DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

The Short

Pros
- Well crafted murder mystery with just enough dark undertones
- Pacing is very well done; there's hardly a dull moment
- Doesn't fall into the trap of being overly wordy when it comes to inner monologues
- Cases rarely intentionally leave information out to make the ending more "surprising"
- That being said, there are plenty of red herrings, and most work very well
- Characters, despite being obvious caricatures, are genuinely entertaining
- Trial scenes are exhilarating and solving cases is satisfying
- Final scene is exactly what it should be for this story

Cons
- A few minor plot holes persist through to the end
- Some areas of the game could have been better streamlined
- It sucks when your character is like fifteen steps behind you during investigations
- Minigames in the trial start fun but get horribly obnoxious by the end (particularly NonStop Debate)
- Was released as a two pack in Japan for one price, split it up here for more dollahs. Second game is needed to fully understand the world and connections between the two stories.

Monokuma laying down some philosophical puns. 

The Long

I'm not the biggest fan of visual novels. There, I said it. While I was really into them in high school and early college, eventually the whole concept became somewhat taxing. While games like Persona 3/4 and Phoenix Wright managed to combine enough intrigue with their wordy stories, others like fan-favorite Katawa Shoujo, despite still being good stories, missed the mark. Often times these types of "games" boil down to one or two major "choices" over several dozen hours of reading through text, and often times the main character's over-abundant inner monologues completely kill the pacing for me. You can like them, I'm fine with that (and again, I think Katawa Shoujo in still an excellent story piece when it's boiled down), but the tediousness of these types of "game's" pacing often turn me away.

...so why did I even bother with DanganRonpa? Besides the fact that the "Vita has no games?" (it has plenty, by the way). Well, the promise of Phoenix Wright meets Battle Royale was too much for me to pass up, so I dove deep into this high school of despair and emerged...relatively unscathed? Let's take a look.

As a note: DanganRonpa is best played completely spoiler free. I take care in the review to not reveal anything that isn't said within the first 10-15 minutes of the game.

You know Leon? We gonna get along just fine. 

The plot of DanganRonpa is its main driving force, and it starts off with a bang. You play as Makoto, a regular-ass dude who just so happened to get invited to Hope's Peak Academy, a school where only "Ultimate" people get invited too. "Ultimate" in this context could be replaced with "World's Best." You have the Ultimate Baseball Star, Ultimate Programmer, and some other weirdos like the Ultimate Fancomic Drawer and Ultimate Fortune Teller. You and fourteen others all get invited to this school, but on your first day there something crazy happens and you pass out. You then awaken to find all of you have been transported to a hellish version of Hope's Peak, with all the windows and doors leading outside sealed.

While investigating, you come across a remote-controlled anamatronic bear named Monokuma (what is up with me playing games with evil anamatronics lately?). He then announces that he's taken over the school, and everybody is now trapped there forever. The only way they'll be allowed out is if they kill another student, and then get away with it. Once a student is murdered, a brief time for investigating will be allowed, and then a student trial will take place. If the murderer (called "blackened" by Monokuma) is correctly revealed, they are executed. If they aren't, they get set free and everybody else gets executed. So it's pretty freaking imperative that you figure out who killed who.

School's In. Prepare to have a bad time. 

The game's pacing is near perfect. While the intro sequence is a bit lagging, once it gets into the juicy character and plot moments the game blasts off and doesn't slow down. It's quite difficult to stop playing (as evidenced by the fact that I beat this game in under a week). The story takes some absolutely crazy turns along the way, with each of the murders escalating the stakes and being all the more shocking. The ending is a wallop of a reveal, made all the more satisfying by the fact that you use all the evidence you've gathered to break down most of it yourself. That being said, the large "twist" at the end is fairly difficult to predict, and the final ending scene (which has, not surprising to me, earned a lot of negative feedback) is actually perfect when it comes to closing out the story.

Before I go into the cases, it's important to make note of the characters. As stated there's fifteen students total and then Monokuma, the obnoxious bear that can not only show up at any time and in any place, but is also intentionally snarky and rude, trying to provoke you constantly. The rest of the cast cross a wide spectrum of characters, but they're all pretty nuts. I won't spoil it, but watching them interact is half the fun of enjoying the story as it unfolds, and despite being obvious caricatures of the "Ultimates" they're representing, several have surprisingly three-dimensional personalities. As the game goes on, people you first suspected to be scumbags you have second thoughts on, and people you felt were stable break down. Ultimately, the game's interesting premise lived or died on whether or not all these characters trapped in a school together had interesting chemistry, and I'd say it succeeded. Mostly.

Hiro may be dumb as a brick, but you can't say the guy isn't a bro. 

I won't dig into spoilers, but Kyoko is bland. There, I said it. They try to make her more interesting by tying her into more story bits, but she never really has that spark of life that the other characters do. Yeah, she isn't totally insane like the rest (which makes it easy to render opinions of them), but I really felt she didn't go anywhere.

The other big bland character is, oddly enough, the main character. Makoto is entirely uninteresting. While I understand he probably was meant to be a character one would project themselves into, the guy has no backbone outside of the courtroom, and is completely reactionary. Rarely is he proactive enough to investigate on his own (often times other people drag him along), and in general he just comes off as someone there for the ride. It's not gamebreaking, but being in his head means what he thinks is generally uninteresting and solely used for the plot (rather than developing and actual character out of him), and even by the end the guy felt totally empty.

Monokuma can say some outlandish and genuinely funny chunks of nonsense. 

But the meat of the game is obviously how it addresses the investigations and trials of the murders, and whether or not it knows how much information to dish out and why. In this regard, I feel the game is near perfect. In both the investigation and later trial instances, the game does very well in letting you connect pieces together and, if you are clever, figure it out before even going to trial. Unlike some other games (*coughPhoenixWrightcough*), DanganRonpa very rarely brings new evidence in during a trial sequence. This means you can usually get a grasp of who did it (or at least prime suspects) and form a full story in your head before going in, rather than having only part of the picture and relying on the game to decide when you get the whole story.

There is a plus and a minus to this. The plus is that DanganRonpa knows how to stay one step ahead of you. On the second case, I was certain I'd cracked it. I'd dug extremely deep into the clues, found several layers underneath that worked together, and all my assessments felt just far enough from the initial evidence that I had to have outsmarted the game. Turned out that, during the trial, there was a twist that was not blatantly revealed but totally could have been called had I looked a little harder at the evidence. I hadn't been wrong in my assertions, the game had just thrown a brilliant red herring to make me stop digging, but if I'd kept going I would have found the error and solved it. The game intentionally tricks you into thinking you're ahead of it, when actually there's another layer in. That's pretty good writing!

Though, once it humiliated me on the second case. I was ready for it in the later ones. I successfully predicted the next two even before the investigations happened, though I will admit the way they happened was different than I'd concocted. But I still guessed the killer right in them, but it wasn't an easy thing. The game respected my intelligence, and if I was smart enough to figure it out, it rewarded me. Or I rewarded me, with the smug satisfaction I felt after watching someone I knew was the killer try and lie their way out of their situation while I completely destroyed their claims.

And the case is solved!

Without pushing too much further into the story, I'll just leave it at that. The characters do well at making you love or hate them, or be situated in some area in-between (usually resulting in massive distrust). The game starts off straight up flying in the face of your expectations and knowing it's going to mess with you, and it delivers. While I'll admit the two most shocking instances happen both at the beginning and the end, there's more than enough crazy in the middle to keep you going.

Oh, and the game is actually pretty funny. Despite adhering to it's dark premise really well (aka Hunger Games has nothing on this, especially after revealing what was really going on in the ending), the characters' play off each other enough to be genuinely entertaining (if some in more messed up ways than others), and the characters slowly becoming more and more mentally unhinged as the situation worsens makes them both funnier and scarier at the same time. Overall, solid stuff, and the story is addicting and certainly worth the read.

Hey, didn't they say this in Persona 3 too? What is up with Japan and sad rabbits? 

The actual "gameplay" of the game is divided into three main events. Aside from just general story stuff that happens whenever it feels like it, there are three distinct events you participate in: Free Time (read: social linking your friends), Investigations, and Trials. I'll break them down for ya (protip: Trials is longest).

People compared this game to Persona 4, probably because of both the game's bright, eye-popping style through its UI, and also because it had "social links" like the previous game. I'll just toss this out there right now: they aren't really as in depth as in Persona 4, so much so the comparison is hardly merited. While they do provide a good bit of humor and a little insight into the characters, next to nothing you find out during these events is valuable during an investigation or trial. In addition, the game straight up lets you skip Free Time if you want to just move the story along, so even it knows they're not that important.

All free time actually gives (besides a look into the character you are visiting with) is small passive power-ups that can be equipped during the trials (and a few other minor bonuses, I should point out). Some are better than others, but you could easily beat the game without any of them. Social links also require you to give the respective person presents they like in order to rank them up faster, which means either guessing or consulting a faq. As it stands, they're nice distractions (and there's some funny stuff hidden in there), but not as impactful as you might think.

There you go.

Investigations are very Phoenix Wright-esque, though they do a better job at helping you follow their rules. As mentioned before, you often have a babysitter as you move around, and the game won't let you leave a scene until you've found everything it's decided you should find. In this same vein, it's impossible to go into a trial missing information, so ultimately it's a limited-interaction Disneyland trip through a few crime scenes. Not that there's anything wrong with that; at least I'm not pixel hunting or totally lost (again, cough, Phoenix Wright's investigation scenes).

Now the Trials are where things get crazy. They're exhilarating, to say the least, mostly because of the sheer number of people. Again making the Phoenix Wright comparison, in that game it's essentially a throwdown of logic between two people. In DanganRonpa, you've got over a dozen (at least at the start...) tossing in arguments and opinions that you have to sift through. This is where the real "gameplay" emerges, for better and for worse.

OBJECTION!

There's four events that can happen in a trial, often multiple times: NonStop Debate, Hangman's Gambit, Bullet Time Battle, and Closing Argument. I'll go over the pros and cons of each in brief.

NonStop Debate is the most frequently repeated scene. In this, characters from around the group shout out opinions and speculations on the given topic at hand. As they're arguing, you load "Truth Bullets" (basically the evidence and facts you've found along the way) into your...truth gun? Gun of knowledge? Something? And take aim. When you find a statement that  your "bullet" contradicts, you fire it at the offending statement, obliterating it with Logic and Critical Thinking. Much like the entirety of graduate school.

The game mixes it up along the way, by adding both multiple options to choose from (and you have to cycle through to find the right one), "white nose" obscuring the topics (which you have to clear by tapping the back of the Vita or targeting it with the cursor before you can bullet it), and my favorite: you can take one person's statement and temporarily turn it into a bullet and then fire it against another statement. The latter of these is my favorite as it requires the most critical thinking (since often it just gives you the right truth bullet so you only have to find the offending statement; this requires you to find both the wrong statement and the one it contradicts), and so it's a pity it doesn't actually come up as often as you'd think. Most are simple and can be solved with basic logic.

That being said, this mode pissed me off to no end, mostly because near the end actually hitting the words becomes incredibly difficult. The location of the "white noise" blocking it is completely random, which means sometimes you don't have enough time to both clear the noise and fire the bullet before the statement moves on. There were times when I very clearly hit the statement, only to have the game decide it was "too late" and move on. Luckily the whole scene cycles if you fail to present an argument (and you can fast forward at any time to move things along quicker), but knowing the logical error only to be thwarted by bad shooting controls and the RNG white noise gods is straight up infuriating.

Editor's Note: I just now realized I never used the "slowdown" power given to you at the start of the game. Upon replaying it, even on the hardest difficulty, shooting the words down is a lot easier. So that last section was pretty much me being stupid, whoops. It's still challenging, but the ability to slow down time to line up your shots makes it much less painful. 

I swear purple text, if you get in the way one more time...

Hangman's Gambit is by far the easiest. Basically if someone asks a question that requires a word (or a combination of words) that you don't have evidence for, you jump into Makoto's head (which, apparently, is empty except for random floating letters, which makes sense now that I think about it) to figure it out. There is a random word spot (which gets a few letters filled in depending on your difficulty setting), and it's your job to fill in the remaining letters. They float randomly from the core of Makoto's thought processes, so you shoot 'em with your truth guns in the right order until the word is formed.

Again, not only is the game itself easy (just tap the right letters; a monkey could do it), but the words you have to find are extremely simple to decipher based on the context clues. I get they probably needed something else to do here, but it really is just kind of...there. And easy. Really easy. Did I mention it's easy?

Easy like your mom, HEYOOOHH

Bullet Time Battle is a...rhythm game? Yeah, it actually totally is. Which does an awful job of explaining how it works the first time (the only time I ever failed at a case was during the first two Bullet Time Battles), so I'll break it down easily here.

Basically when another character just won't shut up about something, you have to lock and load dem truth bullets to learn them how to be quiet. Essentially, a song with a beat plays, and a section on the bottom of the screen indicates when the beats hit. You can only press buttons on the beat (hey, it's like Crypt of the Necrodancer! ), and your goal is to shoot away the negative thoughts. Except they kind of suck at explaining exactly how to do it, so I'll tell you.

Pressing "X" on the beat locks onto a thought/word cloud. Once locked on, pressing Triangle to the beat shoots it. Later, when you have a limited number of bullets, pressing Square to the beat reloads. So once you figure that out, just press "X, Triangle, Square" to the beat, repeat, and you'll win. You can literally do it in your sleep.

The game tries to throw you off by making it so the enemy can block the visual indicator of beats, and also it increases/decreases the tempo depending on how you are doing, but if you have any musical inclinations whatsoever you can, again, do this in your sleep.

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH, LEON!

The last segment is Closing Argument, which I won't find a screenshot for because they're all spoilers. Basically, your job is to fill in a manga-style set of pages that represent exactly what happened. Some are already filled in, but you have to figure out the empty spaces. These are generally ok, but the biggest problem is the parts you can choose from are very small circles on the bottom, with pictures that are both tiny when compared to the panels and also somewhat abstract representations of what happened. This means that I found myself more fighting the battle of "what the hell is this bubble trying to convey?" rather than actually piecing the murder together. It was fun when it worked (and when it plays out it's actually really well done visually), but it does lead to some unwanted confusion.

I think that, in a whole, sums up the gameplay aspects of DanganRonpa: it's fun, but has unwanted confusion. I'm glad the trial elements are there otherwise there would be no skill-based gameplay bits in the game, but as a whole they feel relatively unpolished and, frankly, tacked in just so the game could have something interactive. It's an interesting contrast to Phoenix Wright (which fully embraced it was a visual novel and you just straight up present facts without any nonsense), and I really like the visual styles during the different minigames, but when they started hindering me actually presenting what I knew was a counterargument I got annoyed.

There are a few other minor niggles I have, too. To get presents you put coins into a capsule machine, but there's no option to just dump them all in there and get a hundred presents at once. You have to do them one at a time (putting in more coins just increases your chance of not getting a duplicate), which is absurdly tedious. Burning though a hundred tokens can take 10-15 minutes of your time just cranking the knob, which is no fun. Last minor thing is the map. It does let you teleport (hooray!) but the cursor isn't free flowing (boo!) which means sometimes it would move or go somewhere I didn't want it to. Not a biggie, but this (and a handful of other things I just won't mention) are little gameplay issues that probably wouldn't have taken long to address.

I'm glad you can actually walk around the school, even if there isn't much to see. 

 Graphically DanganRonpa looks great. It's an up-rezed version of a PSP game, but you wouldn't be able to tell playing it on the Vita. The game has a distinct sense of style, from its menus to its character art. Even the school itself, with its bold colors lighting the hallways and odd colored doors, is like something out of a strange nightmare. Special note must also be made of the trial sequences (especially NonStop Debate), where the camera spins around the circle of students and the visual style becomes heavily stylized. It looks really good!

Characters and objects in the 3D environments intentionally look like 2D cutouts being propped up. It's a style choice so I get it (since they're 2D drawings they decided to just not bother rendering them in 3D), and while at first I didn't like it, it grew on me and fit the game. What I really didn't like was the poor draw distance for objects, meaning people (and lights, which are the most noticeable as you move) pop in only when you get close. It makes looking for people to social link with a pain.

The few animated scenes (usually the executions) are delightfully done in a pseudo 2D/3D style. And I just realized I used "delightful" to describe executions. I'm probably on a list now.

The music is solid. It isn't exactly...I dunno...memorable like Phoenix Wright was, but most provide proper ambiance and all fit a neat style. It's mostly standard visual novel fair (again, just there as background noise), so it's all good.

The voice acting is decent. Almost all lines are spoken during the trials, which I appreciate. Out in the world, only a few key ones are ever said. Most are simply prefaced with a "reaction" audio clip (such as "Oh!" or "What?") to match the tone of the text. It's fine, save the few characters who just have them cussing as part of their clips. There's only so many "You son of a bitch!" you can get totally out of context before you get bored of it.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention it before, but there's plenty of f-bombs in this game to earn it is M rating. Just tossing that out there if you thought this game was for kids for some reason.

Living cutouts. How...nice?

So after all this jibber-jabber, what do I actually think about DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc? Well...I liked it. Really liked it. Liked it so much I stayed up late almost every night last week because I had to see what happened (hurting both my sleep schedule and my productivity at work...). The game is actually fairly long (think ~20 hours), but it certainly didn't feel it. The story is so well paced and the characters so entertaining, you can't help but get engrossed. They do well on their bizarre premise (and equally bizarre characters), and the trials are exhilarating and nailing the culprit satisfying.

Since people probably want a Phoenix Wright comparison, I'll toss this out there: I liked it better than the Phoenix Wright games I've beaten (which is just the first two, mind you). The pacing is brisker and the investigation and trial portions faster and funner. It's got a black sense of humor (unlike Phoenix, which thrives on it's charming goofiness) that works well with the story, and has quite a few "adult" jokes that caught me off guard. I still think the Phoenix Wright games are phenomenal, mind you, but DanganRonpa takes those ideas and streamlines them in all the right ways.

If you like a good, bleak story and enjoy deciphering mysteries, DanganRonpa is quite a good time. The somewhat lackluster minigames and overall strangeness may turn a few people off, but you came for the ride, and it's absolutely a ride worth taking.

Oh yeah, and just because I had to say it: no duh DanganRonpa is a game. Why is that even being brought into question? It's a game. QED.

Four out of five stars. 

It's the trial of the century. 

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

The Short

Pros
- Reinvented Castlevania by taking the aesthetic and mixing it with Metroid-style exploration
- Single-handedly invented the "Metroidvania" (or "Castletroid" if you're a tool) genre
- RPG elements including leveling, gear, and currency all play a role in this new style
- Fantastic 2D art mixed with some 2D and 3D backdrops make the game look good
- Music is absolutely some of the best in the series with almost all new tracks
- Long adventure, with the "inverse castle" twist still crazy
- First game to introduce Ayami Kojima's fantastic gothic artwork for the series
- Buttload of secrets, including fighting game-style magic combos
- Can be a genuine challenge if you play with the "max luck, low everything else" code, which makes the game as hard as the old-school Castlevanias (aka the best way to play SOTN)
- "WHAT IS A MAN?!"

Cons
- Game balance in terms of difficulty is all over the place.
- That being said, 99% of the game is pretty easy, the exception being a few bosses
- These said bosses you pretty much have to cheese using the broken and op items (the sword dropped in the inverse library or the Shield Rod + Alucard Shield combo)
- Recycles a lot of assets from Rondo of Blood from the CD Engine.
- Marked the official end of linear style Castlevania games, which is too bad
- Spawned roughly eight trillion modern day indie (and commercial) games that knocked off the game's formula
- Inverse castle is basically just a hard-mode straight shot, without any story and just one song for the whole area (what is up with that?)
- PSP re-release re-dubbed and retranslated all the lines. They aren't much better, but the corniness is gone, so that's a con.

Dracula: Expert on men and what they are.

The Long

Symphony of the Night was NOT the first Metroidvania game I ever played. That reward goes to Circle of the Moon, though I beat Aria of Sorrow first. I just figured I'd toss that out there just so you know I play games in totally the wrong order, and that's ok.

Anyway, everybody's heard the story, whether or not it's true. Koji Igarashi went to Sony to say that they wanted to make not a 3D, but a 2D Castlevania game on their new Playstation system. Sony told him to suck it up and make it 3D, because 3D was the future. Then Koji went to Konami, and Konami said "No 2D Castlevania, no Metal Gear Solid," so Sony relented. Then the game actually sold pretty badly on release and only really picked up after gaining a cult following a few years down the road (enough to get it "Greatest Hits" status, at least).

I think this story is totally fake, but it does prove a point: game developers know what is good for their series. Most of the time. If you look at Symphony of the Night and compare it to the "modern" 3D Castlevania 64, it's pretty clear that Sony got the way better deal out of this.

Nintendo really should have looked into that "Blast Processing" tech when it had the chance. 

Anyway, the game is pretty much a legend at this point, because it spawned the genre that Castlevania stuck pretty rigidly too in regards to it's handheld iterations for over a decade. It wasn't until Lords of Shadow had to show up and ruin everything that our 2D Castlevanias were squarely in the "Metroidvania" category of game design.

But let's say you know nothing about this nonsense I'm spouting, and need a full rundown. Is this game good? Has it aged well? Is it worth playing on it's re-release on every gaming system ever? Well...probably. I guess. Here's a review anyway.

That's using your head. 

Story-wise, it's the same old nonsense, though it does present it in an interesting way. The game actually starts on the last level of Rondo of Blood (complete with it's level intro graphic, though it calls the stage "Bloodlines," which is in fact the first stage in Rondo of Blood. Come on, Konami, I'm just a huge nerd, I didn't even design the game and I noticed this!), where you as Rictor Belmont bust into Dracula's joint and whip him good. Following which you get a massive text crawl explaining Rictor is missing, and Dracula's son Alucard (last seen in Castlevania III: True Blood) is off to punch him in the face and blow up his castle.

So you play as Alucard instead of a whipping Belmont. This isn't the first time we've mixed it up (Bloodlines didn't have a Belmont, and it had a dude with a whip and a dude with a spear), but the fact there are no whips at all until after you beat the game and enter an unlock to play as Rictor is pretty unique.

Anyway, the story's simple. Rictor's lost his marbles and thinks he's the king of Castlevania, and his sister Maria (who has gone from being a tiny girl to an actual woman) wants Alucard to beat some sense into him. The game does have different endings (based on if you kill Rictor or bring him to his senses, which unlocks a buttload more game to play) which is neat, but the story is hardly worth mentioning.

Minus the atrocious script and god-awful voice acting. It's so bad it's downright lovely. Seriously, I really, really dig this game's atrocious voice actors. They weren't even trying.

You tell 'em, Rictor. 

No, the biggest change is this is not a linear, straight shot Castlevania game. Instead, you as Alucard are tasked to explore the entirety of the castle, gaining power-ups and items that allow you to access further and deeper portions in your quest to find the princess. Wait, that's Mario. Whatever. 

If that sounds like Metroid, then you're both right and have reading comprehension, because I only mentioned that like fifteen times already. The map screen? Ripped from Metroid. Power ups like double jump to get to new areas? Metroid. It does have a few super cool changes, like Alucard can change into a sprinting dog, form of mist to pass through grates and other small areas, and a bat that can fly, all of which unlock new areas to further your exploration. It's cool, and you can see how they took the Metroid formula, flavored it up with some Castlevania style, and it ended up alright. 

The main difference is this isn't a game that you can speed run, nor one that is based on skill like Metroid or the earlier Castlevanias. While, yes, some skill is required for the bosses, the game actually has a level-up system, similar to Simon's Quest. Sort of. Only not at all. I just thought I'd drop that comparison for some reason.

You get XP and level, learn spells by inputting fighting game-style combo moves, find new weapons and armor and equip them, all in a 2D platforming sense. This isn't the first time this has been done (one could argue Zelda 2 did it a billion years before), but it actually feels...well, good. While skill can technically be replaced with level grinding and number crunching, it's still very satisfying to get that 3D "Level Up!" text and have Alucard glow all crazy. Mixing RPG elements with Metroid exploration was, frankly, brilliant, and it shows because they kept using it for future games.

The combination of 2D and 3D in the backgrounds makes this game gorgeous. 

All is not perfect in Symphony of the Night, however. While the equips and level up system are nice, they're also a bit simple. In fact, the whole game feels a bit dumbed down. Focus isn't really on the enemies or the challenge, the meticulous platforming and merciless bosses. Instead it's about exploration and the adventure of finding every secret and rotting in every nook and cranny the castle has to offer. Is this bad? No, not really. But it is quite different from other Castlevania games in nearly every regard. As well as much, much easier. 

While one can argue the second or inverse castle offers the real challenge (and it does), the whole first half of the game is an absolute cakewalk. This is mostly because Alucard, unlike his Belmont buddies in earlier games, controls like a dream. He slides gracefully with way too many frames of animation across the screen, can change his direction mid-air, can easily morph into any animal or form he wants, and has a quick-dash to get him out of sticky situations (or just slide across the floor for fun in reverse). Much like Super Castlevania IV, the game didn't really scale it's difficulty for all these new abilities, meaning if you even have a basic grasp of how to play a 2D platformer you'll stomp your way through this game in no time. Minus the few secret bosses that you have to cheese to beat with the absolutely broken "ultra" weapons. Balance is thrown out the window pretty quickly in, and it just keeps blasting out of control from there. You could be murdering things without even trying, take a wrong turn, and die in two hits. It's a bit like a massive mixed bag of imbalance. 

That looks like a good place to go. 

What isn't a giant mixed bag of imbalance is the graphics and music. I'll say I think this is one of the best looking and sounding PS1 games out there, and certainly the best 2D one. The pixel art is phenomenal and gothic, with the backgrounds often hybridizing 2D and 3D elements to make it feel both modern and retro. As mentioned, Alucard has way too many frames of pixelated animation to be legal, and the enemies all look phenomenal, from the huge bosses to the tiny skeletons.

The music is also absolutely rocking, so much so I actually imported the soundtrack. The opening song (which I will embed below) is probably one of my favorite intro songs in a game to date, with all the rest being just as fantastic. I really only have two gripes: the absence of any "classic" Castlevania tunes (Bloody Tears, Vampire Hunter, etc.) and the fact that the inverted castle uses the same song for 90% of it. Seriously? And it isn't even that great of a song compared to the rest. Come on, guys.

Now that's rockin.'

Symphony of the Night is difficult to review, mostly because of my immense love for the linear Castlevania games. That being said, I absolutely fell in love with SOTN after I first played it, and even to this day I often revisit the game and rebeat it, both with Alucard and the unlocked Rictor. While it does have some serious balance problems, and most skill is easily replaced by grinding or just knowing where the broken items are, Symphony of the Night remains a complete and wholly decent adventure into Dracula's lair. While I honestly wouldn't rank it up as high on my favorites as the best 2D linear Castlevania games, I can say it is still one of my favorites in the series, and highly recommend you get the re-release on PSN or Xbox 360 if you haven't already. 

A new direction, a new style for Castlevania, and a hundred indie game creators rejoice. Finally, something they can overuse now that they've ground duel-stick shooters into the ground.

Four out of five stars. 

What is going on here I don't even know.

Metal Slug X: Super Vehicle - 001

The Short

Pros
- Basically Metal Slug 2 without any of the problems
- New enemies, weapons, and slight tweaks to the levels make this the definitive version of Metal Slug 2
- No slowdown, even on the PS1 version
- PS1 version has a level select
- One of the funnest run-n-gun games to date
- Finds a perfect balance between skill and arcade challenge

Cons
- Renders Metal Slug 2 redundant

Metal Slug: Where you kill land-boats one gun at a time

The Long

I loved Metal Slug 2, but the problems with the slowdown really killed the game's flow for me. Luckily, it seems SNK realized they screwed up, because shortly after the release of Metal Slug 2 they cleaned up the game, made a few adjustments, and released Metal Slug X. Metal Slug X was also the first Metal Slug game released in the US on the PS1, so for most people (myself included) this was the first Metal Slug game they ever played in the comfort of their own home.

And hoo, boy, is it a good one!

Suck it, Nazi Laser Death Sub!

As I stated in my Metal Slug 2 review, I consider the second installment in this series to be the absolute best one. While many can argue that Metal Slug 3 is the craziest (and the longest), it also is absurdly difficult to the point that the game can be very frustrating (not to mention the final level is way too long). While that discussion will be reserved for the Metal Slug 3 review, I will say this: Metal Slug X is the perfect balance of skill and cheap deaths, making it for a fantastic Metal Slug game and the absolute funnest. 

Power-ups are frequent and feel great. Vehicles (aka "Slugs") are also all over the place, and a skilled player will be able to keep them for long durations of time. Enemies are plentiful but never overly difficult, and even the final batch of enemies (the aliens) are a new challenge but can be mastered if you are good enough at jumping and shooting their space-blob-bullets. This is one of the few Metal Slug games were I could actually one-coin the whole game (yeah. Really. The only one) while I was in my prime on the PS1. This makes you feel like you are always in control, and the game never throws anything particularly unfair at you.

Bats with potions. I hate those guys. 

Now, in argument that means this is a "bad" arcade game, as it won't suck your quarters as much as Metal Slug 3 does. But since X is clearly intended to be the "home" version of Metal Slug 2, I think it's perfect. You don't have to continue like crazy (though if you do you have unlimited lives) and you can get a good run going and actually save prisoners at the end of the levels. 

Let's go over the brief changes between X and 2, since the majority of the game is exactly the same. There's a new weapon, the Iron Lizard (though I swear the guy says "Iron Eagle" when you pick it up) that is like an explosive remote-control car that zooms away from you on the ground when shot. There's new enemies like mummy-dogs, and the first-level boss has been moved to a mid-level boss and replaced with the standing-tank-thing from Metal Slug, which is kind of neat. They also changed a few levels in very small ways (the starting level is at night instead of during the day now for some reason), but overall this is pretty much the exact same game, just refined to an excellent shine. 

I really love this game's bosses. 

Aside from that, there really isn't much to say that hasn't been, except this is my absolute favorite Metal Slug game. It's well balanced, has fantastic setpieces, is never unfair or unjustly cruel, has a fun story with a goofy "plot twist" at the end, and is an absolute riot co-op. While it might be the easiest Metal Slug game (at least out of the early ones), that isn't to say it's a pushover. It strikes a good balance between visceral satisfaction and edge-of-your-seat stress, which is exactly what the series needed.

Metal Slug X is also a fantastic PS1 port, with all the slowdown gone and even with a stage select. This is where I spent most of my days, but it's also on the PSP, PS2, and Wii as part of the Metal Slug Anthology. I personally think that whole collection is worth it for X alone (and all other six games are a bonus), but hey...to each his own.

Regardless, you should play this game. If you have a friend who likes blasting stuff as much as you, grab him or her, sit in front of your TV, and get shootin' at those nazies, mummies, aliens, bats, and tank-boats. Metal Slug don't get better than this.

Five out of five stars. 

And yes, the mummy level song will still get stuck in your head. 

Metal Slug 2: Super Vehicle - 001/II

The Short

Pros
- Takes the original Metal Slug formula and cranks it up to 11
- More weapons, slugs (vehicles), and enemies
- Fight aliens and mummies, oh my!
- Adds two new playable characters (girls!) and lets you actually pick your character
- Can get "Fat" for more damage and more fatness.
- Some of the best bosses and locations in the series
- Strong balance of skill reward vs coin-pushing

Cons 
- Arcade version and all ports have absolutely crippling slowdown
- Overall mechanics not to different from the original Metal Slug
- Some of the levels (with the exploding Gollum-lookalikes) are a bit cheap
- Enemies don't bleed in the US versions; they "sweat." What.

Uncharted 2 train level, eat your heart out. 

The Long

Considering how successful Metal Slug was, it made sense that SNK would punch out another game. Two years later, with rocket lawnchair and heavy machine gun in hand, Metal Slug 2 hit arcades. Of all the Metal Slug games, this one has always felt to me like the one where the series really took off. It blends just the right about of nazi-slaughter along with killing weird other things (mummies, aliens, and...bats?), as well as allowed you to traverse the entire globe rather than just sort of rustic European-looking townscapes. Combined with new vehicles, characters, and weapons, this was going to be the best Metal Slug yet.

Is it? Well, almost, except for one rather massive flaw. 

This first boss is bigger than any in the original Metal Slug.

Metal Slug 2 takes everything that made the first game great and amps it up. The graphics are prettier, the enemies and bosses larger, and the locations and situations zanier. One minute you'll be fighting your way through an Egyptian village, riding a "Camel Slug" (basically just a camel with a machine gun mounted on the side), the next you'll be raiding tombs with the best of them and fighting mummies (and turning into a mummy if they manage to hit you with their toxic breath). Then you'll be fighting a land-ship-tank-thing, as well as a boss that literally throws tanks at you. After a startling plot twist that aliens are, in fact, behind all of this (spoilers?), you'll have to send E.T. home via flame shots and shotgun blasts before destroying the mothership and rescuing not-Hitler from anal probing. Oh, and did I mention one of the levels requires you to shoot a runaway train so many times it explodes? Four times?!

Metal Slug 2 is everything I love about the Metal Slug series. Tight controls, tons of great power-ups, fantastic boss battles that are just massive, and great graphics and tons of silliness. It was all set to be the best Metal Slug game yet.

But then you start paying it, and you realize something bad: this game has horrible slowdown.

Also, in the US versions of these games they "bleed" sweat. How lame is that?

And I don't just mean the home ports, which at the time were much less powerful systems than dedicated arcade cabinets. I mean, the game itself was slow in the arcades. When stuff really got crazy, which is a Metal Slug staple, things could drag to a downright crawl. While you could argue it isn't gamebreaking, it is extremely frustrating, not to mention lame. One of the staples of the first game was that tons of crazy stuff happened but the game still ran smooth. The slowdown is annoying.

Not just annoying, but it can get you killed! I can't count the number of times I couldn't react with good enough timing to dodge boss attacks or bullets because the game was just chugging along at about half-speed. It takes the wind out of the sales of many of the fantastic-looking (and designed) bosses to have the whole game barely moving half the time. Quite obnoxious.

I blame the mummies. Who live in a "Mummy" house, it seems.

All that aside, this game is gorgeous. The aforementioned huge bosses are all pixelated, glorious pillars of art and animation in a style that people, frankly, think takes too much time these days. The explosions look even better, and the new effects (like how a variety of enemies die differently when being either burned by a flame shot or literally disintegrated by the overpowered shotgun) are delightful to look at. This is really a fun looking game, slowdown be damned.

The music is, as always, catchy and great, but with certain tracks like the mummy level getting stuck in your head something fierce. The sound effects are also fantastic, with the alien and mummy death sounds being personal favorites of mine. 

It also has a great ending that directly references Independence Day, so that's hilarious as well.

I see what you did there, Metal Slug 2.

All in all, Metal Slug 2 does everything that a sequel should do. It ups the ante, jacks everything up to a new level, and looks phenomenal doing it. If it weren't for the awful slowdown, I'd argue that this is the best Metal Slug game ever made. But, to be honest, Metal Slug X (which is basically this game but better and with all the mistakes fixed) makes this game completely obsolete  But that's the topic for the next review.

Point being: Metal Slug 2 is great, and it's unfortunate the slowdown causes so many glaring problems. If you find it in an arcade, you should play it, but if you have it in a collection, play X instead.

Three out of five stars. 

Die, aliens!

Metal Slug: Super Vehicle - 001

The Short

Pros
- Crazy run 'n gun action with lots of powerups and abilities
- Drive vehicles (aka "Slugs") for more awesome carnage
- Some of the best pixel art in the business, bar none
- Six levels of not-nazi blasting carnage
- Strikes a good arcade balance between skill-based and unfair quarter-stealing
- Quite silly
- Two players
- "RAWKET LAWNCHAIR"

Cons
- Not as silly as later installments, though that might be ok
- Only two characters
- Early ports (Playstation and Saturn) were kind of garbage

Metal Slug: Actually a spiritual sequel to Prometheus? 

The Long

The "run n' gun" genre has been around for a while, but people will argue it really took off with Contra. Combining macho-men with tight control, the "one hit and you're dead" idea, and absurd powerups and tons of action, Contra was pretty kickass. Many games would attempt to emulate Contra's success, some doing great (Alien Hominid), some ok (Cybernater) and some doing not ok (Doom Troopers). But really, when you think of a game series that not only matched but completely outdid Contra, you're thinking about Metal Slug.

SNK and Neo Geo were the kings of the arcade back in the 90s. Even today, they've made games across tons of genres that are memorable, play fantastic, and are just straight awesome. But for me, my absolute favorite SNK arcade game franchise is Metal Slug. There's just something about these games that is so incredibly gratifying it's hard to not just want to sit down and play them for hours.

So...what makes the first one so good? And why should you consider it nearly twenty years later? Grab your Heavy Machine Gun and read on.

Burnin' bridges. 

There isn't much to the story, so we'll just leave it at "Nazi look-alikes." The army of green-clad, lazy soldier jerks is out to take over the world, lead by a Hilter wannabe, and it's your job to take 'em out. Take 'em all out. Be it tanks, helicopters, planes, dudes, boats, military bases, walls; whatever. Enough bullets, and it'll explode in glorious, hand-drawn shrapnel goodness. Thank you, SNK, for completely going over the top.

The gameplay of Metal Slug will be familiar to anyone who has (as stated previously) played Contra. Your character starts with a standard pistol and can shoot in four directions (unlike Contra's starting eight) and can fire as fast as you can mash the arcade button. Of course, power-ups are everywhere, most of them given to you by captured prisoners who all look exactly the same. Save them and then stand next to them for a brief second, and they'll pull out their pants and give you something good. Sometimes it's something awesome ("Shotgun!"), and sometimes it's just stupid (a bone that's worth 50 points? Gee, thanks). 

What makes this game a riot is the previously mentioned carnage. Your dude is a non-stop destruction machine, and with power-ups it only get more ludicrous. The amount of stuff on the screen at once is just staggering (not to mention gorgeous), and as you get more and more insane upgrades, the carnage just increases. And don't let me forget to talk about the tanks (or "Slugs," as they call them) which you can man and can take about 4-5 hits before exploding. These tanks are awesome and can jump, duck, and shoot tons of bullets and shells all over the place. They help give you a sense of empowerment few games can emulate. 

This is paired with incredibly tight controls for jumping, shooting, and tossing grenades. And since enemies are about as quick on the trigger as the cowboys in Sunset Riders, if you play careful you can usually get pretty far without having to put in another quarter. 

Total destruction. Also, those pixelated explosions? Gorgeous. 

That, in truth, is one of the better parts of the Metal Slug games. While it's still an arcade suck (especially on the last final levels and bosses), it's designed in such a way that if you get really good at timing jumps and shots you can last a pretty long time before seeing a Continue screen. The game pushes for your continue quarter by offering a free Heavy Machine Gun power-up on death, and every death also restocks your grenades (a cheap tactic in Free Play to get through some bosses quickly). But even though one little hit will kill you (and cause you to lose whatever powerup you have), you come right back where you left off ready to go.

That isn't to say there aren't cheap deaths. The vertical stage (stage 4 I think?) in the snow is cheap, as bad platforming jumps can cause unnecessary deaths. The later bosses fire so many bullets everywhere it seems impossible to dodge. And if you ever see a mounted gun: ignore it. It's a trap. Standing still where the computer wants you to be is a sure-fire way to get murdered, unless you have a great co-op buddy to cover your butt.

Speaking of co-op, that's by far the funnest way to play these games. While single player is nice because you can hog all the power-ups, the game drops so many that you can tell it's been designed for a co-op experience. Playing with two people can also decrease frustration with bosses and other enemies that take a lot of hits, as having a second hand makes you feel all the more powerful. Absolutely a game to be played with friends.

This has some of the best pixel art and animations in the business. 

The game looks incredible, too. Everything is hand-drawn pixel art, from the backgrounds to the bits that explode off enemies to the blood and effects; everything. The animations are amazingly smooth, the art is jaw-dropping at times, and some of the bosses (while not as totally bananas as the later games) really look impressive. This is combined with a serviceable soundtrack that just exists to get you pumped to shoot a trillion not-nazies, though the little "end level" ditty that they recycle throughout the series will be stuck in my head forever.

So what is bad about Metal Slug? Well...only a few minor nitpicks. As mentioned before, despite the game being quite silly in the amount of damage you can do, it still is pretty straight-laced this early on. While later games introduce zombies, giant hermit-crab tanks, and aliens, this one is just you shooting guys for most of it. Hardly bad, and the six stages offer plenty of scenery variety, but just not quite as memorable as others. 

The only other real issue I have is the general arcade thing of it being designed to eat quarters, especially with the later levels. While skill can take you a certain distance, after a while you're going to have to be tossing quarters in pretty frequently if you want to see the end of the game. This, of course, doesn't matter if you're playing one of the home ports with unlimited continues, though some might argue that takes away the nail-biting stress arcade games are designed to give you. I personally think the game is fun both ways, but I prefer to not have to pay every time I make a bad jump.

You're going down, not-Hitler.

Overall, however, Metal Slug is a classic for a reason. The home ports to the PS1 and Saturn were both pretty bad (the Saturn was better, though you'll need the 1 MB Ram cart), though the PS1 was where I first played this game and I survived. If you want to play it today, the Wii's Virtual Console is a pretty safe bet, though the best way is through the Metal Slug Anthology on either the PSP or PS2. Or just find it in an Arcade; it's still around.

Metal Slug is just straight up fun. Tons of blasting, explosions, bad pronunciation of powerups, and general macho badassness makes it memorable and just a straight up joy to play. I usually get frustrated at most arcade games for being unfair, but I never did with Metal Slug. If you like destruction, then grab a buddy and start blowing up everything. You can't let the not-nazies take over, can you?

Four out of five stars. 

"I eat prisoners for breakfast! Yes, literally!"

Corpse Party

The Short

Pros
- Horrific, graphic Japanese horror game on PSP
- Extremely unsettling to the point of bringing on nausea
- Fantastic sound design
- Cutscene/drawn art assets are appropriately disturbing
- 16-bit graphics conflicting with the awful events create a great mind-bending dissonance
- By majority, the translation is top notch, particularly when describing some of the grotesque ways characters die
- Story takes a while to get revved up, but has some fantastic and unpredictable twists

Cons
- Actual core game (a fusion of adventure mixed with visual novel and 16-bit RPGs) is horrendous
- Many of the deaths/different endings happen for completely unrelated or predictable reasons
- In addition, the minimal save points and lack of an ability to skip cutscenes or text at a reliable rate exacerbates every time you screw up
- 16-bit graphics look like they were made in RPG Maker 2000, because they were. Sprites in particular are fuzzy and not great
- Game feels less "scary" and more "unsettling," and the ending is downright depressing
- Weird "Japanisms," such as random panty shots and voyeuristic fan service feels out of place and gross
- Speaking of which, is Japan really filled with 16-year-olds with DD sized breasts? I doubt it.

Corpse Parties: About as fun as they sound. 

A Warning: Corpse Party features some really screwed up stuff, and those easily disturbed should be warned that there will be some creepy images in this review. There will also be very minor spoilers, but not enough to ruin your experience (play the game unspoiled. It's better that way). If you still want a review, go all the way down to where I say "Let's Cut The Crap" in bold, and just read from there.

The Long

I love 16-bit horror games. The dissonance that plays out between the cutsy, overexaggurated sprites of my childhood and the grotesque, horrible things that happens to them is just enough to set my hair on end. It's like somebody went into my past and took the games I find so much nostalgic comfort in and turned it against me. And, despite the obvious limitations of adhering to a style, I find that the limitations only make the blood and gore that much more horrific.

Enter Corpse Party, one of the handful of games I actually went out and bought a PSP for (another one being Persona 3 Portable). At first glance, Corpse Party looks like everything I want in my horror. Japanese (who are inarguably the masters of creep-out horror), pixelated, with crazy things happening all the time in messed up ways. Sold.

So after blitzing through Corpse Party and getting every single ending for every single chapter, I must love the game, right? Well...let's get to that.

Hello there. 

The story in Corpse Party is actually its biggest strength. A group of eight high school students (as well as a middle school aged younger sister and their teacher) all recite and participate in a ritual called "Sachiko Ever After," seeing as one of the students is being transferred and this ritual is supposed to show how they'll all be together. Shortly after everything goes wrong, and the group is transported to Heavenly Host Elementary school, an old school that was destroyed and their current school was built over. Trapped (usually in groups of two) and alone, the various characters must uncover the mystery of how they got there, what happened at Heavenly Host, and if it's ever even going to be possible to get home.

A common theme throughout the game is helplessness and despair, one that really hits home early on. It is explained very early that the groups of characters are in different planes of existence while in the school, meaning their present might be another group's past, etc, and there is frequently some bizarre carry-over between these multiple dimensions. This allows for the story to do some very clever set-ups and awful things to screw with the player's (and characters') minds. Finding or seeing something that might originally be believed to be a cheap scare gains further depth on other playthroughs, as you discover exactly what happened. Piecing the bits together is deliciously satisfying as well as creepy, pushing you to continue forward to see what is going to happen all the way to the end.

If you are scared of ghosts, this is not the game for you. 

This is good, because it takes the story's main plot a while to actually kick in. The biggest plot reveal happens at the end of Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 feels like an elongated expository cutscene with how much stuff is just shoved into you to better explain the reveal (remember: this game only has five chapters total). Part of me wants to critique the pacing as being "weak" (and throwing a truckload of red herrings at you and the characters), but the other part of me feels this ties in well with the helplessness mentioned before. There is no obvious way out, and you and the characters are just trying to survive without going insane, starving to death, or whatever. This makes the fact that next to nothing is accomplished (in terms of the overarching plot, mind) in the first three chapters seem acceptable to me. It made me upset at how I was clearly not progressing in saving these characters, which is exactly what the game wanted. So, kudos to them for that, though I will admit I almost lost interested when I finished Chapter 3 and felt like I was going nowhere.

I will also say the writers have some serious guts in how they treat their characters. By that I mean George R. R. Martin would cringe at some of the completely horrible things Corpse Party does to its group of high schoolers. Main characters will die frequently, but that isn't the worst of it. Those who die do so often in horrific, grotesque ways, but what really hurts is the aftermath it has on the living charters  As famed author Patrick Rothfuss said, "There's a lot worse things I can do to a character than kill them." Corpse Party has this and in spades. And while the deaths (for the "Wrong End" endings) are absolutely unsettling in nearly every way, at least then you can mark it as closure so you don't have to keep torturing these poor kids any longer (though even death isn't an escape, as revealed in an early portion of the game. This game really hates its characters).

If you want to tell yourself they're talking about hair, that's fine. I won't feel bad for you.
...it isn't hair. 

I must also make note on how well it uses text without visuals to make things unsettling. While several bad endings have some nice, full screen art to accompany the awful thing that has happened, most tend to avoid showing the exact moment of horror. Instead, the game uses vivid text descriptions and sound effect and then lets your imagination do the rest. This is an excellent use of both overcoming the obvious graphical limitations of the game, as well as that ancient horror tactic that what the viewer things is always far worse than anything you can display on screen. Corpse Party takes this to the extreme, to a point where I actually had to look away from the screen rather than read and listen to the descriptions of what was going on, and I actually felt sick during several instances. As a relatively spoiler free example: if the notion of a possessed girl, fully aware of her surroundings but unable to control her movements, being forced to swallow a pair of scissors complete with vivid textual descriptions of the damage is too much for you, you should not play Corpse Party.

All this being said, it does seem to end quite abruptly, and good grief is it depressing. While I love fiction that impacts me emotionally (usually through grief or stress), Corpse Party might go to far, especially for those who get heavily invested in characters. Very little positive happens here, all the way down to the downright Prozac-necessary ending, so unless you are really good at shaking stuff off, Corpse Party might hit you pretty hard. 

This game does not shy away from disturbing imagery. 

So now that I've praised the story, let's talk about where Corpse Party completely and utterly falls flat: it's absolutely abismal gameplay experience. 

Corpse Party is a fusion of two genres: adventure games and visual novels, and all this is wrapped in a 16-bit, JRPG graphical wrapper. Don't let the fact that characters have hit points and are are small sprites moving on a grid-based map fool you, there are no RPG elements in this game, and in fact the hit points only really apply in two situations I can think of during the game, and even then it boils down to one or two hits and you die. All other "attacks" that happen are on a strict fail/pass basis, rendering all that moot. 

The problem arises with how the adventure game elements come into play, or rather, how they completely suck. A regular chapter of Corpse Party consists of a few very simple objectives: find random items, use random items in ways that make sense, use random items in ways that make no sense, and answer dialogue options that tend to only matter about 20% of the time. While doing this you'll be wandering around the school, frequently in no actual danger at all (sorry to break the illusion, but this game has very distinct "Game Over" screens, meaning you can only screw up if the game lets you), trying to know where the hell to go next or what item you need. It's maddening. 

It's nothing. I'm sure everything will turn out ok, bro. 

Rather than try to explain it with hypotheticals, let me give you the story of my experience with Chapter 1, which very nearly caused me to quit the game completely. I knew going in this game tends to do stupid crap like give you bad endings if you fail to read every random newspaper article lying around or whatever, so I took great care in seeking out everything I could find. After sitting through several long cutscenes I finally got to a point of the game where my character was locked in a room and hunted by a monster. I knew what items where in the room to solve the puzzle, but the game wouldn't let me pick up one of the items before I tested that the other item I had didn't work. All while being chased by a monster who randomly threw up barriers in my way only after I'd stepped on the spot to try to escape. In a very small, grid-based, enclosed room. Great. 

Needless to say, I died several times, and every time I died I had to go back to a savepoint and watch the entire slow cutscene that preceded the chase scene because the game has no way to fast-skip stuff you've already seen (again, I'm going to blame this on the fact it's made in RPG Maker). So after about twenty minutes trapped in the same room, I finally figured out where the creature spawned the random, invisible blocks, and was able to figure out the arbitrary order the game wanted me to approach the room and get the items needed. It as a miserable experience, and any immersive horror I'd felt was yanked away as the game's busted up mechanics came to light.

Yes, run from the bad gameplay! RUN!

But that isn't even the worst of it. I finally got to the end and, to my surprise, got a "Wrong End." I couldn't understand: I'd explored everything! I'd gone back and checked every inch as I progressed! Well, it turns out I screwed up. After a cutscene where the game very clearly directs you to go forward, you are instead supposed to go back. And not only back, but into a completely random stairwell (which I'd checked before and found nothing) a distance behind. Now, after the cutscene was over, a key had magically appeared. And I'll point out, the cutscene I mentioned had nothing to do with the key or the doorway, no hits whatsoever. It was just there, now. 

This key opens another random door that has no indication of unlocking. What does this do? Grants another brief cutscene that more or less has nothing to do with the bad ending I got. I should also point out this happens very early on in the game (and I didn't have a save before it, because the game has extremely limited save spots), so I had to watch the entire beginning of the chapter again and replay the whole thing with no text skip. 

Ahem. Anyway, after all this, what happened? I got a slightly elongated sequence near the end, and then the actual ending only changed very, very slightly. Without any spoilers, the big awful thing still happened, it just didn't have the additional secondary awful thing that happened during my "Bad End" where I failed to watch the completely unrelated cutscene in the completely unrelated room. Awesome game design, guys. 

It seems you're all tied up at the moment. 

While I will admit this sort of blatant bad game design does soften up a bit in later chapters, it never goes away completely. There's a scene where you emerge from a door to find an enemy, the second one in the whole game. Previously, you couldn't run out of the door to escape (see my rant above); you just had to learn how to run. After dying countless times to this guy (who also spawns invisible walls) I found out you are supposed to go back into the door, and when you go out a second time he spawns further away (with no walls) and you can get away. Again, no explanation.

And don't even get me started about the items that "save you" from one death, but if that happens it might as well game over, because you have to keep that item to the end of the level to get the good ending (and progress to the next chapter). So why even have it? Just let me die; I end up having to reload a save if it gets used anyway. 

This total lack of direction is where Corpse Party failed me, so much so I gave up and used a spoiler-free guide for the last three chapters. I am not ashamed in saying that, and I think I had a much better experience because of it. It was getting to a point that the game wasn't scary anymore, because all I could see was the broken mechanics, and I was constantly backtracking over the whole huge school after every cutscene to be certain I didn't miss something and screwed up like I did in Chapter 1. And don't even get me started on the things you can look at that seem to do nothing, but if you trigger that unrelated, unhinted at "switch" then you're just doomed to get a bad ending. Seriously? How is this ok?

Me, before I got a guide. 

After I got a guide, I should point out, I actually enjoyed the game a lot more. While the ambient creepiness sort of diminished because I was following instructions, it was gone anyway after I realized there were only very specific ways you could die (despite numerous ways you could "fail"), so I don't count it as too big a loss. I recommend playing through Chapter 1 without a guide to experience how the game could have been, and after failing go to a guide and never go back. Trust me. You'll like it better this way.

Let me really quickly bring up another thing that kept ruining the game for me before talking about the graphics and sound: what I like to call "Japanisms." Now, I don't mind Japanese games. I have some friends who adore how the culture influences their games, and others that straight up hate it. I tend to just love the weirdness and not like the other less permissible bits, but Corpse Party is filled with plenty of the latter. Like...seriously? Is it really mandatory that we see panty shots of characters in key scenes that are supposed to be disturbing or plot-crucial? Is it necessary that all the girls have the chests of porn stars (except the 14-year-old, who acts like she's 5 to fill the "little sister" role, and even she ends up taking off her underwear at one point in the game. Don't ask)? Do we really need a bath scene flashback? Now, I get the whole "it comes with the culture" argument the otaku will counter this with, but for me it really tore me out of the game and made me feel really uncomfortable. To be fair, it only happened maybe five times in total, but every time it did the game totally lost me (especially the time it happened during an extremely climactic story flashback scene. Like...seriously?). 

You stay classy, Japan. 

The graphics are a mixed bag. As I've mentioned before, I dig pixelated horror games, but something about Corpse Party's extremely low-rent presentation really bothered me. The game, despite being remade from its original RPG Maker 2k PC release, still looked fuzzy and super low-def on the PSP screen. The backgrounds were ok (though they get recycled frequently thanks to the game's "multiple dimensions, same place" trick) and actually pretty good looking at times, but the character sprites were fuzzy and jittery in their animations (probably a weakness of RPG Maker). All the UI stuff, from menus to the weird "HP" levels and everything looked straight out of old RPG Maker games (this coming from the guy who made stuff on RPG Maker) and as such it feels like an extremely low-rent indie game. They also are in sharp contrast with the cutscenes, which were added to the game after the PC release, but often the sprites don't match the in-game characters (or the scene/gore will be much more graphic in the pixelated version but quite toned down for the drawn cutscene). While I usually think this sort of thing works, Corpse Party doesn't look good. And considering how much wandering you'll do, that's a bad thing.

Music, on the other hand, is excellent. The game uses silence quite well, and despite the soundtrack perhaps feeling a bit too "upbeat," I'm pretty sure they did that to lure you into a false sense of security. I liked all the songs (and the fact they all variate on a similar theme, which is clever) and they were certainly catchy and memorable. The sound effects, as mentioned above, are a downright standout, and the Japanese voice acting is also quite good despite it being done by a small team. Sound design gets an A, at least. 

I still can't listen to this song without feeling uneasy. 

Let's Cut the Crap and get on to what's really important, the big, elephant in the room question: Is Corpse Party scary? And to that I say...maybe?

I can say this: it is certainly unnerving, disturbing, depressing, and it sticks with you long after you finish. I am a hardened horror buff and I fully intended to blitz this game over the course of five nights (since playing at night is the best way to play horror games), but after the second chapter I found I started feeling uneasy playing the game, even with a guide. I played Chapter 3 during the day, and after that actually had to take a break for almost a week before continuing and beating Chapter 4. Chapter 4 left me so unhinged I didn't finish the game for another week and a half, neglecting the bad ends (which are by far the most messed up parts of the game) and just wanting to get it over with. I later went back and got the rest of Chapter 5's ends (and did most of the "extra chapters," which tell the story of other groups of students trapped in the same school), but I didn't have the heart (or guts) to go back again. So on that front? Yeah, it worked. 

I don't feel Corpse Party has the atmosphere it thinks it has, however. Games like Silent Hill and Amnesia prey on you during the quiet times, the slow times when you are walking around, alone and in the dark and in complete silence, long shadows creeping you out and the atmosphere of not what is there, but what might be there causing your own head to play games with you. Corpse Party, either because its awful gameplay shatters any illusion of immersion, or simply because of the way it is designed, doesn't really have this atmosphere of dread. What it does have, however, is horrible things happening in completely, mercilessly horrible ways to otherwise good people, and the implications of many of these things are more than enough to disturb. So is it scary? I can't say (it's an arbitrary thing anyway). But I will say I will not be playing it again, and not because of the gameplay, but because of what it did to my head. 

Nobody is safe. Not even you. 

As it stands, Corpse Party is a very specific game created for a very specific group of people. Some people absolutely love it, and are willing to overlook it's massive gameplay flaws in leu of the visual-novel style horror story awaiting. Others, like myself, will only barely stomach the game (and almost give up on it) and still somehow push through with a guide or otherwise and find the great horror game that is buried underneath all the garbage. And many will play the first chapter, realize this isn't the game for them, and never play it again.

At $20, that makes Corpse Party a hard sell if you are on the fence. When it was on sale for $10 that seemed much more reasonable for a risky plunge, but still be aware of what you are getting into. I'm a massive fan of this genre, and Corpse Party pushed my gaming patience to its absolute limit. Which makes me sad because, again, I think there's a fantastic scary story buried under here. It's just buried a little too deep for most. 

That being said, it accomplished exactly what it was designed to do: unnerved me completely and left an unforgettable impression. If that alone seems enticing enough, then grab your PSP, jump over to Gamefaqs (the one guide that says it isn't spoiler free actually is, so you should be ok. It's also a better guide, FYI), and get yourself on over to Heavenly Host Elementary. However, if more than once during this review you've said "this is not for me," you should probably avoid it.

Three out of five stars, though again: if you aren't into these kind of things (and don't have the patience of a saint), then knock one or two stars off the score.

Ain't no party like a Corpse Party