Maken X on the Dreamcast was my most disliked game that I beat last year. In a year where I played Drakengard 2, Sonic Heroes, Shenmue 3 (which honestly wasn't even a consideration for the "most disliked list", but still), and plenty of other less-than-great games, Maken X stood out among the rest as the worst of the bunch. A first-person swordfighting game on Dreamcast and also one of the only action games Atlus ever developed in-house, it's a super unique and weird thing I had to play. Unique: yes. Good: no. A combo of the weird combat and the poor implementation of first-person controls on a console with only one joystick made this one a really hard game to enjoy despite its super wild and weird premise (and art by the same guy who did it for Shin Megami Tensei 2). Surely, this remake several years later on the PS2, a remake that is on a console with 2 joysticks that also changes the camera perspective to third-person, would be the push in the right direction that this delightfully weird game needed to succeed, right? Well, it took me about 12.5 hours to reach the end of the Japanese version of the game (with one of the good endings) to try and find the answer to that question.

The story of Maken Shao is basically identical to the plot of Maken X. Although a couple more expository cutscenes have been added here and there, it doesn't change the story terribly meaningfully outside of giving you a slightly better picture of the world at large. You play as Maken, a strange sword infused with the power of "Image", a bold new area for science that's a mystical energy linking all human consciousness (I think). You also play as the young girl Kay, who is forced to mind meld with Maken to save her father after he's taken by an Illuminati-like group who are bent on using his research to allow their own Maken-equivalent to destroy the world.

The setting and character design is definitely one of the strongest parts of the game, as you would expect from Atlus. You go all over the world to weird locations and see just what the Hakke (a term left totally unlocalized in the English release, that basically means something like "Eight Controllers") are doing to the world to corrupt it for their dark master. There's even a ham-fisted morality system where you answer moral questions from Kay after each level in the shared mind-space of Image you have with her, and that's what decides your endings (mostly). It's a strength effectively identical to how Maken X has it, as nearly all of the really wild stuff from the original game is here, save for all of the swastikas (can't have an Atlus game without those) which have for some reason been replaced with the Japanese character for "nothing" 無 (although all of the other very obviously Nazi symbology has been left in place, I guess to pass the minimum bar to release the game in Europe? O_o).

The gameplay on the other had has been pretty radically changed. On the smaller side, you have some well appreciated quality of life features introduced. In Maken X, items you picked up were immediately used, but in Shao, you hold onto them (a maximum of one at a time) and can use them when you see fit. No more backtracking through levels to collect that one health powerup you left for safekeeping! The other very appreciated addition is the inclusion of mid-level save points. Not just checkpoints, which the original game didn't have at all (from what I remember), but bonafide save points that you can turn off the console and come to later. It makes retrying bosses way WAY easier, which is nice because Shao is a game in many ways even harder than the original Maken X. The last addition is that changing characters on the map screen is now far easier and can be done from one big menu instead of hunting around the world map for where you happened to leave the character you wanna play as next.

That's right, changing characters! Just as in Maken X, Maken is a creature of Image, which means it can also interact with the Image inside anyone. What that means on a narrative and gameplay level is that Maken can consume the consciousness/Image of defeated bosses (and certain willing allies) and you can then play as that character! The original game had an EXP system where you got experience points from killing enemies that made an overall level go up, and you needed to be at or above the level of any bosses/characters you wanted to possess. However, that system has been done away in this game in lieu of something else, and that brings me to the start of the long, LONG list of ways this game is somehow significantly worse than the original Maken X.

Instead of the old leveling system, now defeating any enemy gets you Image points that are basically money that you spend to swap bodies. This point system also works on a combo system where you get higher multipliers of points for killing consecutive enemies without taking damage. That's right, they took away the ability to freely swap characters (in a game where you still are very often required to use a particular character to play over half the stages in the game), and now you need to grind points for the privilege. But that's not all, as there's actually still a leveling system, but not it's locked to each character instead of just to Maken itself.

Each character has a "Synchro" meter for how synchronized Maken is with their body, and as this increases you unlock new combos to do with your character. Once Synchro reaches 100%, you can swap to that character for no Image cost at all, and you even get a max HP boost, a max attack boost, and even a magic attack you can activate by holding the button. The original Maken X had no leveling, and you had all your combos immediately as well as your magic attack. However, being in third-person instead of first-person, a lot of the old moves wouldn't really make sense, so basically every character has had their moveset meaningfully tweaked to fit the new camera perspective. The Pope (in all his strange, winged puppet-wearing glory) is still the best character despite the moveset change (even after they got rid of his super overpowered magic spell of temporary invincibility, they just replaced it with an arguably even better healing move you can use after a short recharge), but that's ignoring a bigger problem.

The one thing, perhaps more than anything else, that makes Maken Shao a worse game than its predecessor is ironically enough one of the things you'd think would be one of the best things about it: the new camera angle. While the movesets got a change for third-person, the levels didn't, and that means you're now going through levels designed for first-person with a third-person camera, and that really sucks in a melee-focused game. In fact, you're often so big that you're blocking the character you're locked onto and trying to hit, so the fact that you can see your feet (thanks to the new camera) is counteracted by the bigger problem of not being able to see in front of your own nose. Bosses and enemies with wind-up attacks now flash before they do their special moves, and that's a REALLY good change, since otherwise there are a fair few bosses whose attacks would be nearly impossible to dodge because you're so huge compared to them.

This problem also manifests in other weird ways, such as the fact that you now have width. Before I forget to mention it, I should clarify that Maken Shao may be on the PS2, but it doesn't really use two joysticks. The game still functionally plays like the Dreamcast game, but turning the camera when standing still is easier now. You're no more or less mobile than you were before, for the most part (although a little less, I suppose, since they took out the over-head 180 jump move). In the original game, you were just a camera with arms, so every character was about the same "size". But now, every character has to physically exist in space, and that is an issue in more ways than simply taking up a large portion of the screen space in a game packed with lots of narrow corridors. In those corridors are quite frequently enemies with guns. Some characters used to have ranged magical attacks, but the one that used to be my favorite had his removed, so you're a lot more vulnerable to these gunners now (not to mention how you gotta grind for 30 to 60 minutes to even see what a given character's moveset is like by maxing out their level). Worse still, basically every character is too physically large to actually dodge these bullets anymore, leading to quite a few points where you have no choice but to trudge down a hallway simply hoping you don't die before you get to the guy to club him to death. This makes an already hard and frustrating game even more hard and frustrating in a way that is utterly unfair and above all unfun.

The presentation is fairly strong visually, as mentioned before, but that's all holdovers from Maken X. The music is never anything super special, but the character and monster design is just SO wild (the mafia boss and president being two of my personal favorites) that they're at least looking up pictures of.

Verdict: Not Recommended. Maken X had the honor of being the worst game I played last year, and it's looking like Maken Shao has a very high chance of being the worst game I've played this year too. It is a triumph of design that a game as flawed and mistaken as Maken X was actually made so significantly worse an experience to play through. It's not a positive triumph or one worth bragging about, but it's certainly an achievement in and of itself. If you MUST experience this, play Maken X, because it's just a better (though still not good) version of this. As it is, Maken Shao only reveals the more glaring flaws with Atlus's approach to action game design, and that they probably would've been better off making a full blown sequel instead of this weird Frankenstein's monster of a remake.

pretty cool and weird, but occasionally frustrating and awkward. not my favourite trash-action experience, but pretty darn compelling nonetheless. real heads will get something out of this one.

- much though it pains me to say it: the game would be better without tank controls.
- don't play on hardware. there's too much time-wasting bullshit in the form of unskippable cutscenes and poorly placed save points.
- the menus take way too long to navigate because of excessive fade-in fade-out animations, but i do really like the main one on the world map, even tho it is profoundly stupid.
- the writing is some nonsense, and the plot itself is neither clear nor compelling. it's not egregious by atlus standards, but it does kinda feel like eating a large bowl of unseasoned rice.
- the action is actually pretty good. it's simple, but supported well by the level design (nothing flashy, but commendably aware of the game's verbs in a way that similar games often aren't), the number of different (playable) characters and enemies, and intensely good hitstop.
- even if you know you're never going to play this, i highly recommend watching a vid of the final level cos it looks incredible.

i'm glad i played this one. i don't think it reaches the lofty heights of a true trash-action gem, but it was worth my time.

It'd be a lie to say this is a much better version of Maken but I did beat it when I rage-quit the Dreamcast one. Almost every aspect other than the gameplay (which is arguably better or worse though I had a better time) is kind of a downgrade (not having the shit dub is nice but the new translation sucks, the animations of playable characters are very bad and overall the game is somehow uglier) but it is significantly less frustrating thanks to the existence of an easy mode and mid-level save points, which are both lifesavers. I also like how there's a codex of info for stuff in the plot. So I'd recommend it over the original, I suppose.

Just read the manga, man. It's very good.