Demon Chaos (PS2)

When Dynasty Warriors 2/Shin Sangoku Musou came out back in 2000, it wowed everyone with it's hge battlefields filled with dozens of enemies. As that series has gone on, the amount of enemies on the battlefield, as well as the amount of enemies appearing onscreen at a time have both increased. But even now, after tons of sequels, spin-offs and licenced tie-ins, none of Koei's games have been able to match the sheer number of enemies displayed in this PS2 game from 2005.

Developed by Genki and published outside of Japan by Konami, Demon Chaos (also known as Ikusa Gami) sees the player controlling a big, burly lion-man samurai, somewhat reminiscent of the 1970s tokusatsu series Taiketsu Lion Maru. They're tasked with saving feudal Japan from hordes of spider-like demons that are spewing forth from giant red gems called blood crystals. At first glance, it all looks like a fairly standard Dynasty Warriors clone, albiet with a fantasy coat of paint, and few more on-screen enemies.

As you progress through the first cople of stages, however, things start to change a little. Firstly, you'll become a leader of men, having huge armies of human soldiers following in your wake. These soldiers are obviously a lot weaker than the player character, though you have to rely on them to destroy the blood crystals, which are unaffected by your own attacks. Secondly, you gain the ability to order your soldiers to build magic pillars. These pillars have various uses: healing soldiers that are near them, firing arrows at nearby demons, and destroying nearby enemy structures (including blood crystals).

The fact that your entire army follows you directly, and that you need them to build pillars gives the player more a feeling of responsibility when it comes to keeping them alive, compared to the Dynasty Warriors games, where you barely interact with your underlings, and their lives are of no consequence to you. I guess it also helps that there are constant on-screen trackers telling you exactly how many soldiers you have left alive.
There's more interesting things to be said regarding the pillars, too. As well as the main effects they carry, having them built is also the best way to fill up your power meter, which allows you to perform special moves and activate your "spirit release" ability, which essentialy turns you into a destructive force of nature ntil it runs out. There's also the whole "earth force" mechanic relating to the pillars too: as you walk around, you'll see ripples of energy at your feet. These ripples represent the earth energy, kind of like ley lines, and the more ripples there are in an area, the stronger pillars built there will be.

Now, the enemy count. It's insane. Only a couple of stages in, and you'll be killing hundreds of enemies in the opening skirmish, and thousands by the end of the stage. On top of this, you'll also have hundreds of your allies fllowing you around too, so there's always a sense of the battles taking place on a grand scale. Taking this to its absurd extremes is an extra mode aside from the main game called Massacre mode, which places the player alone in a flat, featureless field with 65535 enemies, where they have to attempt to kill as many as they can in 3 minutes.

Although the whole battlefield action genre has an (unfair) reputation for all being identical, boring and repetitive, Demon Chaos is a game that definitely does enough to stand out from the crown, both in its mechanics, and in the sheer spectacle of its battles. It's odd that no-one (as far as I know) has ever tried to match or even top the scale of the battles in this game, especially considering that it came out over a decade ago, and there's been two rounds of more powerful consoles since then.

Cyber Dodge (PC Engine)

It's an odd title, Cyber Dodge, as though it's definitely a dodgeball game, the "Cyber" part isn't as apt. I guess it's meant to imply that it's a futuristic, cyberpunk kind of dodgeball game (and or some unknown reason, GameFAQs lists the name literally as "Cyberpunk Dodgeball", which sounds like the kind of re-naming the game might have got if it had had a westrn Turbografx-16 release. Except it didn't as far as I can tell, so I guess GameFAQs pulled that name out of the ether?

Rather than a specific cyberpunk theme, the theming in Cyber Dodge is a random mishmash of various sci-fi and fantasy archetypes. There's the protagonist team for single player mode, who are generic guys in futuristic american football armour, and their opponents include teams of gladiators, skeletons, aliens (sadly not Giger knock-offs, despite what their team logo would have you believe), robots, ninja, and long-bearded levitating wizards. Each team also has its own themed arena, and each arena has its own themed ball! For example, the skeleton team plays in a museum full of dinosaur bones, where they throw a skull around, while the ninja team makes its home in one of those Japanese gardens with the big rocks and meticulously raked sand, with a moss-covered spherical rock as their ball. It's a nice little touch.

But is the game any good? Kind of. As dodgeball games go, they're pretty much all the same, mechanically: you throw the ball at the other team, they throw it at you, with good timing you can catch a thrown ball, and there's also running and jumping too.  There's also the usual special power shots, unique to each team, though I've yet to figure out how to consistently pull any of them off. There is, however, one big flaw in Cyber Dodge: it's totally unbalanced. In single player mode, you fight all the opponent teams in the same order every time, and as well as getting better at playing dodgeball as you go through them, the later teams also have more health and do more damage. The problem with this is that it carries through to the free play modes. So no two teams are on equal footing, and the wizards team have a distinct and significant advantage over all the others, being the last team faced in single player mode.

So in summary, Cyber Dodge has inconsistent, nonsensical theming, it's brutally difficult in single player mode, and it's unfair to the degree of being totally pointless in two player mode. But it does look pretty nice! So make your own mind up whetheror not you want to play it. But remember, the PC Engine also has a Kunio-Kun dodgeball game, and a game based on the anime Honoo no Toukyuuji@ Dodge Danpei, and while I've yet to play either of them, it's a pretty safe bet to say that at least the Kuino game will be better than this one.