Inuyasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale (Playstation)

 Just like TV Animation X: Unmei no Tatakai, this game (also known as Inuyasha: Sengoku Otogi Kassen) is a fighting game based on an anime with a large female fanbase that was released very late in the Playstation's life. Also like TV Animation X, it takes full advantage of its late release by having really impressive graphics, though this time it's a 2D game. But while that game was built upon an existing series, being essentially the secret third Psychic Force game, this one is totally its own thing, with mixed results.

 

The second thing you'll notice about the game is how great it looks: the character sprites are all really well drawn and animated, and their animations are all full of personality, too. The stages are also really well-drawn, and even more impressively, they all have different lighting. I mention this because the character sprites actually react to the lighting in each stage. And it's not just that they'll be dark in the dark stages or what ever, but there's stages where different parts of the stage have different levels of light coming from different sources, and the sprites are lit appropriately depending on what part of the screen they're in. It's something you don't often see in 2D fighting games, and in 2003, I think the only similar examples would have been the Capcom Vs. SNK games, which were on much more powerful hardware than the Playstation.

 

Another feature you really wouldn't have expected to see in a Playstation fighting game are tag battles! Even Capcom had to make massive sacrifices to get them working in their games, and they were able to work miracles on 32-bit consoles. But of course, Capcom's games were arcade ports with massive sprites, while Inuyasha is a Playstation original, so everything about it was custom-tailored to the hardware. Furthermore, there is a couple of seconds of loading whenever a tag happens. But I do think they did a fairly decent job of hiding these pauses, and you can have any combination of four characters fighting each other on any of the game's stages.

 

It's not all good, though, unfortunately. There are a couple of things I really don't like about this game. I mentioned earlier that the graphics would be the second thing you'll notice about the game. That's because the first thing you'll notice is that you start with only two playable characters! You've got to unlock the rest by playing through story mode, where you travel around a map encountering characters to fight, and mini-games to play. While doing this, you have a quota of jewel shards to collect. You get these by knocking them out of your opponents, and each character has one specific move that knocks shards out of an opponent. Imagine if you bought this game and wanted to play versus mode as soon as you got home! This'd really knock some of your enthusiasm out of you, wouldn't it? 

 

Another disapponting thing is that the special move inputs are very simple. Normal attacks are performed with the circle button, and specials are done by pressing a direction and the square button together. I get why this was done, the target audience of the game was more likely to be fans of the anime, rather than fans of fighting games, and simplified inputs have even been tried a few times in original fighting games in an effort to try and attract new players. The problem is that in my opinion, it never really works well. Move inputs in normal fighting games are designed so that performing moves can be a part of how a character plays, and how it feels to control them. These simplified input games though, lack that kind of satisfying, fluid flow, and they never feel especially good to play.

 

Despite all of that, I think that for fans of the show, I think there is some value to be found in a great-looking game where you can have the characters fight each other, and most importantly: you can play as Sesshomaru, the best character. It's a shame that all the work that went into making it look so good ended up being attached to a game that's so mechanically flawed. I got a Japanese copy of it dirt cheap a few years ago, and prices don't seem to have risen a great deal in the time since, but make sure you don't accidentally uy a copy of the JP-only RPG, also on Playstation.

Chaos Seed: Feng Shui Chronicle (SNES)

 Is this the first game where you're charged with the task of building dungeons, and defending them from invading would-be heroes? I don't know of any that came earlier than it, but I can believe that something along these conceptual lines might exist on some eighties microcomputer somewhere. Either way, Chaos Seed: Fengshui Chronicle (also known as Chaos Seed : Fuusui Kairouki) is a very early entry into the genre, and  it is a little different from the more famous games that came out after it.

 

In most dungeon building games, a large part of your goal is to create an environment to which monsters will be drawn, and will want to stay, so that they can defend your base at the centre of it. Instead, Chaos seed has you placing certain kinds of rooms with the goal of generating various resources, most prominently energy and sentan. The actual aim of your dungeon is to generate energy that you can absorb and then redirect into the dragon vein (which I think is the Asian equivalent of Europe's ley lines), and revive the blighted lands above. Sentan, the other resource, is used for upgrading the abilities of the rooms you build, as well as other things like summoning monsters to whom you can assign patrol routes to help defend your dungeon.

 

The Fengshui element mentioned in the title comes in the from of a system whereby every room you build is assigned one of five elements, depending on where you build it, and invisible elemental energy flows down the corridors from room to room, and adjacent rooms can have beneficial or detrimental effects on their neighbours' efficiency, depending on how their respective elements match up. A few years ago, when I was less patient, I never would have been able to get into this game. It starts out with a (definitely necessary) tutorial dungeon, where you're constantly being bombarded with (annoying, but still necessary) dialogue boxes explaining every mechanic in detail. Then, at the end of that dungeon, an angry dragon defeats you in battle and casts a spell that scatters your soul simultaneously across multiple different universes, and each subsequent dungeon is a dragon vein in one of those universes.

 

What's less clear is why soldiers are constantly invading your dungeons. For some reason, everyone's very angry about you trying to revive their desolate lands, so they constantly flood your dungeon with goons in an attempt to destroy it and kill you. You fight them in a typical SNES action RPG style, where you have a few normal attacks, you can open a menu to cast spells and use items, and so on. Occasionally, a plot-important character will also invade, and you have to watch them go an a rampage in your dungeon, killing any monsters they encounter until they find and fight you. Though any damage your monsters inflict won't be healed before they character gets to you, so even if they're all killed, they'll still be helping you a little bit.

 

I've played through the first few dungeons, and so far, each takes between one and two hours to complete. Things will speed up a little once you get used to things like how to maximise the efficiency of your energy-generating rooms and so on, as well as a few random factors,like days where enemies don't invade. It's one of those games that's pretty fun, but due to the nature of it, I can't imagine being able to sit through more than one dungeon every couple of days. It's got a problem that I've seen in other real time building/management games, like Sim City: once you've collected and used all your resources in a period, you're left wasting time and doing nothing until the next period starts and causes another round of generation.

 

Still, it's a decent enough time, and it's a pretty unique game, both thematically and mechanically. Plus it looks great! Well, your dungeons are always going to be made up of differently-sized copies of the same few rooms, but the places you see in the cutscenes are beautifully realised! Villages, temples, natural scenes and more, all in an east Asian fantasy style, and all looking great. I'd say Chaos Seed is a game that's definitely worth a look, at least, though I will re-iterate again that you've really got to persevere through the very long tutorial, because it's a complicated game, and you do kind of need to be told how everything works.

Kid Chaos (Amiga)

 According to legend, this game started out as a pitch to SEGA for an Amiga port of Sonic The Hedgehog, or possibly an original Sonic game made for the Amiga. I don't know if that's true, but surely anyone would just pre-emptively assume that SEGA wouldn't endorse a port of their mascot character and hardware showcase to another company's system? Though rumours of an Amiga Sonic were pretty prevalent in the early nineties, with screenshots of something claiming to be such a thing appearing in some magazines.

 

It's clear that even if the above legend isn't true, that the gme was definitely heavily influenced by the Sonic games, at least. Your character (a caveman brought to the future by scientists, and inexplicably given a flat-top haircut and a leather jacket) runs really fast, with momentum being gained or spent running up and down hills. He attacks with a spinning jump attack. 

 

There's also a non-conventional health system that's different enough from Sonic's rings, but you can see the influence in there: you start a stage with ninety-nine hitpoints, and after taking damage, you slowly recover at a rate of one HP per second, plus one for every one of the half-apples flowing around that you collect. One original element is your destructive quota: in each stage, you've got to destroy a certain amount of objects to open the exit. The objects in the first set of stages are flowers, which I did like. The idea of a game where a caveman who's dressed like a stereotypical modern-day thug on a mission to destroy every flower he finds has a kind of Beano-ish charm to it. One of the later stages has the object literally just being ring monitors from Sonic, which does dampen the originality points a little.

 

The weirdest part of this is how damage is dealt: instead of different enemies and hazards dealing different amounts of damage, each stage has a "damage factor" announced on the introductory briefing screen, and everything that can hurt you in that stage will do that amount of damage. These start out at a reasonable thirty or fourty points of damage, but rising to the ludicrous heights of eighty-five later in the game. Which brings up the game's biggest problem: the difficulty. I actually got as far as the second section of the second set of stages under my own power. That stage is run under a strict time limit, you've still got to find your quota of things to destroy, and there's spikes on almost every surface. Furthermore, the spikes are very small and don't stand out much visually when you're stood still, let alone when you're moving as fast as you can to beat the clock. On top of all of that, that most hated bugbear of European microcomputer platformers is also present: tiny drops of liquid that fall down from the ceiling and hurt/kill the player.

 

So, I used passwords to see later stages in the game, both to take more varied screenshots for this review, and to see if this stage was just a weird difficulty spike in an already-hard game. Nope, the game continues to be a miserably harsh experience. All the stupid comments people say about Sonic games, about how they're meant to be about speed, but the traps and enemies never let you go past (it's very telling that such "critics" have such a hard time with a series of games that are incredibly easy to complete) are actually true about Kid Chaos. Except it's not just that there's lethal enemies and hazards all over the place, but also that the eponymous Kid is so unruly in his movements. That is to say, he's always sliding arond everywhere! The game demands precision, but doesn't allow you to give it! 

 

I'm really disappointed in Kid Chaos. The idea of a weird reskin of a rejected Sonic project was interesting, and of course, being a Sonic-like means that the old "one button controls" problem wouldn't have mattered, either! This could have been one of the best Amiga platformers, and maybe one of the best Amiga games in general, but actually playing it is just such a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

WWE Brawl (3DS, Prototype)

 Long, long ago, there was concept art going around for something called WWE Brawl, a game in which superhero-like cartoony versions of WWE wrestlers would fight in somewhat fantastical environments. It was no secret that this game existed, WWE even still have a bunch of the concept art up on their official website! I remember there being some excitement for it among wrestling fans, but unfortunately, it never materialised. Until earlier this year, when an unfinished prototype of the 3DS version leaked online, being the version about which I'm writing today.

 

The game was apparently in development since 2009, with the leaked version being supposedly from around 2011, which puts it very early in the 3DS' life. It also puts it at a time a few years before WWE started caring about female wrestlers, and as such, the roster is all-male (though the concept art on WWE's site does feature the infamously useless Kelly Kelly as a member of "the resistance", she isn't in this version of the game). There are twelve playable characters, though, and they're made up of who you'd excpet from a WWE kids' game from around 2010: there's Cena, The Undertaker, Kofi Kingston, The Big Show, and so on.

 

Most are pretty much as you'd expect, though two I thought were especially interesting are Kane, who's a big, white-skinned monster-man, and Randy Orton, who has a bunch of tubes attached to him, like the Batman villain Bane. Also, looking at the concept art again before writing this, I saw that Triple H was also counted as a member of the resistance, which makes little sense, not least because the game has him dressed as a medieval king. But WWE games are infamous for their insistence on always portraying him positively.

 

As for the game itself, it's kind of like Power Stone. You fight in one of the three arenas: a blank grid world, the lobby of a fancy building (you can also take an elevator to the roof, where an Adamski-type UFO will shoot lasers at you), and some kind of cartoony sci-fi factory/lab place. There's also crates lying around, which can be broken open to reveal weapons! There's a sword, a baseball bat, a bazooka, and a giant tire. The four face buttons are assigned to jump, attack, throw (your opponent, since this is a wrestling-themed game, after all), and pick up weapon.

 

It really seems like it'd be a pretty decent game, had it actually been finished and released. All the problems I have with it, other than the slightly boring roster, are due to it being a prototype. There are only three stages, though there are spaces on the menu for eight more. A bigger variety of weapons would also have been nice. And, of course, you can only take part in one-on-one fights in this version, and after the fight ends, you're sent straight back to the title screen. Plus, the CPU opponents are all incredibly easy to defeat. Naturally, it can be assumed that with proper arcade/story modes, escalating difficulty, and maybe also group battles, the finished product would be a lot better than this.

 

There's not really much point in recommending or not recommending WWE Brawl. I've said what I think of it, and if you didn't know it was out there, you do now, and can satisfy your curiosity on your own if you want to. I do think it's a shame it got cancelled, though. Like I said, it does seem like it was going to be a good game. Still, there were plenty of vaguely similar games released on 3DS in Japan, at least. Beast Saga: Saikyou Gekiotsu Coliseum, for example.