I’m the kind of person who prefers to play a series in the order the games were made, even if that isn’t necessarily their in-game chronological order. After all, some sequels can spoil the plot twists in their original games. For example, if you haven’t beaten Advance Wars, don’t even so much as read the subtitle for Advance Wars 2 or you might get its major plot twist spoiled for yourself. Of course, this tactic hasn’t always worked out in my favor: remember when I beat one of the worst PS2 games of all time? Well, the whole reason I did that was because I read that it was a precursor to this game:

This is a hack ‘n’ slash. Square is your attack button, X lets you double-jump, and circle is for interacting with people and objects. As you progress, you’ll earn different powers that you can equip to the shoulder buttons: you start with a block and a dodge roll (the only shoulder-button moves that don’t cost magic to use), but later you get rapid-fire bullets, magic spears, and even a magic fist that is almost too powerful. I don’t remember any items that restore magic, but magic regenerates automatically as well as getting a boost when you kill an enemy.

The main thing that sets this game apart from other hack ‘n’ slashes is that many enemies fire waves of large, slow moving projectiles like the ones in typical arcade-style shmups. These bullets can be destroyed by your attacks, though they mutually destroy magic projectiles if hit with them. There are even entire sections devoted towards getting past waves of bullets, so it’s not just a gimmick. What is a gimmick is, when you get a boss’s health to a certain level, it will be stunned and a timer will tick down, and you have to deal enough damage to deplete the secondary health bar (runes in a circular shape) before the timer finishes or the boss regains some health. There’s also two parts where the game goes into a platformer-esque side view, one of which actually has you jumping over hazards, but the controls weren’t built for these parts and it comes across as a bit clunky (example: if you turn around mid-air, your character stops to turn around, but your jump still goes through its quick animation, meaning you essentially stop moving and fall into whatever’s below you).

Another brief aside: if you’ve read some of my recent posts, you’ll know that I mentioned the games’ first impressions and whether I thought they were good or bad. Well, I think this game takes the cake for the worst first impression I’ve seen in a game. You know how a lot of bad hack ‘n’ slash games will just stick the player in a plain room, then proceed to throw waves of the same 1-2 enemy types at the player for way too long? Yeah, that’s how this game starts! The scenery is nice, being part ruins and part snowy outside, but once you get control, you’ll just be fighting the game’s common enemy, the Shades, over and over and over. You might think this is a sort-of tutorial since, every so often, it swaps out one of your spells for another one and tells you how to use it, but no: after this part, your spells get taken away and reintroduced throughout the game. Plus, after this part, you’re tasked with fighting a significantly smaller number of an enemy that’s less threatening than the Sades, meaning this would have been a much better way to introduce the melee combat mechanics to new players. You might think it’s there to set up some plot point, but no: all of that gets reintroduced afterward as well! Yonah’s illness, your spells, Weiss, and even how you acquire your spells all get their own alternate introduction after this point. If anything, this part risks spoiling one of the game’s major plot twists since you don’t go to the ruins again (or even hear it referenced in-game) until the end of the game. It’s as if the publisher told the dev team that they wanted the game to start off with a bunch of action to let players know that there would be a bunch of action later in the game (as the beginning is otherwise fairly dull) because this part makes no sense from a design perspective. At least there’s a boss at the end of the enemy waves for some semblance of variety.

Speaking of tutorials, this game treats them rather uniquely: after killing certain enemies (or a certain number of enemies), you’ll unlock a text tutorial for one part of the game. This is like the crafting system in Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 1 in that it might seem like a good concept on paper, but is laughably terrible in execution, like when you kill a wolf and get the “fighting wolves” tutorial, or when you get the “key items can be found in ordinary crates” tutorial many hours after figuring that out for yourself in the first dungeon. It would have been better if all text tutorials were unlocked at the start.

Anyway, once you make it to the game proper, things begin to pick themselves up. Sure, it starts a little slow, and sure, you’ll still end up fighting a bunch of Shades, but there is a decent variety with the enemies: one dungeon has you fight robots which, when killed, explode after a few seconds; in the desert, you fight wolves, which have their own AI, and scorpions, which hide in the ground and jump out to attack you. Plus, there are even elements of level design: the factory will have parts where you’re on a mine cart and you have to attack incoming projectiles and drones to avoid damage, and in the desert temple, certain rooms will prevent you from using certain abilities until you find and destroy the glowing blocks in the room (although the “no running” room should’ve been last since that one’s the hardest).

Unfortunately, the game does have its problems. Near the beginning of the game, there’s this lizard boss that you have to fight twice, and I don’t just mean its second phase when you destroy its first health-rune-wheel, I mean the entire battle from start to finish is recycled before your first team member joins you (this isn’t even the only reused boss, either). It gets worse: at the part of the game that should have been where you fight the final boss, it escapes and you have to go back to dungeons you’ve already been, and at this point, each positive has a negative: the factory unlocks a new area for you to explore, even introducing a room where you have to watch for pitfalls, but the game makes you go through this area twice: once to retrieve an item, and once to fight the boss, and both times through the exact same rooms (the boss arena is empty the first time); the desert doesn’t make you go through a dungeon again, but what it does do is spam a bunch of wolves at you until the boss decides to attack (yup, turns out that first impression wasn’t wrong); there’s one new dungeon before the dungeon-recycling happens, but the only level design it has is spamming Shades at you and the occasional part where you pick up a key to unlock the next section; the first dungeon has some simplistic block puzzles added for your second trip, but the game makes you go through this dungeon a third time near the end of the game where it’s identical to your first visit! Also, in the final level, a new enemy is introduced (the rhino), but the game makes you fight it like five times in a row before finally letting you progress, and when that does happen, it’s literally just two rooms with more Shade spam, and then the final boss! You had actual level design, game! What happened to it?

Plus, as much variety as this game has, it only ever seems to want to trap you in rooms and spam Shades; the only places it doesn’t do this are the factory (where it spams robots and drones instead) and the desert. When the game only makes you fight the same few enemies over and over with no variation in AI or level design, you can just implement the same winning strategy over and over, and the game becomes repetitive quickly. I’m kinda disappointed that this is the hack ‘n’ slash that got the unique arcade shmup enemies; surely there are hack ‘n’ slash games that don’t resort to trapping the player in a simple room and spamming the same few enemies over and over, right? If you know of a hack ‘n’ slash game like that, please suggest it to me in the comments; I want to like this genre, but the more of these I play, the more it seems like that’s a feature, not a bug (getting knocked on my back after pretty much every hit is annoying as well).

EDIT: Just to clarify, I made it to the end of the dad’s route and unlocked Kainé’s route, but I didn’t start Kainé’s route because this was long past the point where the game introduced anything new that wasn’t a boss or scenery, so I’d imagine her route is just more of the same.

Overall, the hack ‘n’ slash elements of this game are really weak, and the powerful attacks you get that can practically take out multiple enemies at one is more of a band-aid over the problem than a genuine fix. However, the mixture of shmup elements helps to give the game just enough variety to make it worth checking out if you’re a hack ‘n’ slash fan; just don’t pay too much for it, and don’t be surprised if it turns out there’s another game out there that executes this game’s concept of hack-‘n’-slash-plus-shmup in an objectively better, less repetitive way.

P.S. Also, the game’s plot has nothing to do with Drakengard except one off-hand line mentioning a red dragon, but that really could’ve referred to anything. Also, maybe the villain kinda looks like Caim, but that’s probably a stretch.