Kuon
- February 02, 2005 18:08 PM PST
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Twin tots with bowl cuts are supposed to be the pulmonary kickstarters in this yawn-inducing hunt and fetch-style shocker from the same team behind the Armored Core series and Echo Night: Beyond.
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"The stairway is blocked by rubble."
By transplanting survival horror to a feudal-era milieu, FromSoftware could've had something cool on their hands if it weren't dragged down with its myriad problems, many of which have mysteriously plagued this genre from its inception, flaws which point to lazy design as a way to pad out gameplaying time. The cinematic camerawork compromises the controls, you have to sit through load screens every few minutes, and despite having some cool spellcasting abilities, the combat is painfully sluggish.
Even worse, a few key objects are so easy to overlook that you can spend an hour meticulously backtracking until you either find it, or randomly trigger a plot-progressing cut scene. Then there's the fact that you inexplicably gain the ability to jump during the last third of the game, but can only do so at areas the programmers decided you could. And maybe these girls' kimonos are too tight or something, but if there was an overturned chair blocking my path I'd probably step over it instead of trekking to the other side of the map so I could get around it.
Poo-On
In its favor, a few tricky puzzles will give your brain something to wrap itself around from time to time, the cut-scenes boast some cool faux handheld camerawork, and you can turn off the weak English dubbing and set the dialogue to Japanese with English subtitles instead. Oh yeah, if you can motivate yourself enough to finish both characters' stories, a secret, you unlock a chess game and secret character. Whoop-dee-doo.
