Game #1075: Heavenly Sword

  What's their next game gonna be called? Hell Blade? Oh, wait...

 I can't say I ever cared much about Heavenly Sword. I love hack-and-slash games, most things I heard about it were positive, and Nariko, the main character, even made it into Playstation Battle All-Stars, and yet... I never cared about it. For whatever reason, my interest was sparked a few weeks ago, so it was finally time to try this PS3 exclusive, and all I can say is that it didn't feel much like heaven.

 Something I found super interesting is that now that I've played HS I can find a lot of its DNA inside their DmC reboot. Donte taunts his enemies much like Nariko did, although somehow dialogue feels much cringier here. Boche, the main villain, feels like a sillier version of Mundus, I could find a few parallelisms in their dialogue and mannerisms, they also each have a woman-monster lover that they treat like garbage, and one of the bosses in each game is their respective deformed kid. Said kids even kinda look alike, even if Mundus' Spawn is a giant deformity while Boche's son looks more human. Kai is an unbearably dumb version of DmC's Kat. Oh, and even gameplay, in DmC you could change between Heaven and Hell weapons by holding L1 or R1, well, Nariko gets Ranged(L1) and Power(R1), and each style is tied to a color, either blue or orange. In many ways, this sort of feels like a prototype of what DmC would be like. It even runs like a prototype.

 I'll start with the story I guess. DmC got a lot of criticism over its characters, dialogue and story, but I actually enjoyed all three. Not so with Heavenly Sword. The dialogue is very cringe inducing at times, and the way characters animate during cutscenes can be off-putting to say the least. At times it's hard to tell if the game is trying to be funny or if it's being unintentionally funny, like the first time we see the main villain reunion, characters talk in weird ways and they behave so... oddly with each other. Their interactions are so weird, were they trying to be funny? I don't know. When Nariko starts taunting the female boss, Whiplash, it felt so awkward and forced... Like, Jesus, the story itself isn't awful, but the dialogue can be pretty bad. There's a ton of tonal whiplash, heh, too as you can get silly scenes right after moments that were supposed to be serious. Boshe, the main villain, does have some interesting mannerisms, so he was a bit interesting throughout the first half of the game... but he became too cheesy and silly throughout the second half. Kai, the catgirl, ruined every scene she was in.

 Whatever, who cares about the story in an action game, right? You pop in the disc, the intro cutscenes play and... ooh boy, it's Nariko on a giant battlefield getting surrounded by hundreds of enemies, YEAH! THIS IS AWESOM-.... and then you notice how the framerate drops into the small 20s. And the framerate is never steady, it's always dropping frames left and right, to the point I'm not sure if some animations are just choppy or if the framerate made them look that way. The game just never runs very smoothly, which was pretty lame.

 In combat you get a strong and weak attack that can be chained together, and you can dodge with the right analog stick. Enemies will attack in three ways, orange Power attacks, which means you must hold R1 to block, blue Speed attacks, which means you have to press nothing to block and ranged attacks which are countered by attacking with the L1(Range) modifier. You can counter attacks by pressing triangle the moment you block an attack. It's not a bad system, and swapping styles mid-combo is pretty cool, however, I feel as though I blocked attacks I shouldn't have a lot of the time. For instance, I'm sure I was holding down R1 yet I blocked incoming speed attacks. At least it errs in the player's favor! You can unlock more moves by performing well in battle, as you'll get rewarded with either more moves or art pieces.

 Just like Onechanbara before it, the game is no depth just style. Later in the game it grinds to a halt, as enemies start blocking absolutely everything, so now you have to wait for them to attack one by one and counter their attacks. Either that or keep mashing hoping one of your attacks gets through and opens them up. Either way, boring. The thing about combat is that it has no depth... and it's style is not enough. Some of Nariko's attacks look cool, they do, but the framerate does them no justice, so it's not very fun. For as shallow as Onechanbara was, at least the framerate was stable. Oh, and it has QTEs, if you miss a button prompt the enemy boss will recover a ridiculous amount of health. Screw that!

 There's also a surprisingly large amount of shooting gallery segments. These are just plain boring. You can hold down the shoot button for a first-person, unwieldy six-axis aiming... or you can turn-off aftertouch in the options menu and just use the left analog stick like a normal person. Either way, these are boring. The game is super linear too, so no unlockables for straying off the beaten path.

 If I had to choose between Nariko and her glorified bikini slaying enemies in sub-30 fps or murdering enemies in a stable framerate and a silly bikini... I'd go with Onechanbara. No, really, I felt this game to be really bland. The story is hard to take seriously most of the time and the combat just isn't good enough, particularly taking into account how poorly the game runs. However, considering how much they fixed everything for DmC... I wouldn't mind seeing Nariko return, I think with a decent redesign and a more defined personality she could work really well.

 5.0