When you look at the past work from the developer of Genji, you should quite rightly feel in safe hands even if your knowledge of Genji is limited. Yoshiki Okamoto is the genius behind the likes of Onimusha, Devil May
Cry, Resident Evil and Street Fighter II, all wonderful games in their own right. And for the most part you are kept in safe hands, if only for a short while.
Genji is set in a very authentic ancient Japan, and the main focus point and backbone of the story is the Amahagne, the reason why all the conflict exists. These are powerful stones that gift the wearer God-like
powers. Of course with any clichéd story such as this, the bad guys (The Heishi) are seeking to become the most powerful force in the world, and can only do this by owning all the Amahagne stones.
Unfortunately, they have all but two and they are in the possession of the main protagonists, Yoshitsune (The main character, and the
more all rounded fighter possessing great strength accompanied by lighting
quick reflexes) and Benkei (The more powerful of the two, mammoth in size and protector of Yoshitsune). Throughout the game you will be changing between the
two, as both are necessary for progression, Benkei for example is needed to
move large objects blocking a path and Yoshitsune to climb unreachable
platforms.
It’s a shame that you weren’t given the option to change between the two on the fly as you must choose beforehand who you want to play
with, this can become an annoyance as it gets a little tedious having to go
back and change characters, especially with the long loading times to contend with.
The big positive of Genji are the visuals particularly the environments, achingly beautiful and quite simply one of the prettiest games to
grace the PS2. It perfectly captures the feel of ancient Japan with its lush
surroundings. You’ll frequently stop and just stare in awe at what is around you; the trees and grass breaths with life and you can almost feel the history
of the village as you walk past the marketplace and houses.
The combat is a mixed bag. It’s very accessible for newcomers and is a lot of fun; at it’s most basic you only have two buttons to
worry about, one for quick attacks and one for powerful attacks. Linking these
two together can produce deadly combos but with nearly all hack ‘n slash games
it suffers from repetition. Genji can be as simple or as complicated as you
want it to be, but trying to go for incredibly flashy combinations can be too much work and hassle for you to want to bother.
A problem with combat is the dodgy animations especially with Benkei. The characters never feel as if they’re part of the world, just
running forward won’t result in you running in a straight line but you will
slide to the left or right hitting walls. It can feel like a driving game trying to steer your way down a long corridor, more trouble than it should be.
So the problem with the animations in regard to the combat is that the response
time between inputting the move and it actually appearing on screen is a little slow compared to say Devil May Cry. There’s also no way of stopping mid combo,
too many a time was I In the middle of a move and I could see an enemy about to
hit me and I wasn’t able to do a thing about it. I guess God of War has spoiled us; it would have been just a little inclusion but would have made all the
difference.
The hit detection is a little off as well, which can be the ultimate decider in whether you live on or die to try again. All in all though
the fighting is very well put together and extremely satisfying if a little
rough round the edges…
The cut scenes in Genji are a joy to watch, those of you familiar with the likes of Onimusha should know what to expect. It’s a let-down
that the voice acting is some way short of stellar. Yoshitsune at times sounds
like a stereotypical English-man then in other instances completely Japapnese. Benkei is very hard to understand, his accent is very strong and feels forced.
The rest of the cast just sounds as if Sony has just picked up random people of
the street.
Genji is a very, very short game indeed and can be completed in less than 5 hours; it’s also not a very hard game overall. There’s no extra
game modes to go through once you’ve finished apart from hard mode which is
just normal mode but without the ability to level up and strengthen your character. So I really can’t recommend you buying this, but it is well worth a
rental and does not look totally out of place next to the leading titles of
this genre.
[6]
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Leroy says:
Well i’ve had a bit of problem, the text keeps making new lines where i don’t want it to, i’ve sort of fixed it so it looks ok now =\
Sep 22, 2006, 8:45 amJanus says:
Yeah, I too have been having problems with posting. Had an terrible time with my Innocence review and if you look at that review you’ll see it’s still not right.
Sep 22, 2006, 2:47 am