If you're looking for a good Asian themed action game, chances are you're only looking for one name, and that name is Kou Shibusawa. For the longest time, he's had a practical stranglehold on the niche. Part of it is because Koei's Warriors offerings are pretty good, and the other half is that games like Nightshade and Seven Samurai 20XX haven't exactly given him a whole lot of competition.
Well, Game Republic is looking to change that. Their latest offering, Genji is a fictional account of the life of Minamoto no Yoshitsune. Yoshitsune's a pretty popular character in Japanese folklore, and the game coincides with the NHK mini-series, Yoshitsune.
The game looked to be sporting lots of polish at E3 2005, but one wondered whether the gameplay could hold up its end of the bargain. Get out your Japanese-English dictionaries, it's time to take another trip to the Import section.
Story
I don't understand a whole lot, but the game revolves around Yoshitsune, and his companion, Saito Musashibo Benkei. As the game opens, a warlord named Heishi has occupied most of the southern provinces of Japan. He then sends some of his men to assassinate Yoshitsune.
Yoshitsune is aided by a friendly ninja cuts his way to safety, and pledges his aid to a local wise man named Keiichihougen who's looking to put an end to Heishi's reign of blood.
Keiichihougen shows Yoshitsune that he's got the ability to use a power called “Kamui” thanks to a little stone called “amahagane”. Along the way they meet a woman who can fuse these stones together, given them an advantage that Heishi does not possess.
Armed with this knowledge, Yoshitsune and Benkei head out to save Kyoto.
Gameplay
Your basic controls are simple. Left analog joystick moves you to and fro, hither and thither. Square is your quick attack, and triangle is your power attack. X jumps, and O interacts with the world.
The game plays like a fusion of several different games. Take the “Tate” system from Shinobi and fuse it with the “Issen” system from Onimusha, and you basically have the game's most compelling selling point, “sword time”. (There aren't any bullets in the game.)
Once your character's amahagane has at least one bar, you can hit L1 to go into “sword time”. Seeing the power of kamui apparently compels the enemies to foolishly attack you. When they do, counterattack with the square button, and you'll slay all the minion enemies on screen in one blow. Succeed in hitting every button press and you'll end the fight quickly, as well as getting yourself a nice XP bonus. Fail, and you take extra damage.
If you don't have full bar of power, you can also hope to time the counterattack just right, and it will produce a similar killing blow, but it won't allow you to chain it onto multiple enemies.
Littered about the game are rocks that you can use to power yourself up. Collect 3 and you can slot them into your attack, defense, or HP, and get a small boost. You also level, and since the game is short, they use a unified XP gauge, i.e. If Yoshitsune levels, Benkei also gets the benefits.
There's a minor crafting element to the game, too, but it's not so much you actually refining your weapons as it is making sure to nail enemies with your kamui powers to knock special items off the enemy that the blacksmith can fuse into something powerful.
Graphics
I'm having a very hard time coming up with a game that looks better than Genji. It even employs cinematic elements found in Star Ocean: Til the End of Time, where it simulates a camera's depth of field, blurring out elements of the background that aren't the focus of the scene.
The scenery is lush looking with babbling brooks, shiny stone flooring, fireflies, and all kinds of leafy vegetation. Lighting effects are also really cool. Certain weapons will leave glow effects on characters, as will candlelight and other illumination.
The animation for the characters is very fluid, and accurate. Benkei is very sluggish, and changing direction with him results in frames of animation I haven't seen in a game before. The same is true with Yoshitsune. If you've got a good bit of speed, when he needs to go in the opposite direction, he'll let his feet slide out under him while he's rotating his shoulders. Not many people will care enough to catch something like that, but when you do notice it sticks out in your mind and tells you that these people know what they are doing.
Acquiring new weapons and armor is reflected through minor changes in both characters appearances and attack animations, as well.
If visual elements in games wow you, no matter how little they are, the odds are very, very high that you will be able to pick them out in this game. Definitely the most in awestruck any game's graphics this year have rendered me.
Audio
The voice acting is capable. Benkei sounds big and rugged, but not stupid. The younger female characters don't sound like airheads. All very good work.
Normally I'd have to give the ending theme a huge thumbs down, but since it actually fits given the region and era for the game, I suppose I should have expected as much. The rest of the music is pretty nice. You've got your taiko drum fueled melodies, and the standard adaptations on Japanese period music. All in all, a solid showing from the audio team as well.
Gripes
This is yet another short game. That is partially to be expected, though, as you really can't extend the length of an action game like this too much. But, when you basically recycle all the field maps from the first chapter of the game in the third and final chapter (minus a few field effects), and you don't offer any real unlockables for the play, then it becomes something I have to talk about. Clocking in at a mere 7-9 hours, this is probably going to be one of those games you're debating internally for a while.
Granted there are SOME unlockables, and you can run through the game in Clear Mode, but there's not a whole lot of compelling reasons to pick this up and play through it more than once.
Overall
This is one of those games I need decimal points on the 4 categories, so my scores work out mathematically. (The graphics are a 9.5, and the audio's an 8.5, but I'd feel weird giving it the categories a 10 and 9 respectively.)
If this hits $30-$35 this game gets pretty hard to say no to. However, $40 for the US, not to mention the import version's price tag puts it in the range where you can go either way, and that's never a good thing. Much like Darkwatch, this is a game that you definitely want to play, but you're probably better off not paying for, at least not while it's $40.
