Despite knowing little about Sega's Dororo (made by some RED ENT. staff and some WOWOW staff [which includes old Overworks people]), I picked the game up last thursday as the 2 mins I had spent with it at E3 had left me with the impression that it might be a Sega game that doesn't suck.
Well it's still a Sega game and riddled with stupid little problems, but after finishing it 14 hours later I gotta say that Sega did good once again and Dororo is a game that will make the 5 people who actually buy it quite happy.
Dororo (or Blood Will Tell in the US) is a action/adventure game in the style of Onimusha meets Dynasty Warriors. One thing that seperates it from those two though is the story. Dororo is based on Tezuka Osamu's manga of the same name from the 1960's. The story goes that:
One day a man was approached by 48 majin (demon gods). They lured him into a making a deal where he would gain the power to unite Japan and create a peaceful country. In return they would take the parts of his soon to be born baby. The baby is then born and is horrible deformed so the father tosses him into a river where he is picked up by a doctor who lives in the woods. The baby is missing 48 body parts (don't ask how it's alive, this was written in 1960). The doctor raises the baby and then one day here's the baby's voice in his head. He realizes that the baby has special powers and can communicate through telepathy. So the doctor decides he will create a human body for the baby so he will at least look like a normal human. Years go by and now the baby has become a young boy: Hyakkimaru. He is told from a spirit one day that all 48 of his body parts were taken away by the 48 majin. They used his body parts to create their own human to rule the human world. He is told that for each majin he destroys he will gain back the body part they hold, and that if he ever found the human made by the majin and killed them he would instantley gain back all 48 parts of his body. The boy then tells the doctor this story. The doctor decides to install weapons throughout his fake body so that Hyakkimaru can go off on a trip to hunt the 48 majin. The game starts around here with his meeting up of the young theif Dororo...
As you can see the story contains a bit more than "The presidents daughter has been kidnapped, go save now!". Because of this the story is weaved throughout the game with top-notch presentation. The game is divided into chapters like a manga and each one opens with a cutscene and then cuts to the title in really cool old school samurai font. The episodes are all self-contained yet the main story also moves along with it. So it really feels as if you are playing through several chapters of a manga or eps of an anime. Also the game has a LOT of cutscenes. The final count I did (a drama mode lets you rewatch them) numbered at 202 cutscenes. Cutscenes are usually pretty short in length, 1-3 mins probably. But the directing in them is top-notch and the character designs by Blade of the Immortal's manga artist/writer, Hiraoki Samura (adapted from Tezuka's style into his own more realistic gritty look), hold up quite well. Even the short dialogues are well-written and the voice actors consist of top notch people in the industry who do fantastic jobs. So the story is conveyed quite effectively throughout the game and IMO is really good for an action game plot.
So when you're not watching the story what are you doing? Well you're running around the level heading to the next boss area. During the mean time you will be attacked by all sorts of enemies. The way the action plays out is very similar to Samurai Warriors as you have big areas, lots of enemies and crates and stuff around the area to destroy and find treasure in. The main difference is that your movelist is HUGE. Here's a break down of what you can do right off the start in the game:
Square = light attack with arm blades, can do canned combo strings between square and triangle.
Triangle = does heavy attack, used at the end of combo strings. Also charged does "super combo" which I'll discuss later.
Square + Triangle = Magic spell
X = jumps
O = tells Dororo what to do (fight, get items, search for hidden stuff, stick near you)
L1 = camera centering, hold down and you strafe hop and flip around.
L2 = Put arm back on and use big sword (which has it's own Square and Triangle combos)
R1 = arm machine gun (can only be used with short swords)
R2 = Knee cannon
Analogue moves and right analogue is camera which during boss fights can be switched from boss-centered to free by pushing in the R3 button.
Ok so that's a decent set of moves just to start with. The super combo thing is an interesting move that once you hit an enemy, a bunch of button commands appear endlessly on the bottom of the screen along with a timer. You try to hit as many as you can and then press triangle to finish the enemy. The more hits you do the better items the enemy will leave when they die (thus if your low on health you try to do this to an enemy to get a health item). Note that if you are hit during this sequence you get knocked out of it.
Throughout the game you power-up a lot. Your short swords level up as they kill enemies, while you get big swords by finding them hidden throughout the game most of these swords have stat properties. You can find new spells and as you get new body parts you get very strong. Each body part in the game gives you stat bonuses (ribs = endurance, brain parts = speed, chest muscles = strength). Upping the speed stat pushes your canned combo strings longer and longer, it also gives you more time to do your super combo thing. Some body parts even give you new basic attacks such as dashing and air recovery. So basically as you progress through the game you will constentily be gaining new abilities which will change up how you play little by little. This works extremely well as fighting 100 enemies never really gets boring. The game also has a bunch of special events where you may have to fight slightly differently (such as using the back of your real sword to knock people out rather than kill them).
You also play every once and a while as Dororo who surprisingly is pretty fun to play as. Dororo doesn't fight too much and instead does little puzzles and platforming and exploring. For the most part these parts are fun, although in all truth the game should have ditched the few platforming areas that are in the game as the controls are suited for fighting, not making jumps...and neither is the camera.
Throughout the chapters you fight lots of majin so the game has a ton of bosses (50+). Most of the bosses just consist of 2-4 patterns which you figure out how to avoid and then beat the boss down in between attacks. It's simple, but with so many bosses it stays fun. When you beat a chapter it tells you how many hidden majin are left in the chapter. Then you can go back and try to find them at any time. The 2nd time in a level, areas where the hidden majin are show up on the map so it's easy to find them. Also going back and fighting them helps make the later chapters much easier because of all the stat increases you get.
The level design in the game is alright. It's not amazing and for most of the areas it's not terribly bad either. The monster designs including the 48 majin are by Mahiro Maeda of Blue Sub No.6, Last Exile, Gatekeepers, and one of the animatrix shorts, and really cool looking. The music is pretty empty and one of the weaker points of the game. The graphics run at a nice 60fps but aren't super detailed (although the character models look great).
After you beat the game you unlock a mini-game which is kinda fun, and there's a info gallery of all the monsters and majin in the game. You can also rewatch any of the drama scenes, or go to the art gallery to see some gorgeous drawings and sketches by Samura.
One last thing I want to mention is that the game has a decent amount of moments of brilliant design and presentation style that make you stop and go "wow, that was really cool". Seriously you can tell that some of the people on the team are very talented. The game is also quite long for an action game and should run most people around 14-20 hours.
So overall the quick +/-:
+Great story with good dialogue and cool characters
+Fantastic looking (in a art-sense) 3d models retaining Samura's gorgeous design.
+A very large move-list so you can mix up your playing style a bit
+Great power-up progression that keeps giving you new moves and abilities until the end
+50+ bosses. Some suck, but there's a lot of fun ones in there.
+Smooth framerate
+2ndary character is actually a fun diversion rather than a pain
+Long game, 14-20 hours playtime.
-Platforming elements are horrible and seriously the toughest part of the game was jumping between two stationary pieces of wood in the last level.
-music sucks
-environment is pretty sparse
-camera is decent but on certain occasions pisses you off (platforming)
-control is good but the way dashing is handled (they ran out of buttons) is bad.
-could've used a lock-on attack for bosses.
-difficulty balance starts off hard but if you get most of your parts back then watch out your an unstoppable killing menace.
So yeah the game is rough and has issues, but it's also addicting and a lot of fun. I put 14 hours into the game over the weekend and I'm still gonna keep playing it until I unlock all the art gallery. I would easily state that this is the best game ever based off an anime/manga and if the upcoming Berserk game were this good I'd be thrilled. I even found the game more enjoyable than all 3 Onimusha games as the fighting was much more varied and the story was actually really enjoyable here. It's still a whole set of stairs down from Ninja Gaiden or Viewtiful Joe, but still great.
So surprisingly Sega with their little to no budget was able to assemble a team of talented and famous artists, directors, writers, voice actors, game designers and create a great game. Though as it did bomb in Japan, I do expect it to bomb again in the US. Especially if the game contains 202 horribly dubbed cutscenes killing the story which is a major focus of the game. But even if the game bombs, Sega fans will be happy that they got a great game.
8.3/10 (if they had dumped the platforming, fixed the camera, and adjusted the difficulty a bit this could've easily been a 9/10 game)
Well it's still a Sega game and riddled with stupid little problems, but after finishing it 14 hours later I gotta say that Sega did good once again and Dororo is a game that will make the 5 people who actually buy it quite happy.
Dororo (or Blood Will Tell in the US) is a action/adventure game in the style of Onimusha meets Dynasty Warriors. One thing that seperates it from those two though is the story. Dororo is based on Tezuka Osamu's manga of the same name from the 1960's. The story goes that:
One day a man was approached by 48 majin (demon gods). They lured him into a making a deal where he would gain the power to unite Japan and create a peaceful country. In return they would take the parts of his soon to be born baby. The baby is then born and is horrible deformed so the father tosses him into a river where he is picked up by a doctor who lives in the woods. The baby is missing 48 body parts (don't ask how it's alive, this was written in 1960). The doctor raises the baby and then one day here's the baby's voice in his head. He realizes that the baby has special powers and can communicate through telepathy. So the doctor decides he will create a human body for the baby so he will at least look like a normal human. Years go by and now the baby has become a young boy: Hyakkimaru. He is told from a spirit one day that all 48 of his body parts were taken away by the 48 majin. They used his body parts to create their own human to rule the human world. He is told that for each majin he destroys he will gain back the body part they hold, and that if he ever found the human made by the majin and killed them he would instantley gain back all 48 parts of his body. The boy then tells the doctor this story. The doctor decides to install weapons throughout his fake body so that Hyakkimaru can go off on a trip to hunt the 48 majin. The game starts around here with his meeting up of the young theif Dororo...
As you can see the story contains a bit more than "The presidents daughter has been kidnapped, go save now!". Because of this the story is weaved throughout the game with top-notch presentation. The game is divided into chapters like a manga and each one opens with a cutscene and then cuts to the title in really cool old school samurai font. The episodes are all self-contained yet the main story also moves along with it. So it really feels as if you are playing through several chapters of a manga or eps of an anime. Also the game has a LOT of cutscenes. The final count I did (a drama mode lets you rewatch them) numbered at 202 cutscenes. Cutscenes are usually pretty short in length, 1-3 mins probably. But the directing in them is top-notch and the character designs by Blade of the Immortal's manga artist/writer, Hiraoki Samura (adapted from Tezuka's style into his own more realistic gritty look), hold up quite well. Even the short dialogues are well-written and the voice actors consist of top notch people in the industry who do fantastic jobs. So the story is conveyed quite effectively throughout the game and IMO is really good for an action game plot.
So when you're not watching the story what are you doing? Well you're running around the level heading to the next boss area. During the mean time you will be attacked by all sorts of enemies. The way the action plays out is very similar to Samurai Warriors as you have big areas, lots of enemies and crates and stuff around the area to destroy and find treasure in. The main difference is that your movelist is HUGE. Here's a break down of what you can do right off the start in the game:
Square = light attack with arm blades, can do canned combo strings between square and triangle.
Triangle = does heavy attack, used at the end of combo strings. Also charged does "super combo" which I'll discuss later.
Square + Triangle = Magic spell
X = jumps
O = tells Dororo what to do (fight, get items, search for hidden stuff, stick near you)
L1 = camera centering, hold down and you strafe hop and flip around.
L2 = Put arm back on and use big sword (which has it's own Square and Triangle combos)
R1 = arm machine gun (can only be used with short swords)
R2 = Knee cannon
Analogue moves and right analogue is camera which during boss fights can be switched from boss-centered to free by pushing in the R3 button.
Ok so that's a decent set of moves just to start with. The super combo thing is an interesting move that once you hit an enemy, a bunch of button commands appear endlessly on the bottom of the screen along with a timer. You try to hit as many as you can and then press triangle to finish the enemy. The more hits you do the better items the enemy will leave when they die (thus if your low on health you try to do this to an enemy to get a health item). Note that if you are hit during this sequence you get knocked out of it.
Throughout the game you power-up a lot. Your short swords level up as they kill enemies, while you get big swords by finding them hidden throughout the game most of these swords have stat properties. You can find new spells and as you get new body parts you get very strong. Each body part in the game gives you stat bonuses (ribs = endurance, brain parts = speed, chest muscles = strength). Upping the speed stat pushes your canned combo strings longer and longer, it also gives you more time to do your super combo thing. Some body parts even give you new basic attacks such as dashing and air recovery. So basically as you progress through the game you will constentily be gaining new abilities which will change up how you play little by little. This works extremely well as fighting 100 enemies never really gets boring. The game also has a bunch of special events where you may have to fight slightly differently (such as using the back of your real sword to knock people out rather than kill them).
You also play every once and a while as Dororo who surprisingly is pretty fun to play as. Dororo doesn't fight too much and instead does little puzzles and platforming and exploring. For the most part these parts are fun, although in all truth the game should have ditched the few platforming areas that are in the game as the controls are suited for fighting, not making jumps...and neither is the camera.
Throughout the chapters you fight lots of majin so the game has a ton of bosses (50+). Most of the bosses just consist of 2-4 patterns which you figure out how to avoid and then beat the boss down in between attacks. It's simple, but with so many bosses it stays fun. When you beat a chapter it tells you how many hidden majin are left in the chapter. Then you can go back and try to find them at any time. The 2nd time in a level, areas where the hidden majin are show up on the map so it's easy to find them. Also going back and fighting them helps make the later chapters much easier because of all the stat increases you get.
The level design in the game is alright. It's not amazing and for most of the areas it's not terribly bad either. The monster designs including the 48 majin are by Mahiro Maeda of Blue Sub No.6, Last Exile, Gatekeepers, and one of the animatrix shorts, and really cool looking. The music is pretty empty and one of the weaker points of the game. The graphics run at a nice 60fps but aren't super detailed (although the character models look great).
After you beat the game you unlock a mini-game which is kinda fun, and there's a info gallery of all the monsters and majin in the game. You can also rewatch any of the drama scenes, or go to the art gallery to see some gorgeous drawings and sketches by Samura.
One last thing I want to mention is that the game has a decent amount of moments of brilliant design and presentation style that make you stop and go "wow, that was really cool". Seriously you can tell that some of the people on the team are very talented. The game is also quite long for an action game and should run most people around 14-20 hours.
So overall the quick +/-:
+Great story with good dialogue and cool characters
+Fantastic looking (in a art-sense) 3d models retaining Samura's gorgeous design.
+A very large move-list so you can mix up your playing style a bit
+Great power-up progression that keeps giving you new moves and abilities until the end
+50+ bosses. Some suck, but there's a lot of fun ones in there.
+Smooth framerate
+2ndary character is actually a fun diversion rather than a pain
+Long game, 14-20 hours playtime.
-Platforming elements are horrible and seriously the toughest part of the game was jumping between two stationary pieces of wood in the last level.
-music sucks
-environment is pretty sparse
-camera is decent but on certain occasions pisses you off (platforming)
-control is good but the way dashing is handled (they ran out of buttons) is bad.
-could've used a lock-on attack for bosses.
-difficulty balance starts off hard but if you get most of your parts back then watch out your an unstoppable killing menace.
So yeah the game is rough and has issues, but it's also addicting and a lot of fun. I put 14 hours into the game over the weekend and I'm still gonna keep playing it until I unlock all the art gallery. I would easily state that this is the best game ever based off an anime/manga and if the upcoming Berserk game were this good I'd be thrilled. I even found the game more enjoyable than all 3 Onimusha games as the fighting was much more varied and the story was actually really enjoyable here. It's still a whole set of stairs down from Ninja Gaiden or Viewtiful Joe, but still great.
So surprisingly Sega with their little to no budget was able to assemble a team of talented and famous artists, directors, writers, voice actors, game designers and create a great game. Though as it did bomb in Japan, I do expect it to bomb again in the US. Especially if the game contains 202 horribly dubbed cutscenes killing the story which is a major focus of the game. But even if the game bombs, Sega fans will be happy that they got a great game.
8.3/10 (if they had dumped the platforming, fixed the camera, and adjusted the difficulty a bit this could've easily been a 9/10 game)
