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I'd more or less given up on ever seeing this game come to the UK officially. Historically, the series has always been passed over for an English language translation or US release, mainly because of its themes. In a world where the American version of Splatterhouse got to keep all of its gore but had to have an enemy that resembled an inverted cross replaced by something less likely to upset hardcore religious lobbies, there was no way that a game in which you recruited demons from a number of different real world mythologies to your team by befriending them was going to see the light of day. Even less likely when the second game had the Christian God as one of the main bad guys.
This is the third in the main SMT series, the first on the PS2. Came out in the US some months ago and has managed to sneak out into the shops over here recently, with no fanfare or real publicity. I only just noticed it last week.
And that's a shame, because it's brilliant.
Starts off with the world ending, techno-apocalypse style. Then it's reborn. It begins at the point where Invisibles/Promethea/Akira end - reality being rebooted. A few people are kept whole - you're one of them, but during the reboot you're accosted by a small blonde kid and a woman in a veil, who shove a worm in your mouth and turn you into a demon.
The game plays like a cross between the old AD&D Eye of the Beholder games and Pokemon. It's effectively one big dungeon crawl, as far as I can tell so far, only with complete freedom of movement within the areas. It doesn't need that freedom of movement, as the areas are all very much corridors with rooms leading off from them - indeed, the previous games in the series played from a perspective almost identical to EotB, first-person with movement being conveyed through screen wipes of static images. While the new one's entirely three-dimensional, it still feels remarkably similar to that sort of style. That's no bad thing - I'd forgotten just how entertaining this kind of exploration can be.
It's a dungeon crawl in structure, but a lot of the environments are everyday (although deserted, due to the events in the storyline) - shopping malls, railway stations, hospitals. Well, asides from the bits where you're transported into a computer network or the underworld, obviously.
Battles are random. To begin with, your party consists of you and one other demon who you meet almost as soon as the game proper begins. During battle, along with options to use specific attacks or spells, you have the ability to talk to your opponent - this is how you recruit extra team members. Some will ask you questions and will join depnding on the answers you give. Some will want you to give them gifts. Others will come to you and request that you let them join.
That's where the Pokemon stuff comes in. There are over 100 different demons that you can recruit, meaning that you can shape your active party to suit your own style of play. Demons can evolve into different types, too, depending on a number of factors - it might happen when they reach a certain level, or you can force it by combining them with each other, creating new types along the way. As usual for Japanese turn-based RPGs, everything has its own elemental strengths and weaknesses, turning battles into a highly complex game of rock, paper, scissors.
In terms of how it plays, then, it's resolutely old school. What makes it feel unique - apart from the demon collecting and communication stuff - are how it looks and the way that the storyline is affected by your decisions.
Looks first. It's Zelda: Wind Waker meets Killer 7 meets Rez meets the Blood: The Last Vampire anime. Highly effective toon shading, a bold use of colour and framing, Tron-style texturing and spot effects, and lots of light bleeding in around the edges. While it's basically a combination of those releases, it never feels anything less than entirely original, so effectively are they combined. It's one of those rare titles where what you see on the promotional artwork is what you see when you're playing the game.
As the story progresses, it takes the standard premise for this sort of thing - you're the character upon whom the fate of the world depends - and expands on it, offering up a level of choice that's missing from most of the genre. The eventual outcome - the fate of the world - depends on the choices that you make during the game. Reality is still undecided, everything in flux, and it's up to you whether a new world is created from it or everything is wiped away, full stop. Five endings, apparently, so it's clearly more open than that. Unusually, the choices aren't obvious - rather than having one option that's clearly marked 'good' and another that's 'bad', they're instead relatively searching philosophical things, where you're never entirely sure how choosing one over another will change the outcome.
It also manages to tick the 'decidedly, wonderfully odd' box, too. Take the bit I just got to (still right at the beginning of the game, really, so no major spoilers): After making my way through a computer network (the only way I could travel from one city to another in the new Japan, which is situated on the inside surface of a sphere) I ended up plonked in front of a tree that seemed to be made of cybernetic blood particles. Looking through a peephole in the surface of the tree, I was transported to a theatre stage in a void full of blinking eyes, to be told that I was performing as expected by a blonde guy in a wheelchair. The curtains drew, and I was suddenly back in the 'real' world.
I adore it already. I've got to admit that some of that may be down to having wanted to play this series for so long - finally getting the opportunity may be dulling my critical senses somewhat. Everything fits together so perfectly, though - you've got an old, proven yet abandoned gaming recipe, topped off with some sparkling new icing and decoration, with a taste that's significantly different from any of the other cakey gaming treats currently doing the rounds.
The cyberpunk demonology is refreshing, the apocalyptic setting is exciting (in that it's not your usual post-apocalypse stuff, but during the apocalypse, defining exactly what sort of apocalypse it's going to be).
I'm bigging it up for the same kind of reasons I went off on one about Killer 7. The European version's been released on a brand new label - Ghostlight - and it's fantastic. Like I say, I never really thought we'd get to see an installment from this series, or any of the off-shoot games, in the UK, let alone in a conversion of this quality - 60Hz option, full German and French translations. That sort of care isn't often displayed by small European publishers, so they deserve praise for that alone. It's also a risk, to release a game that most publsihers would consider to be a no-go - the franchise is largely unknown outside of fan listings, the gameplay is out of step with current trends. Everything about it is esoteric enough to make most labels run screaming.
They've also got plans to release the first in the latest SMT splinter series - Digital Devil Saga - over here at Christmas, and I'd really like to see that happen and for it to be a success. Games like this need to do well over here, in order for people to keep bringing them over and kill the claims that there's no market for them. Games that treat the audience as having some measure of intelligence, of having the ability to appreciate something other than another FPS or racing title. Hopefully, they're going to make enough to guarantee that Ghostlight can stick around and keep to this kind of standard, cherry-picking the best and most important of the obscure stuff and presenting it in a manner that demonstrates respect both for the material and for its audience.
But forget all that. It's a superb game in its own right, well worth getting hold of. |
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