This is a game that I had always heard was awful but never really expected to play. Then I saw a single manual-less copy at the resale mall and got a little excited to finally see what it was like, but then looked at the price tag and walked away. It wasn't THAT much, but more than I was willing to pay for what I'd been led to believe was a pretty bad time. Then a friend of mine offered to pay for it if I picked it up, and that was all the prompting I needed to go back to the mall and take the plunge xD. It took me about 13.5 hours to go through the Japanese version of the main game on real hardware and then mess around with the extras enough to unlock some of the post-game transformations.

PAB is the story of a muscle-bound, white-haired amnesiac who survives a helicopter crash-landing in a city filled with mutated monsters. He's about to be attacked by some of said monsters when suddenly he undergoes a transformation into a powerful werewolf and slaughters them all! He nearly dies from the exertion, when a mysterious woman approaches and is able to change him back, bringing him back from the brink of death. Solving the mysterious mutations as well as finding out your own identity and who this woman is is the quest you soon embark on in this very odd take on the Altered Beast property. Very much like a Blue Stinger or a God Hand, this game actually has no Japanese voice track despite being made by a Japanese team. Unlike those games, however, it doesn't really have the quantity to keep up with the quality. What's there IS very campy and silly fun (and very much feels like the sort of American action movie parody that Blue Stinger nails so well), but it's so few and far between that it's hard to call it much of a selling point. It mostly just does what it needs to to set up the action, but it's nice that it's also at least funny and entertaining while it's there.

The gameplay of PAB is a sort of brawler metroidvania, which is a fine idea, really, but it's just not really executed on very well here. You have a map to go around that seems quite linear at first, but it opens up a little around the halfway point. That said, that's mostly just in the sense that you can backtrack to get new powerups and such. You can't really sequence break at all. As you fight bosses, you acquire more monster transformations and special movement powers for those monsters that will allow you to access more and more areas. Those in and of themselves are pretty neat ideas. Throw that general gameplay loop in with how beating gate guardians gets you points to spend in a Musou-like combo skill tree, and you have the makings of a bit of a hidden gem on the PS2.

Well, you WOULD have the makings of a hidden gem, if the execution of all of this weren't so flawed. On the more minor end, you have generally rough signposting once you get to the 33%~50% progress point. There were a good few times an area was so big or a puzzle was so vague that I had to look up the solution on where to go next because I simply couldn't be bothered to trial and error anymore. For example, as the minotaur, your unlockable move via defeating a boss is a charge to break walls. You use this to break a wall in that boss's room to escape, and then there's a big flat wall that pushes you from the end of that next hallway. You would logically think that this is a time to use your new charge JUST right (it has a very big lead up) to get in the door at the end. No. You'd actually be incredible wrong to think that. Instead, you need to ACTUALLY use the minotaur's steel-transforming block move to repeatedly block the wall and slowly work your way down the corridor. This poor signposting extends to how to fight bosses and use super moves as well, which was less than fun, and that unclear-ness is definitely one of the biggest factors in making the game a generally not great time to play. It puts a hard timer on your ability to do trial and error, and getting more green transform juice back (especially during boss fights) can be an annoying and time-consuming pain when enemies generally don't infinitely respawn out of boss fights.

This is exacerbated VERY highly by the fact that you actually can't stay transformed indefinitely. You need to keep up a supply of green slime to stay safely transformed, because once you run out, it starts chewing through your health instead. Health is an uncommon drop from enemies or can be regained at save points, but green slime can only be siphoned from weakened enemies using a special move as the human, or it can be gotten in smaller amounts as a drop from most dead enemies. It makes being a big, powerful brawling monster a lot less fun than it should be because you're constantly trying to conserve your power because fighting as the human is a total waste of time because he's so squishy and weak. Adding on top of all that of that is that the hit detection is a bit too much less than perfect, controlling several often used and important mobility forms like the merman and bird are a bit too awkward a bit too often, and generally every transformation is worse at fighting than the werewolf (in a non-elemental situation), and you have a brawler that is frustrating just as often as it is satisfying.

The presentation is pretty good. The lab and outdoor environments look nice, and the animations and monster designs also look really cool. The animations for the werewolf were apparently so nice, Sega would even re-use them for Sonic's Werehog transformation in Sonic Unleashed (an eagle-eyed friend of mine who watched me play it pointed out x3). The music is also pretty good, but the way they use it isn't great. Each transformation has its own theme that plays when you're as it, so though you do get to hear those fun themes quite a lot, areas and levels don't really have music associated with them very much as a result.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Especially if you don't mind looking up puzzle solutions when they get you stuck, this game is actually an alright time. It's definitely not worth hunting down particularly, because even AT BEST it is mediocre, but it's still a fun enough and quite interesting piece of Sega's history at the end of the day. Not super worth playing, but an enjoyable enough time if you're gonna sit down with it.