama’s boy? I’ll even give you the
first hit for free… if you don’t like it, you can just
quit.”
The
horror stories you’ve heard play over and over in the back of
your mind, but the curiosity and peer pressure are too much to
resist. You take
the disc, stick it into your arm- er, Playstation 3- and for
an hour, you’re consumed by feelings of exhilaration and joy
far stronger than you’ve ever felt in your life. Suddenly, you hit a
brick wall, and the thrill is replaced by depression,
confusion, and remorse.
So you give the game back to your friend and return
home, hoping to forget the whole thing ever happened… and as
you sit down to relax, a little piece of you begs for another
taste. You drive
to the store and buy a copy of Demon’s Souls for yourself,
covering your face with your jacket as the cashier runs it
through the scanner.
Now your curiosity has blossomed into a
full-fledged addiction.
With each passing day, the high gets shorter, the shame
grows deeper, the craving more insistent. You go back for
another hit maybe two, three, four times a day, not because
you enjoy it, but
because a fierce compulsion has you by the throat. During your rare
moments of lucidity, when you’re not playing the game or
passed out on the couch or fencing stolen goods to feed your
addiction (okay, this stretches the analogy a bit), you
realize that the only way you’ll ever be free is to quit, or
when it all comes to an end. The game, I
mean.
This is what it’s like to play Demon’s
Souls. It’s an
addiction, but an unhealthy, abusive one. Even when the game no
longer entertains you, you’ll keep coming back, either due to
peer pressure (“This is a hardcore game! If you don’t like it,
you just suck!”), or because your own foolish pride refuses to
abandon the progress you’ve made. You’ll make excuses,
telling yourself that it will be more fun to play once you’ve
finished the next stage, bought the next magic spell, or
gained the next level.
However, the excitement of reaching these milestones is
fleeting, while frustration will nip at your heels with every
step.
Demon’s Souls is an action RPG, fundamentally
similar to the brilliant Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. However, there are
three key differences between the two games. Demon’s Souls takes
most of the depth of Oblivion out of the picture… there is no
alchemy, no lock-picking, and no involved conversations with
non-player characters in the hopes of making them reveal key
plot points or lower their shop prices. Even the level design
is comparatively linear, with five distinct worlds each split
into brief stages with only a handful of detours. Shortcuts can often be
opened in these detours, making the road to the boss at the
end of each stage less rocky.
This brings us to the second distinction,
combat. While
swordplay was always a frustrating and awkward chore in
Oblivion (and even worse in the previous game, Morrowind!),
From Software has made the battles in Demon’s Soul clean,
precise, and at times, incredibly satisfying. This is due mostly to
the third-person perspective that eliminates blind spots, but
also because of a brilliant parry system that lets you shove
an enemy’s sword aside, then jam your own through their rib
cage while they’re reeling from your counter. Finally, the evade
button- used for both running and God of War-style rolls-
makes your hero a great deal more mobile than the walking
tanks in Oblivion.
Ranged attacks are similar in both games, but arrows in
Demon's Souls tend to do more damage, making
them a godsend for fighters who prefer stealth to
brute force.
Finally, there’s the difference from Oblivion
that makes all the difference in the world… the
difficulty. When
video games first made the switch to 3D back in 1995,
concessions were made in the following years to lessen the
frustration of their awkward camera angles and limited depth
perception.
Checkpoints became more frequent, falling off ledges no
longer spelled instant death for the player, and the option to
save freely rescued gamers from the agony of impossible
situations. All
of these modern conveniences are absent from Demon’s Souls,
along with a few you’ve known all your life. Any items you’ve
collected cannot be exchanged for souls, the game’s do-all
currency, and you can’t even pause… the status window happens
in real-time, so if there are monsters nearby, you’re helpless
to defend yourself until the window is closed.
The stages also seem designed to torment rather
than challenge the player. Lethal booby traps are
scattered throughout the world of Boletaria, with little or
nothing at all to warn the player of their existence. Climb a narrow
stairwell and you’ll meet face to rock face with a
boulder. Chase
after a “crystal gecko” (the only monster in the game that’s
both docile and guaranteed to award you with valuable items)
and you’ll be stabbed in the side by an undead knight hiding
in a nearby doorway.
Touch a white trigger square and- oh, you have your
shield up? Sorry,
the arrows lodged in your head came from the opposite direction… or
all directions at once!
After you die, you’re sent back to the start of the
stage (not the middle, not near the end) with zero souls, 50%
of your maximum health, and all the enemies you killed
resurrected.
Before you ask, they get all their health back,
not half of it.
Even the online mode adds to the game’s
considerable frustration. Although you can call
on the aid of two previously killed players, the bosses get a
free hit point boost for every friendly “blue phantom” that
fights by your side.
Conversely, you may get an unwelcome visit from a
“black phantom,” bent on slaughtering you for the souls you’ve
collected and a chance to return to the land of the
living. This
infuriating X factor will leave less experienced players
scrambling to unplug their Ethernet cables… the game’s hard
enough without
other players trying to sabotage your progress.
You can almost imagine the executive producer of
Demon’s Souls watching games in progress from a secret base
deep within the Earth’s crust, stroking a cat while cackling
madly as players are pitted against players and brave knights
meet their doom by a trap triggered just inches from a
sparkling treasure.
His game may be the work of a twisted, heartless
sadist, but at least it’s wrapped in a pretty package.
Although astonishingly dark, the graphics are also
astonishingly good,
with life-like animation, commendable attention to detail (the
hateful red eyes of gargoyles pierce the night sky, and
squid-faced guardians desperately ring a bell to alert their
comrades of your presence), and the largest, most fearsome
boss enemies yet witnessed in a video game. The majority of these
foes are several stories tall; so massive that they won’t even
fit on your state of the art high-definition television set
without the camera retreating to an adjacent zip code. The sound adds impact
to the already hard-hitting atmosphere, and even becomes
critical to your survival… the distant footsteps and labored
breathing of the undead knights may be the only clue to their
existence you’ll get before they use you as a sword
sheath.
All this is quite impressive, but in the end, I’m
not convinced the ambition of the game’s design outweighs its
abundant and needless cruelty. It brings back
scarring memories of Shadow of the Beast, the Amiga
computer title from the late 1980s that made a strong first
impression before brutalizing the player with an absurd
difficulty level and an overemphasis on rote
memorization. If
you can adapt to that kind of rigid gameplay, or even enjoy
it, Demon’s Souls is a smart purchase. However, don’t let the
needling from self-important “hardcore” gamers whose
masculinity is entirely invested in their PS3 trophy case
pressure you into a commitment with this game. If you have a short
temper, high blood pressure, or need a little flexibility in
your gaming experience, just say no.
|
PIXELJUNK SHOOTER |
| Sony/Q Games |
| Shooter |
|
 Heat
and cold have been bitter enemies since the beginning of
time, battling to a lukewarm standstill for countless
centuries. There was a brief truce in the 1980s
mediated by Jason Alexander and the McDLT, but
twenty years later, they're once again at each
other's throats, struggling for dominance in the game
PixelJunk Shooter.
This time, the battlefield
is a vast cavern littered with treasure and stranded
miners. Repesenting heat are scalding pools and
geysers of lava. Playing for the cold team is water,
the refreshing taste that goes down smooth. As the
pilot of a small spacecraft, you're caught in the middle
of the conflict. Your official goal is to
grab all the miners in each stage, but the only way
you'll be able to do this is to bring heat and
cold together, transforming them both into harmless igneous rock which
can be chiseled through with your ship's laser
beams.
The water doesn't seem to
mind your presence, doing no harm to you and even
cooling your ship's hull after you've unleashed a storm
of homing missiles. However, the lava takes things
more personally and will fry you to a crisp on
direct contact. Just getting close to a
pool of lava is enough to raise your ship's temperature
dangerously high. Ultimately, your survival
depends not only on neutralizing the molton rock, but
keeping your distance from heat sources and taking
frequent dips in water to keep your ship from reaching
its melting point.
The interaction between
fiery magma and life-giving water doesn't just make this
game better... it makes the
game. Without it, PixelJunk Shooter would be
a faintly modernized and thoroughly unremarkable clone
of Atari's Gravitar. The simple graphics smack of
Flash- even Sega's Subterrania from the early
1990s had more detailed artwork than this!- and the
soundtrack is all over the place, favoring tribal chants
whose connection to the gameplay is strained at
best.
However, once you add lava
and water to the recipe, practically everything
changes. The visuals come to life when waterfalls
crash down from the top of the screen and streams of the
bright blue liquid are diverted to a nearby lake of
fire, granting you safe passage to the next
miner. Handy items like alien sponges and the
juiciest fruits in the galaxy add depth and a puzzle
element to the unexpectedly sedate gameplay.
PixelJunk Shooter is the rare kind of shooter that's
more likely to confound you with a seemingly impassable
volcano or a perilously placed miner than overwhelm you
with swarms of monsters. The monsters are
there, in all their dive-bombing, magma-spewing
glory, but nine times out of ten, the devilishly crafted
stages will be your downfall.
It's not the merciless
assault on your senses that Geometry Wars and its
many clones tend to be, but if you're looking for a
laid-back game that challenges your mind rather than
your vision, and brings something new to the table in a
genre starving for new ideas, PixelJunk Shooter
is a perfect fit for your collection.
| WHITE KNIGHT CHRONICLES |
| Sony/Level 5 |
| Action/RPG |
| |
 White
Knight Chronicles is a hard game to rate. It's tough
because most of the game will be spent playing the
underwhelming story mode offline. However,
the online functionality is the best part of the
game and ultimately redeems it. It was a tough decision
to make, but overall I can squeeze White Knight
Chronicles into the "worth the $60 purchase" category,
provided you have online access.
If you
enjoy RPGs for fantastic plots with memorable scenes and
epic moments, don't bother with White Knight
Chronicles. Despite a few plot twists, there's
absolutely nothing here that anyone who has ever played
an RPG in the past twenty years wouldn't be
able to see coming. The main character is a young boy
named Leonard who, for reasons that are
inadequately explored, falls in love with Princess
Cisna, because he saw her once when they were children
many years ago. He has taken it upon himself to
save her from a group known as the "Magi," who wish to
use her to awaken the powers of the "knights," large
body armor suits a'la Escaflowne.
Of course, "because I saw her once a
few years ago" hardly justifies involving yourself
in such important matters. In any realistic
scenario, the Princess would be more likely to issue a
restraining order than wait to be saved by her shining
"prince" Leonard. Anyway... along the way you'll
meet the usual ragtag cast of heroes, most of whom just
tag along "just because." The only truly
interesting supporting characters are Kara and Eldore,
whose mysterious personalities barely hold the plot
above water during your quest.
The terrible
pacing of an already humdrum, paper-thin plot only
compounds matters. Once the party arrives at the city of
Greede about halfway into the game, I nearly quit as the
storyline comes crashing to a screeching halt and the
game enters "fetch quest hell." Four or five hours
of the game are spent backtracking to previous areas to
find a plethora of items the party must obtain before
finally progressing to the next chapter of the story.
This wouldn't be such a problem if the storyline budged
even a little while hunting down these trinkets. There's
no character development, no new areas to explore, no
meaningful backstories revealed. This
seemingly endless scavenger hunt exists only to pad
the length of the game. Once it finally comes to a
merciful end, the plot does pick up, but the
threadbare middle of the game will have
many less patient players crying
foul.
Fetch quests are nothing new to RPGs,
but they're especially bothersome in this game
due to its length, or the lack thereof. The main quest
takes no more than twenty hours to complete, so when
nearly a quarter of a game's plot is relegated to fetch
quests, it's impossible not to notice. Once it’s
finished the game feels like a TV dinner for starved RPG
fans. It briefly satiates those looking for a next
generation RPG, but they'll quickly hunger for a
more satisfying storyline. The story ends on
a cliffhanger, which hopefully will lead to a more
intriguing plot in future installments. Sadly, what's
offered here in the first installment of the
game was a complete waste of time as the only
worthwhile moments could be summed up in
about five hours.
Fortunately, the
gameplay is vastly more interesting than the scenario.
Once the game begins the player must create an avatar
for both the story mode and online play. This is an
exciting feature that is sadly underutilized by Level
5. Often times during scenes the avatar is barely
seen in the background and has virtually no involvement
with the plot whatsoever. The idea of the avatar being
not the main character but rather an "onlooker" to the
events unfolding isn't a particularly bad one, but the
problem lies in the fact that the other characters in
the story never acknowledge the avatar’s presence. The
avatar never expresses any kind of emotion and is just a
doll that happens to pop up in a frame from time to
time.
The structure of White Knight
Chronicles is similar to that of Final Fantasy XII,
with combat offering both free-roaming and turn
based elements. When a timer on the screen is
filled, the player can execute a variety of commands
previously assigned in the menu screen.
Unfortunately, the battles are merely a poor
man's version of the ones in Final Fantasy XII,
without its refinement or challenge. A simple task
like changing targets is made ridiculously cumbersome as
it requires a few seconds of fumbling around in the menu
systems to find the right command. A "hot
key" that instantly allows you to switch targets would
have been much preferred. On the plus side, the
amount of customization available is extremely
impressive. You can build your party members
however you like as you earn ability points to spend on
various skills and magic. Weapons each have their
own class and abilities, allowing for a large amount of
flexibility and strategy. You can even create and
name your own combos by stringing together abilities and
assigning them to command slots, provided you have
enough Action Chips stored to do so.
Not that you'd need to employ any
strategy. White Knight Chronicles is so
ridiculously easy that you can skate through the
entire game just by teaching the party healing spells
and giving them the strongest equipment and
weapons. Once the lead character transforms into
the White Knight armor, the game becomes borderline
broken. I never once had to transform into the
knight unless forced by the game. Magic doesn't even
become a factor until the final area, when the game
presents at least some modicum of challenge. RPG
fans looking for the deep strategy and challenge of
Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne will be sorely disappointed
here.
White Knight Chronicles' best
asset is its creativity. How creative of a person
are you? That's the question to ask
yourself before pulling the trigger on a purchase.
The game's best moments come when it lets you color
outside the lines. The game lets you create
your own town and populate it with residents. You
can find materials to build houses and other structures,
and assign residents to cultivate the town... hiring
different professions yields different
items. Your town can then be uploaded, and
you can either invite players to visit your town or
drop in on other players’ villages. You can take
materials and items and combine them to create new, more
powerful weaponry. Up to four people can go on assigned
quests purchased in the story. Eventually you'll receive
a camera that lets you take pictures of your party and
upload those online as well. If you get involved
and make friends online you can have tons of fun playing
the game, and its many shortcomings become less
noticeable.
Even
though you'll have fun going on quests with other
players, once you return to the story mode, you'll be
reminded of the game's total
mediocrity. WKC
isn't awful by any stretch of the imagination, but you
can't help but notice that Level 5 had a ton of untapped
potential here and coming from them, that's a
disappointment. Considering their past output,
Level 5 also did a surprisingly subpar job with the
visuals. Rogue Galaxy and Dragon Quest 8 are among
the most breathtaking games on
the Playstation 2, but White Knight Chronicles
doesn't even come close to harnessing the full
power of the more advanced PS3. The graphics
aren't bad, but this game is seriously behind
the curve visually, and the fact that this was finally
released in the United States a year after its
Japanese debut doesn't help matters. Still,
there's fun to be had in this title, provided you've
got a lot of online friends who also enjoy the
creative aspects of the game. You can also unlock
even more items and equipment on a second playthrough,
but suffering through it once may be enough for most
gamers. Level 5 and JRPG fans who are more
interested in expressing their creativity than
pushing their skills to the limit will get
the most enjoyment out of this game. Everyone
else is better off looking to the horizon for their
RPG fix.
| YAKUZA 3 |
| Sega |
| Action/Adventure |
| |
Today's gamers are quick to
dismiss Sega as withered and irrelevant; a former giant
eroded by a series of reckless mistakes and claimed as a
trophy by a corporation on the fringes of the video game
industry. All this may be true, but there are still
traces of the old Sega buried under all those terrible
Sonic sequels... the Sega that did what Nintendon't,
even if it couldn't match Nintendo's polish. The Sega
that took risks on new ideas and crazy peripherals,
years before the Wii was a twinkle in Shigeru Miyamoto's
eye. The Sega that took those first timid steps into
online gaming with Phantasy Star Online, and into total
player freedom with Shenmue. That crazy diamond has
lost most of its shine in recent years,
but still catches the occasional glint of
light from games like Yakuza 3.
Like its predecessors,
Yakuza 3 carries on the tradition of the Shenmue series
as a narrative-driven adventure fully immersed in
Japanese culture. After spending the first
two games busting heads, lead character Kazuma Kiryu has
sworn off organized crime, retiring to the
sleepy island of Okinawa to manage an orphanage.
Those carefree days of kissing boo-boos and playing
stickball with the kids don't last long, however... a
crime boss has his eyes on Kazuma's property, and
attempts to force him out so the whole neighborhood can
be bulldozed and replaced with a military base.
After a few hours of wading through tutorials
and dealing with petty preteen issues, our hero boards a
plane to Tokyo and the game gets serious, making a
sudden shift in tone from "very special episode of Full
House" to "season finale of The Sopranos."
Much of your time in Yakuza
3 will be spent watching cut scenes, engaging in lengthy
conversations, and stocking up on items in the city
stores. When you're not knee deep in plot
outlining or buying enough energy drinks to keep Lance
Armstrong on his bike for days, you'll break out the
brass knuckles and mix it up with thugs on every
rung of the criminal ladder. Fights are most fun
against young, inexperienced street gangs with no hope
of beating Kazuma, because you have the freedom to
improvise. The crowds of mostly harmless foes
let you charge up your Heat meter quickly, granting you
access to the game's delightfully savage
finishers. There's nothing quite like throwing a
thug over the railing of a two-story building, or
hobbling him with a
flagpole! Unfortunately, all the fun of
fighting goes out the window when Kazuma locks
horns with a boss. These bruisers have three life bars,
the most impenetrable defense this side of Fort Knox,
and a temper that flares when they're near defeat,
turning them into adrenaline-fueled killing machines.
Before you even think of picking a fight with
these guys, you'd better bring along a whole lot of
power-ups. And weapons. And an exorcist, just to be
sure.
What's even more frustrating is that out of
the dozens of shops lining the streets of both Okinawa
and Tokyo's Kamarocho district, only a small handful are
open for business. So many of the doors are welded shut
that the cities start to feel like a movie set in a
cheap western, with each living, breathing building
separated by dozens of flat cardboard facades. Granted,
a lot of content was removed from the Western release,
but even the mahjong parlors without mahjong in them
have doors. This leads to the uncomfortable
conclusion that even the Japanese game has a lot less to
offer the player than the colorful downtown scenery
would suggest. What Sega has done is stretch
the cozy towns of Shenmue out to a more realistic size
without broadening the experience accordingly. It's the
kind of deceptive shell game that players have come to
expect from the Sega of today, rather than the
brave ambition that defined the company in the Dreamcast
days.
Honestly, there's a lot about Yakuza 3 that
could stand to be improved. The escape
sequences which force you to chase after your enemies,
or run from them, are a clumsy means of
advancing the plot and not much fun to play. The
graphics are inconsistent, alternating
between realistic environments and long
strings of boxy buildings with textures slapped on
the sides. Finally, the mini-games are kind of
crummy... why settle for three frames of bowling when
you can play the whole game with motion
controls in Wii Sports?
Yakuza 3's shortcomings keep the
game from reaching its full potential, but at the
same time, it just feels right that they're
here. Even in its best moments, Sega was
never perfect, but its willingness to reach for the
stars and pull back a hand full of tempered brilliance
was what made the company a legend in the
1990s. Yakuza 3 is a return to those days of
high aspirations and unrestrained- if undisciplined-
creativity, and a welcome break from Sega's current
modus operendi of half-hearted
spin-offs. | |
