Oct 6th, 2006, 04:43 AM
Well, here. I rented it last week, and punched up this review to kind of summarize the game. It's long, though, so I threw in some pros/cons at the end for people who don't want to read the whole thing:
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In the game, you roam the district of Kamurocho, getting into random fights and solving the occasional side quest (in most cases, beating someone up). As you fight, you build up "heat", which lets you perform fancier, more damaging attacks. Later, in line with the plot, you meet up with this kid named Haruka, who supposedly has the key to finding the 10 billion yen that was stolen from one of the yakuza families. The manual says you're supposed to "earn her trust" by taking her around the city and buying her stuff/playing games with her/etc, but I never found this. I wonder if it was edited out, or what.
Combat is definitely the main focus of the game. It's definitely not the story, what with it being a tired tale with all the classic cliches like recovering lost honor, and doing the right thing after being a bad guy for such a long time, even though you never really see the main character, Kazuma, doing anything particularly villainous apart from constantly getting into fights.
Speaking of which, there are quite a few random battles. They aren't very hard, but there's tons and tons of them. Typically, you'll just be running around, and someone will run up to you and say something, usually dropping an f-bomb, and then it's on: you versus the guy, and usually a few other people who just appear. Depending on where you are, there'll be a variety of weapons of opportunity lying around, from lead pipes to milk crates to swords and guns, and even giant signs and bicycles. It sounds fun, but the novelty of swinging around a bicycle wears off around random encounter #80. If the camera's pointed in the right direction, though, you can usually spot the people that are going to give you trouble and steer clear when you're hurting, or when you're just sick of one fight after another.
The problem is that the camera is often fixed in place, and not in the the place where you want it to be, so in tight areas like inside buildings, you wind up getting your ass kicked by guys just slightly off to the side. When you're not in combat, the camera has fixed positions as you roam the city streets, changing scenes every now and then with a pause for loading that, depending on where you're going, can be over in an instant or last up to seven seconds or so.
The camera and the lack of difficulty aren't the only problems with combat. Holding down R1 locks Kazuma onto the guys he's currently fighting. In theory. In practice, all it takes is for the target to move slightly to the side (not dodge, just a single step will do) and the lock will be broken, and Kazuma will wind up pointed at god knows what. The problem is less severe in one-on-one combat, but nearly every battle is you versus a whole mess of people. And god help you when you actually start fighting guys that dodge when you attack them.
When you want a break from fighting, there's a number of minigames around the city: There's casinos with a whole assortment of traditional gambling games like blackjack and roulette for making a little extra scratch; you can win some unique items at the batting cages; one of the side quests even calls for you to get several items from a crane game. You can even go to a strip club and enjoy the seductive snares of poorly-rendered strippers that don't even strip. The minigame the stuck out the most by far, however, took place at the "hostess bars." Therein, you dump an assload of money on a girl who pretends to be interested in you, and if you buy the right food and drinks, and wear the right clothes and/or colognes, and give the right gifts, and give the right answers to their insufferable questions like "what kind of underwear do you like?" you can win a small xp bonus, and possibly an item. If you like paying far out the ass for a small reward in some sort of weird dating sim, you're in luck.
The voice acting is just awful. The guy who does the main character is completely flat and emotionless, and he occassionally emphasizes the wrong words as he speaks. There are a few famous actors like Michael Madsen and Eliza Dushku, but even they can't do much with the god awful dialog in the game, which is so rife with cursing as to seem comical at times. The one exception is Mark Hamill, who makes a brief, but memorable, cameo as the obligatory sadistic psycho character. I was disappointed that he wasn't a bigger part of the story.
What really surprised me was that there was no option to switch the audio back to Japanese, and just use the subtitles. There's still a lot of audio in the game, ambient street noise, cashier greetings, and such, that's all still in Japanese, so you'd think they'd leave it in. Plus, it looks weird when a character's face contorts with rage, but the actor is just saying something like, "come 'ere, you jerk!"
With the XP system, you gain xp points for each defeated foe and for completing quests, and you allocate them to your different skills like in God of War. The XP system was actually one of the good part of the game, I thought, because there were a lot of avenues you could take in developing Kazuma. You could boost Soul first and gain longer, more effective use of heat; you could increase technique to gain new moves and slip out of grapples easier; you could increase Body to gain more hit points, dodge better, and add a damage bonus to your heat attacks; or you could combine them to try to get the best of everything. It's almost an incentive to want to play through multiple times.
The music isn't too bad, either. Apart from some annoying J-pop when you enter certain stores, it's mostly just semi-long loops for the fights, and most of those don't last long enough to warrant a full-length song. Some are kind of catchy, but most of the time, they're drowned out by punching sounds and frequent cursing.
In short, it is most assuredly not a $50 game. It's more like a rental, or maybe a $20-$30 game. There were some fun moments, like being accosted on the street by an angry fellow who accused me of, "bitching about some trifling ass shit", guessing that the secret DVD title to get into the weapons store beneath the porn shop was "Butt Detective," and the mere title of the third chapter, which sounds like a great action movie title, "Funeral of Fists." Despite all that, and despite there already being a sequel in the works, this isn't a game that you should run out and buy at full price.
Pros:
Fighting is fun for a while.
Lots of different weapons.
Variance in character growth with XP system.
Decent music.
Cons:
Low overall difficulty.
Tiresome random battles with long load times.
Bad voice acting.
Absurd, Kingpin-like level of cursing.
Tricky camera.
Troublesome lock-on system in combat.
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Linear Mode
