Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II X360 [REVIEW] | ♬ ‘Cause every chromosome is a hand-me-down ♬

The first Force Unleashed was good, not original or amazing, but good hack n slash fun, it was.

So a sequel wouldn’t be surprising, given it was the fastest-selling Star Wars videogame at the time, even if the first one actually had a proper ending and a definitive fate for the main character, Star Killer, so how do you continue the story?

Since i’m about to discuss the story of the first game and spoil the ending, i’m gonna have to make it extra CLEAR.

As in.

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING, again.

You have been warned.

Continua a leggere

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed X360 [REVIEW] | Starkilling It

This is a revised rewrite, but it has been so long since the old review that back then the Sequel Trilogy had just begun, and Disney wasn’t quite drowning people in Star Wars related projects and series up the wazoo, and to be honest while i still don’t consider myself a Star Wars fan… fuck if i know what a “Star Wars fan” actually means nowadays.

Nor i do care to properly find out.

I did like it casually enough to play some SW games like this and the sequel, and – as i said before – i would love a Star Wars Musou, which sadly will never happen, and in general i do like people fighting with lightsabers and magical space powers, i’m not above it, absolutely.

Also, while this isn’t the first hack n slash/beat em up based on the property (i remember the home consoles versions of the Episode III tie-in game being that and mostly well received), it was certainly one made because God Of War became popular, so Lucasarts wanted in, as everybody did.

Namco even resurrect their Splatterhouse series to get some of that violent 3D beat em up action.

Continua a leggere

Bujingai: Swordmaster PS2 [REVIEW] | Wuxia GACKT Action

You think you know the depths of the Playstation 2 library.

You don’t. You just don’t.

If this wasn’t the case, a title like Bujingai: Swormaster would have been covered by gaming Youtubers as a “forgotten gem” to the point it’s not forgotten at all anymore.

And yet, 99 % of you before know never knew there was a PS2 era hack n slash in the vein of Devil May Cry but where you play as sci-fi wuxia Gackt.

Again, the PS2 library is so big we still are finding more obscure titles to showcase.

Personally, i remember seeing this one a lot in bargain bin cases after a while, since it was distributed here by 505 Games/Gamestreeet (figures since they are an Italy based distributor), which back in the early 2000s were famous for mostly peddling ol’ budget games/shovelware by the bucketloads, so that didn’t help, but at least a PAL copy is fairly cheap and easy to find still today.

Can’t say the cover helped because sure as hell the general public wasn’t gonna go “is that Gackt?” after looking at the box art.

But yes, he gave right to the teams to use his likeness for the main character, Lau Wong, a wuxia hero that has to do the usual: sky surf on an ethereal cloud while doing the usual wuxia ballet-combat aerobics and eventually go back to Earth, 100 years after an apocalyptic event wiped out most of the population while giving survivors powers, to rid the planet of a demonic army that has holed up in the asian city of Bujingai.

And since it’s a martial arts inspired game, it just happens the head of the demon army is a former fellow martial arts student turned rival that has gone evil, as you do in these.

Continua a leggere

Dragon Quest Heroes II PS4 [REVIEW] | #musoumay

You could use many adjectives to describe Omega Force output from the PS2 onward, but definitely not “ambitious”, as Koei first and then Tecmo Koei keep them just as the “Dynasty Warriors” guys, a stigma that just got worse over time, even when they don’t make a Warriors title.

Can’t say its unwarranted either as there are dozens upon dozens of Warriors titles, all iterating from a formula now decades old, to the point there are entire sub-series alongside the well milked mainline Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors franchises.

But Dragon Quest Heroes II is the rare exception, as we will see.

Regardless, its not too surprising this exists, as the first DQ Heroes did well, was received quite well (especially for a musou title), so of course Koei put immediately Omega Force back to work on a sequel, which dropped the ridilicously long subtitle of the first one, and came out the following year, thought we had to wait until 2017 for a western release.

A sequel in DQ or FF fashion, in the sense it’s not a direct story sequel, this isn’t even the same world as the first Dragon Quest Heroes.

Continua a leggere

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe And The Blight Below PS4 [REVIEW] | #musoumay

RPGs aren’t really my bag anymore, not because i dislike them, but because they’re way too much time consuming for me nowadays, they simply are, and while i make some exceptions.. i usually don’t bother because i know i will most likely lose interest or be forced to play something else that i can finish in far less time so i can write a review for it and have it out in a reasonable timeframe.

Dragon Quest doesn’t need presentation nowadays, as is THE quintessential Japanese RPG series since its heyday, arguably even more than Final Fantasy in the land of Nippon, but since i’m not familiar with it, i won’t be making any presentation, even more so since this title is clearly catered to hack n slash fanatics that might or might not have played at least a Dragon Quest game, meaning it’s a gateway title for musou fans or general audiences that have some understanding of the series only through pure gaming osmosis but not had any chance or big interest for the series itself.

Which leads us to the plot being a spin-off affair with an original story that does the “multiversional tango”, as it custom to most of these Warriors crossover games overall, in order to have an ensemble cast of heroes from the various mainline games enter the fray alongside original protagonist characters and a fairly generic common threath for everyone to band together against the baddie responsable, in hope this can also sent the various heroes to their home world/dimension.

Works for me.

Continua a leggere

Dynasty Warriors Origins [DEMO] [HANDS-ON] STEAM

I didn’t promise a hands-on first impressions on the demo of the newest Dynasty Warriors game, Dynasty Warriors Origins, because i don’t have a next gen console, and usually i play my musou games like that, but i figured out, there’s a Steam demo as well, maybe my relatively ancient rig can run it fine… and it did, actually surprised me that it’s good enough to run it decently.

So here it my opinions on the demo of Dynasty Warriors Origins, which lets you play one of the classic bouts of the series, The Battle Of Sishui Gate, where the Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalitation attacks united and you also get to meet the demon in red, the mightiest among men, the one you do not pursue: Lu Bu.

So, in case you didn’t follow or knew of this new Dynasty Warriors game, the gist is that you play as a lone Wanderer, a skilled yet aimless martial artist that gets involved into the turbolent battles and political machinations of the characters from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, so you can basically decide around a bit, and interact and fight alongside the many characters fans of the novel and Koei series have learned to know, love and hate.

It’s not quite an OC or a CAW character similar to how you had a self-insert protagonist in the Samurai Warriors Chronicles games, as the Wanderer is a precisely designed character and so you can’t change much about his looks (nor you can choose for a female option, as far as i remember), not that it matters for the portion of game given by the demo.

Continua a leggere

Seven Samurai 20XX PS2 [REVIEW] #meleemay

Technically this is a re-write, because i did review this game years and years ago in italian, but time gave me the distance needed to realize i could actually write an entirely new review from scratch for Seven Samurai 20XX still based on my experience of like 7 plus years ago, since the hatred i felt for this one never actually went away, and i guess festered on the back of my mind.

But i did replay it, and i can futher confirm that there are indeed many reasons to istinctually hate it, if nothing else for the fact it had the brass balls of being the closest to an actual videogame adaptation of Kurosawa’s seminal samurai film, as it actually had the rights by the Kurosawa production, and i wanna make it clear it also has Moebius (yes, THAT Moebius) as the character designer and music by another legend, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.

So yeah, it’s kinda impressive how Sammy (an arcade publisher that by the early 2000s fused with Sega in order to enter the home console videogame market, which i will always associate with my beloved Metal Slug clone called Dolphin Blue) got permits from the film studios, rounded up people of incredible caliber from different industries, and then managed to deliver such an obvious, steaming turd that was destined to haunt the 5 bucks bargain bins for a good decade.

So much for a product meant to celebrate the movie’s 50^th anniversary, as it did the anime series Samurai Seven, both curiously fiddling with sci-fi re-imaginings of the film but actually unrelated to each other besides both meant to attract younger audiences to Kurosawa’s story.

Continua a leggere

Samurai Maiden PS4 [REVIEW] #meleemay

I’ve been waiting to cover this one for a while, but i had to wait for it to go on a decent discount, since D3 Publisher went extra crazy and asked 50 bucks (70 for the Deluxe Edition that includes all DLCs, mostly costumes and music from other D3 franchise like Bullet Girls) for what was obviously another budget game of theirs.

Having played all Oneechanbara games and waiting for the Namco Bandai owned company to finally announce the western release for EDF 6 (which was supposed to be out this spring but was eventually delayed to late July 2024), i did want to play Samurai Maiden earlier, but the absurd price really held me off, i’m not fucking paying 70 bucks for a complete edition of a digital only release of a D3 Publisher budget hack n slash anime game.

Curiously, despite the publisher involved and the premise of hack n slash action using a japanese anime high school girl, this is NOT the fanservicey fest you’d expected, i guess after the “prude crusade” Sony went (for whatever reason, since they were the main platform for most Senran Kagura games before), niche titles like this had to tippy toe on their tits to see what’s ok now.

the plot sees regular high school girl Tsumugi transported back to the Sengoku period, isekai’d directly during the Honno-ji incident so she can chat up Oda Nobunaga and have three female anime ninjas explain she was summoned there because she’s a discendant of a so called “Miko Of Prosperity”, and a prophecy involving her and a Demon Lord was foretold, etc.

Continua a leggere

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae STEAM [REVIEW ] #meleemay

Since i did already cover The Initial and the “sequel” hasn’t yet gone on sale on Steam, i feel it’s time to revisit (so yeah, it’s technically a rewrite in the sense that some of my opinions didn’t change over time, but it’s also a revision i wrote from scratch) another Oneechanbara adjacent title from the indie tier of Steam “famous” japanese hack n slash games heavy on the “school uniform cum swords” anime-derived aesthetic, the kind where you’d expect the dutch wives looking characters to randomly start fucking in a robotic, unappealing fashion, if you didn’t already know this was just a fan service-y hack n slash.

This was actually a fairly popular release, as in it was a smash hit when released during Comiketto 84 (AKA the 2013 august edition of Comic Market, that huge japanese only event) by his developer-creator Zenith Blue, and in March of 2014 PLAYISM picked it up to distribute and localize it in English for a worlwide Steam release.

It received a limited physical PS4 release via Limited Run Games and it’s also available digital on PSN and X-Box systems, FIY, but i got it in a bundle playable via Steam years ago, so i’m reviewing the Steam release alone, sold at a MSRP of 10 bucks.

Continua a leggere

Melee May will tag in for Musou May

So yeah, as promised, instead of the usual Musou May, this year will focus on the more typical beat em up games, going from some licensed tie-in “trash” to the more forgotten dephts of the PS2 backlog, and evena fairly recent entry in the “pants em up” subgenre.

Image is for mystification purposes only, covering Smash clones would be fun but i really don’t have neither the time or the expertise at the moment.