39 Reviews liked by Catorce18


I usually prefer 3D Mario games but how nice :)
It was extremely fun, original and beautiful! Also I really enjoyed playing it with someone <3

La parte de México sobra por completo, la mitad de los personajes de todo el juego no aportan nada y el doblaje de los personajes que hablan en español me pone de mala hostia

De la misma manera que Alan Wake este juego se siente super derivativo de las influencias del estudio pero en este lograron alejarse más y crear algo más interesante, siento que le dieron un giro muy propio al vibe onírico de David Lynch pero a la vez te están golpeando en la cabeza todo el rato con uno de los monólogo interno más aburridos y condescendientes que he visto, te tratan como si fueras imbécil

El gameplay psé está divertido a ratos, no me encanta, espectacular al principio super aburrido por el final, casi dos décadas después y en cuanto a gameplay siguen sin poder superar Max Payne... huh...

Nuestro tiempo aquí es finito así que echa a andar, curiosea, descubre cuanto puedas. La vida es demasiado corta para quedarse a mirar las musarañas. Pero y si...

Lo admito, el final contemplativo del juego fascina por las implicaciones que tiene cerciorarse de que todo lo vivo que pisamos en este mundo se lo debemos a los que nos preceden. De esos finales que te imbuyen en una inmensa humildad y pequeñez. Lo que no me gusta tanto es que a ese momento de fascinación solo lleguemos "rindiéndonos", asumiendo que si todo va acabar tarde o temprano no merece la pena seguir avanzando.

Cuando en nuestro pequeño paseo atisbamos los cadáveres de quienes agotaron hasta su último aliento, por tonto que parezca, sentimos un profundo respeto por la muerte que nos acecha y la vida que pronto dejaremos. Pero el juego y su naturalismo claramente dignifican a aquellos que, por una cosa u otra, decidieron bajarse a mitad de trayecto. ¿Por qué no hay obsequio —o al menos no tan evidente— para los que lucharon hasta el final?

text by tim rogers

★⋆☆☆

“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”

In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.

I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.

Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.

Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.

Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”

Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.





How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.

Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.

Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.

Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.

i'm glad this exists at the very least. i only ever played 1 and half of Project Phantasma, and i really enjoyed them! but VI is... well, a confused game stuck in between eras.

it wants to be longer than its predecessors to fit in with From's more recent output and today's longer AAA games. it wants to have more traditional action bits with the cinematic bosses to pace the story and serve as replayable challenges, but at the same time it wants to tap into the nerdy specificities core to the series. while i get why all of these at once were chosen as the crowd-pleaser approach, it ended up making it a mostly uninteresting experience for me.

- AC VI basically turned the locales and atmosphere into a pretty matte painting without considering a sense of place. the sightlines are all planned and constructed to look perfect at every angle, when in the PS1 titles i could just fit myself into weird corners that exuded zero aesthetical purpose, which in my view was a better fit for the setting.

- imo the major bosses, aside from feeling like an almost different game, were also not that flexible build-wise. they open up damage opportunities for everyone, but tanky ACs are just at such a huge advantage that it makes those bosses even less compelling.

- the writing was kinda neat at first and pretty funny, but it eventually divulges into either fascist roleplay or revolutionary roleplay depending on your route, which made it feel like every other sci-fi game with player agency.

- i genuinely think someone held Kota Hoshino's soundtrack back. even when working on the AC series, his compositions strayed away from the cinematic orchestra box. they were very hard to ignore. here the tracks are basically just Dark Souls compositions with some cool synthwork and futuristic touches. they sometimes shine in the boss fights but are mostly backing tracks to the action.

- most of the missions were fine though; you can express many different builds and approaches while still feeling the weight of the heavy machinery you're controlling.

it's cool that From took a break from making games in their new household genre to take a fresh stab at an old one, but it nonetheless felt like a safe first dip into what could've been a bolder attempt with fewer compromises.

Las pirámide de Giza de los videojuegos: en el futuro la gente gente se preguntará cómo fuimos capaces de hacer una maravilla así, le atribuirán el hito a los aliens, pero la respuesta, amigos, es mano de obra esclava

Better setting than the first one for me!! I love all the characters although I couldn't exploit their individual abilities a lot :(
It's great that this game is bigger than the first one but it's too much for me, I activated the teletoscopes but I don't think I can achieve the ending I want so whatev
I may play again in the future who knows

Edit: right after writing this I started another run with Marina and this time I managed to take more advantage of the mechanics and the game in general and I got ending A :-)
It's been ages since I had so much fun and commitment to a game tbh so here's that

Le doy un 4 porque sale la cabra con pantalones esa de los cómics polacos pero es un puto plagio de Marcelino pan y vino

A bold avant-garde experiment, challenging players' conventional expectations of a racing game by having the cars drive like complete ass. Obviously no-one involved in the development of this game has ever driven a car; what concerns me is that I'm not sure they even know what a car is.

Everything good this remake has comes from the beauty of the original game, but it is so messy and controls so badly that it made me download an emulator to play the PS2 version which remains superb

Hover

2017

con toda humildad, sinceridad y respeto este juego es una poronga encima tiene los sonidos del among us

jugue unos niveles y me dio paja porque hay que buscar como ochocientos objetos + los desafios + las crocs doradas + etc y nada una paja los juegos de buscar objetos no tengo 3 años ni alzheimer ya me desarrolle cognitivamente chau igual el arte es lindo y se trata sobre que te cagaste muriendo pero esta todo bien asi que bien ahi nose qepd

es un paso adelante en los souls pero fromsoftware todavia no puede hacer un juego que no se caiga a pedazos despues de la mitad

si bien no me molesta, la intro son unas diapositivas y las cinemáticas (aunque supongo que es por decisión de diseño que son pocas, cortas y simples) parecen hasta perder calidad hacia el final del juego.

de hecho, se acuerdan de mass effect 3 que tenia el mismo final pero con distintos colores? bueno elden ring tiene como 6 finales y 4 son la misma cinematica pero con skybox diferentes y 3 palabras cambiadas.

al principio pense que en esta entrega los elementos de la historia, como las quests, iban a estar contados de una forma mas simple, porque las primeras quests en Limgrave son bastante claras, gente pidiendo ayuda o buscando cosas. sencillo, despues empiezan a ponerse abstractas, cuanto mas mapa tenés mas lejos se empiezan a mover los npc, y ahora hay indicadores (podrian haber usado el sistema de dark souls 3 en vez de poner los nombres), pero cuando salio el juego tenias que ADIVINAR porque no siempre los personajes te dicen donde encontrarlos la proxima vez. y nada, dejas esa quest de lado y seguis jugando, o perdes horas revisitando 20 zonas viejas, o te metes a la wiki, una paja.

sobre la dificultad, pude ver masomenos la progresión que planearon y como va escalando el juego, pero el late game tiene jefes que tienen dos fases, patrones de ataque complicadisimos, gimmicks molestos o todo lo anterior y si tu barra de vida no ocupa toda la pantalla probablemente te vas a ir oneshoteado por casi todo (que igual no me jode que me oneshoteen, me jode que me tiren 20 ataques seguidos que tengo que esquivarlos frame perfect rolleando adelante atras y saltando al mismo tiempo).
un ejemplo de esto es la segunda fase del jefe final del juego, que me empujo a usar un hechizo de mierda roto para matarlo porque estaba cansado de pelearle a la fase 1.

bueno, hasta terminar Liurnia, que deben haber sido nose, 50 horas, fue una gran experiencia, podria decir perfecta, descubrir por mi cuenta todo lo que podía explorando, tratar de resolver las peticiones de los npc, ir tratando de descifrar como funciona este mundo nuevo, lo tipico de cualquier souls pero ahora en un mundo abierto gigantesco y lleno de cosas.
el combate es espectacular, la variedad de armas, la capacidad de cambiar y mezclar movimientos especiales, los hechizos, el nuevo block counter, todo se presta a crear una banda de builds diferentes.
esta libertad me mantuvo inmerso todo ese tiempo, me iba a dormir tarde pensando en levantarme y seguir jugando, me emocionaba hablando de como habia encontrado algo re piola o de como estaba buildeando mi personaje con otras personas que tambien estaban jugando. y por esas 50~ horas le pondria la puntuacion maxima pero el juego completo si cansa un poco.

recomiendo muchisimo empezar a jugar la saga por acá, super accesible. igual el precio no, chupame el choto bandai

This review was written before the game released