Review #671: 64 Memories - Hybrid Heaven

 Featuring a RPG/Fighting game hybrid!

 Part I: The Flashback
 Yes, yet another Nintendo 64 game I had always wanted to own but never got the chance to, we couldn't even find it up for rental! The game's art looked fantastic, with the Ryu and Ken lookalikes and the whole RPG/Fighter hybrid mechanics. Everything I could scrape and read about the game made me sure that this was a game I wanted to own. And considering how RPGs and Fighters were my favorite genres back then, with games like Legaia and Xenogears being among my top favorites thanks to their hybrid nature, I would've loved this game.

 Part II: The Review
 Hybrid Heaven is fun but with a few caveats. What most sources fail to mention it's that it's also a bit of a third-person shooter, featuring simple, if boring, level design as well as basic robot-enemies that you can defeat with your energy gun. As a matter of fact, there's a boss fought entirely through the third-person shooting mechanic... and it's also one of the most annoying ones, since Johnny, the main character, gets rooted to the spot he was standing on the moment you try to aim his gun. It's very clunky and stiff. It's not too bad for most of the game since the basic robot enemies are pretty dumb, easy targets, but this one boss....

 Thankfully, shooting and jumping is but a tertiary part of the game, the main brunt of the game comes in the form of one on one fights against hybrid and aliens. When you and a humanoid enemy get close to one another a fight ensues, during which you, and the enemy, can move around the environment. As you both wait for your power gauges to fill, the enemies' are invisible so the AI might as well cheat, so that you can perform different attacks. Once at least one fourth of the gauge is filled you can then press the A button to enter a menu and select an attack. There are about 70 different attacks in the game, in the form of multiple punches and kicks. Honestly, you'll want to focus on a few of those in order to level them up and maximize your damage potential. Each limb also levels up on their own, so you can opt for a jack of all trades that can punch as hard as he kicks, or focus on either set of limbs for a strong fighter focused on a specific style.

 But it also might happen that just before you press the A button the enemy will trigger their attack before you, in which case you'll be granted a few defensive maneuvers: Guard, Counter or evade. If you were in the middle of a sidestep when the enemy triggered their attack you just might evade the attack completely. There are other angles to fighting, such as either you or the enemy can try to target a specific body part of the opponent in order to temporarily disable their attacks or handicap them, like slowing them down(broken legs) or getting them dizzy for a while(If you damage their heads). It sounds pretty in-depth, but after you unlock the ability to use combos, all you'll be doing is dancing around the stage waiting for all five gauges to fill so that you can unleash a powerful combo on your enemy. Might as well look for a guide, since a few specific combos have a hidden, extra sixth attack at the end.

 While in theory the combat is pretty dynamic, the truth of the matter is that most of the fighting was, as I said above, just moving around, guarding and evading waiting for my five gauges to fill so that I could use the same exact combo every single time. While different enemies should be approached in different ways, such as you'll want to step around a few enemies while close by so that they don't use their projectile attacks, or others will chase you around if you try to run, the end goal of each fight was pretty much the same. That said, I can't deny that I still had fun with the combat system, and I think that I would've liked it quite a bit back in the day. I also enjoyed how pretty much every fight in the first 5 hours or so of the game meant a stat-up of some sort, made depleting enemy-generators a rewarding, if repetitive, ordeal.

  The story shows promise at the start, being very dumb and involving aliens, but some of the ridiculousness get replaced with boring nonsense by the end, it doesn't happen that special agent Johnny Slater is mute for 90% of the game. The game lasts about 16 hours, although keep in mind I grinded for a bit and died a few times. And some deaths can be painful, since save spots can be pretty darn sparse. You can't skip cutscenes, when sucks when retrying a boss, and is particularly annoying during the last part of the game which consists of a six-boss gauntlet. You don't want to die and then have to suffer through every boring cutscene again.

 While a bit dull by today's standards, I think Hybrid Heaven is a fun experiment. Most of the fun with the game comes from seeing how weird, yet strangely fun the gameplay is, although it grows quite stale by end. That said, I know that I would've loved this game back in the day.
 6.5 out of 10