Tsukiyo Ni Saraba (Farewall to the Moonlit Night) is the first project from Blue Moon Studio. It's directed by Yoshitaka Murayama who was the creator and director of Suikoden I/II and part of III. He left Konami during the Suikoden III production as he had conflicts with what Konami was planning for the direction of that series. Now after 3 years this is the first game he's worked on. The game features character designs by Ryoji Minagawa of Spriggan and ARMS fame, and music composed by Yasunori Mitsuda (Xenogears, Chrono~) and Miki Higashino (Suikoden, Gradius).
The basic premise of the game is basically the same as Gungrave. You are Crow a hitman, your best friend Judas killed your female friend Keiko and now you are upset at him for doing that.
As for the game, it's basically a max payne rip-off with rpg elements. The game is broke down to 2 gameplay types: story scenes, action scenes. Though I call them story scenes, they mainly consist of going to various locations and watching a short non-voiced dialogue between 2d stills which tells you where the next action scene is. For example you'd go to a bar and the bartender would appear and say "hey I heard a guy is looking for you at wherehouse X". So then Wherehouse X appears on your map and you go there and watch a short little FMV and then the action scene starts. The FMVs that tell the plot are pretty ugly as they are just in game models with after-effects.
Action scenes consist of following an arrow at the top of the screen and killing everyone who gets in your way. To help in the killing, thankfully a little radar exists in the corner to show enemies. Just like Max Payne you have a slow motion button. By pressing the slow motion button you can see all the bullets moving slowly with trails and dodge them. This is important because even just one or two bullets can do a good deal of damage. When you start slow motion it opens up a little meter that drains and when it runs out the slow motion ends. But what's kinda stupid is that you can cancel the slow motion at any time by hitting the button again and then when you restart the slow motion the meter starts at full again. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not but by basically tapping the button twice every 10 secs you can play the entire game in slow motion and be pretty invincible.
What kinda makes the game unique from Max Payne or any other Matrix type game (and yes this is a heavy matrix ripoff with Matrix moves and animations + the main guy has 2 guns and a black trenchcoat) is the rpg elements and the acrobatics. For Acrobatics, one of your main buttons is kick which runs up to any nearby enemys and does a guile-flash-kick animation launching them in the air. You also can do all sorts of jumping flips and as you upgrade your jump skill you can do double jumps/triple jumps. Lastly you have to manually reload by hitting down on the D-pad as your ammo # gets low. This is a major point of the gameplay as it takes a few secs to reload but you can do it while flipping around so it's not too bad though the placement of it on the d-pad is a terrible decision since you want to keep moving with the left analogue while pressing the d-pad to reload.
The rpg elements (beyond just exploring and talking to people) appear as skills. Basically throughout the game you learn various skills by beating levels and by using exp from those levels you can buy new skills or upgrade the levels of the ones you currently have. These skills can be rpg-like such as blind (enemies shot can't see), or confused (enemies shoot each other). Or they can be really useful moves like teleport dashing or making a magic circle around yourself that catches incoming projectiles. An example of how upgrades work is upping that magic circle to lvl.2 means now after it catches all incoming projectiles it will fire them back at the enemy who shot it. The skills are assigned to the L1/L2 buttons and you can setup 3 pairs of skills and switch between them in-game by pressing left or right on the directional pad.
So all in all it has some interesting elements. The skills are cool, exploring has style, and heck I'd probably say it's the best done slow-motion/bullet trails to date. It even has tons of objects in each area to shatter/break/explode. But unfortunately these elements just don't merge into a good game. The most obvious problem is that the camera is terrible. It can be moved around but for some reason when you move the camera your movement controls changed direction. It's tough to describe but I'll just say you end up running RE1 style in circles a lot. Then you have the lack of variety. There are like 4-8 enemy types the entire game and they only look different. They all just run at you and fire guns and then die in a few shots (only exception are the people who fire rockets from long range). Also there are only like 4-5 levels/areas which are all under 5 mins in length which are all empty, blocking and lacking in any design at all (think early PS1 stuff). Also they'll re-use an area several times with new enemies since there are so few levels. The difficulty balance is also completely bonkers. The 2nd boss in the game is tougher than any other boss by leagues and the actual levels with enemies provide no challenge since you move 10x faster than everyone else in the game.
Then you have the story which is complete nonsense and barely even exists. I mean I thought considering the staff and the inclusion of 2d adventuring/story scenes that maybe the game would be similar to an rpg with a long 20 hour plot. No, the game is like 4-5 hours total and can easily be beaten in two sittings.
Music ranges from ok~great but it's hard to notice once you start hearing all the bullet noises. I'm looking forward to the ost though I'm wondering how it is 2 cds long when I could've sworn there weren't more than about 13 songs in the entire game.
One last feature that is actually pretty cool is that there are 6 playable characters. Each has their own skills and main weapon. One of them is a Bruce-Lee ripoff named Dragon. He has no guns and fights using kung-fu (think Max-payne Kung-fu mod). One of his skills is the flying dragon kick like in World Heroes/DoA which flys across the room killing every enemy it hits. So as you can imagine it's a lot different playing as the different characters. It's just too bad there isn't an interesting enough game to warrent playing through with all of them.
So yea this is what happens when a bunch of people who are good at rpgs try to make something in a genre which they have no experience in (cough cough Racing Lagoon). Lots of good ideas and intentions (although I'm not sure what the excuse is for the story) but terrible execution. Horrible camera, fighting 100s of the same enemy guy over and over in levels that consist of 3 rooms repeated 10 times; completely broken and crappy bosses, broken gameplay system (there are several ways to stay basically invincible the entire time); basically imagine Gungrave but have 1/2 the story (which Gungrave wasn't exactly overflowing with), much much weaker level design, less solid camera/action system, and without the combo incentive of Gungrave. You end up with something no one should buy [and no one did! As it didn't even make the top20 on the day of release!]. Though if it was released in the states I'd recommend a rental for the curious as when you're actually in the level and running around in slow motion doing flips and shooting everyone effortlessly it's enjoyable but outside of that it's crap. Hopefully Mr. Suikoden has some other way to pool revenue towards making an actual rpg because despite the game screaming low-budget-made-in-5-months, I doubt they'll break even on this :\
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