With E3 there are also game Demos. In most cases these are limited to the show floor, but right around this time playable demos also hit online. On XBL two demos went live recently. The first is “Too Human”, the other is “Tales of Vesperia”.
I’m going to start with Tales. I was really excited for this game. The art style reminded me of Eternal Sonata (and although I just finished rambling about how I wouldn’t play it a second time it was still fun). The problem behind the demo (keeping in mind that it’s still a work in progress) is the fight system. Even with the button mapping screen, I had no idea what I was doing in a fight. I was randomly pressing buttons and just hoped that what I was doing was actually hitting the bad guys. Part of the chaos is with the secondary characters. You control dude with a sword in a party of four. The other three characters are NPC and just randomly swing away. I hardly know who I am, who I’m attacking, and if the person I’m attacking is even who I should be attacking.
The visuals are crisp, but a little bland at the same time. The cell shading is too simplistic. I think there’s a lack of shadows. It feels too 2D. But not in a trendy paper-mario kinda way. Look, just pull up a gameplay trailer. You’ll see what I mean.
*sigh* okay… Too Human. I really don’t know what to say. When the game first started I had no idea who the main character even was. I thought it was the pansy guy who didn’t want to get out of his seat. I was all, “am I the pansy?” Turns out, he dies. I think. It’s hard to tell. I’m pretty sure all of the soldiers pretty much look the same. I was the guy with the weird blue scars all over my face. Not really sure what’s up with that. Not really sure what was up with a lot of things.
Again; controls! Who plays these games? Do developers even try out the button combinations they come up with?
In the demo you can only play as one of the five playable characters. Which is fine, I mean, it’s a demo. You get the guy with the big sword. And range pistols. And you fight robot wolves. Some of the robot wolves have rocket launchers.
The sword is based off of the analog stick. Sounds interesting, yeah? But, it doesn’t move like you’d think. For example, a full turn of the stick does not move the sword in a full 360 swipe. Quite the opposite. As far as I could tell, that doesn’t actually do anything. And you can’t jump and attack at the same time… because you use the same thumb to attack as you would to press the jump button. However, jumping while attacking is supposed to be a big part of the game. They even have skill points for improving that kind of damage.
The visuals are fine… the story makes no sense… the controls are dumb… and you get unlimited continues (as far as I could tell) but rather than just return you to the last checkpoint, there’s this long animation of an angel coming down, picking up your dead body, and then you magically appear at the checkpoint.
Unlimited checkpoints is a good idea since you’ll die so often because of the lame control scheme.
Tomorrow I’ll check out what’s on PSN. Wall-E has a cute charm to it, and Siren Blood-something was bad. Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm is amazing. I’ve never had so much fun with a demo before. Daniel and Julia will agree with me, I’m sure :)
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