I first saw this game in Japan well over a year ago when scoping out the ones close to where I live. At first, I was utterly shocked that it even got a Japanese release, and was then lowkey dying to know if there was a Japanese dub in it. It took me another 17 or so months before I finally threw down the 300 whole yen to buy the thing (and be disappointed by its lack of a Japanese dub), but now I've played through it as well. It's not a terribly long game, and it took me around 6 hours to beat it on normal mode.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is, as the story goes, a game that was nearly finished before the 50 Cent name was slapped on it. While that may be totally unrelated to how the narrative plays out, the narrative is still as delightfully strange as it is simple. 50 Cent is doing a concert in the Middle East and after the show, when he goes to collect his 10 million bucks payment, the guy who owes it to him can't pay up because all his cash was stolen by gangsters. And not just any gangsters. SUPER bad tough gangsters. Instead, after some threatening from 50 Cent, he gives 50 Cent a priceless diamond-encrusted skull. That skull is shortly thereafter stolen by said SUPER gangs, and 50 goes on a quest to kill as many gangsters as he can to get his skull back.
While it is easy to dismiss the story as part of the never ending slew of post-Bush era modern military shooters, which it also definitely is part of, there is a certain beauty to just how 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand's story plays out. As an ego piece for 50 Cent, it is a quite genuinely fascinating look at just what an absolute bad ass he supposedly thinks of himself as despite being such an obviously terrible and amazingly petty person. There is a kind of Tommy Wiseau-esque charm to just how sincerely 50 Cent is portrayed in this, from how basically the entire soundtrack is his own music to even down to how you have a dedicated swearing button you can use to get more points when you kill an enemy. While I certainly wouldn't call the story good by any means, it is endlessly fascinating on many levels to me, and I kind of love it for that XD
The gameplay is a pretty solid co-op cover shooter, and that's really all there is to it. There's a point system, which is pretty neat for a shooter released within the last decade, and there are mid-stage mini-missions you can do within a certain amount of time for extra points, grenades, and super explodey bullets. You also get more points for quickly chaining together kills. There's money you can collect from fallen enemies and from boxes around the stages, but from the point system to the money collecting from enemies, the game really emphasizes a speedy and aggressive approach to combat, which is pretty fun~. You can use the money in stages to buy more taunts to throw with your dedicated swearing button, more animations for your QTE up-close melee kills, and of course more and bigger guns. It's not setting the world on fire, sure, but between the license and how well put together the game is generally, it's a cool way to mix up the giant bag of modern military shooters that inundate last gen's library.
The presentation is equal parts fascinating (as explained earlier) and grating. The game looks graphically alright for the time, but some of the character models look a little odd in cutscenes. The main female protagonist looks especially broken, and I'd even go as far as to say that her motion capture data was borked and they just had to go forward with what they had regardless XP. The soundtrack being basically entirely 50 Cent's music is kinda soul-draining given the game's 5+ hour runtime, as it really removes any kind of musical pacing to the action and it makes the game feel even more like "distilled video game with 50 Cent added" than it already is. I can't really comment on the quality of the hip hop, it not being a genre I have any familiar with, but I did get a huge belly laugh when I heard one of the songs rhyme "nickname" with "dick game" XD
As far as the Japanese version of the game is concerned, it's a really half-assed localization, and that also kinda adds to the charm for me. There's no dub, sure, but there ARE subtitles, and those subtitles are absolutely hilarious in just how little they capture anything unique about how 50 Cent & co talk. Sure, it's' plenty hilarious the first time you see a subtitle say "Fifty-san" or "Cent-san" (translating "Mr. Fifty" or "Mr. Cent"), but just how much of a normal irritated guy the subs make him sound is just so funny to me. I know Japanese doesn't really have swears like most languages, but just how toned down all the "motherfucker"-esque lines that 50 spits are add so much to the oddball charm of this game that I'm still sorta surprised at how well that enhances the overall experience XD
Verdict: Recommended. You can probably find this game for pretty cheap these days, and if you want a pretty solid third person shooter with a pretty damn odd theme, this is a really good fit. To yet again use a phrase I say a lot, it's not setting anyone's world on fire, but the odd theme and competent gameplay mesh together to make something quite memorable. When I mentioned I beat this game in the Slack chat, AJ mentioned that he would've never thought I'd play this game. I retort to that in that weird games are suuuuper up my alley, even for genres I don't often enjoy, and this completely fits the bill X3
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is, as the story goes, a game that was nearly finished before the 50 Cent name was slapped on it. While that may be totally unrelated to how the narrative plays out, the narrative is still as delightfully strange as it is simple. 50 Cent is doing a concert in the Middle East and after the show, when he goes to collect his 10 million bucks payment, the guy who owes it to him can't pay up because all his cash was stolen by gangsters. And not just any gangsters. SUPER bad tough gangsters. Instead, after some threatening from 50 Cent, he gives 50 Cent a priceless diamond-encrusted skull. That skull is shortly thereafter stolen by said SUPER gangs, and 50 goes on a quest to kill as many gangsters as he can to get his skull back.
While it is easy to dismiss the story as part of the never ending slew of post-Bush era modern military shooters, which it also definitely is part of, there is a certain beauty to just how 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand's story plays out. As an ego piece for 50 Cent, it is a quite genuinely fascinating look at just what an absolute bad ass he supposedly thinks of himself as despite being such an obviously terrible and amazingly petty person. There is a kind of Tommy Wiseau-esque charm to just how sincerely 50 Cent is portrayed in this, from how basically the entire soundtrack is his own music to even down to how you have a dedicated swearing button you can use to get more points when you kill an enemy. While I certainly wouldn't call the story good by any means, it is endlessly fascinating on many levels to me, and I kind of love it for that XD
The gameplay is a pretty solid co-op cover shooter, and that's really all there is to it. There's a point system, which is pretty neat for a shooter released within the last decade, and there are mid-stage mini-missions you can do within a certain amount of time for extra points, grenades, and super explodey bullets. You also get more points for quickly chaining together kills. There's money you can collect from fallen enemies and from boxes around the stages, but from the point system to the money collecting from enemies, the game really emphasizes a speedy and aggressive approach to combat, which is pretty fun~. You can use the money in stages to buy more taunts to throw with your dedicated swearing button, more animations for your QTE up-close melee kills, and of course more and bigger guns. It's not setting the world on fire, sure, but between the license and how well put together the game is generally, it's a cool way to mix up the giant bag of modern military shooters that inundate last gen's library.
The presentation is equal parts fascinating (as explained earlier) and grating. The game looks graphically alright for the time, but some of the character models look a little odd in cutscenes. The main female protagonist looks especially broken, and I'd even go as far as to say that her motion capture data was borked and they just had to go forward with what they had regardless XP. The soundtrack being basically entirely 50 Cent's music is kinda soul-draining given the game's 5+ hour runtime, as it really removes any kind of musical pacing to the action and it makes the game feel even more like "distilled video game with 50 Cent added" than it already is. I can't really comment on the quality of the hip hop, it not being a genre I have any familiar with, but I did get a huge belly laugh when I heard one of the songs rhyme "nickname" with "dick game" XD
As far as the Japanese version of the game is concerned, it's a really half-assed localization, and that also kinda adds to the charm for me. There's no dub, sure, but there ARE subtitles, and those subtitles are absolutely hilarious in just how little they capture anything unique about how 50 Cent & co talk. Sure, it's' plenty hilarious the first time you see a subtitle say "Fifty-san" or "Cent-san" (translating "Mr. Fifty" or "Mr. Cent"), but just how much of a normal irritated guy the subs make him sound is just so funny to me. I know Japanese doesn't really have swears like most languages, but just how toned down all the "motherfucker"-esque lines that 50 spits are add so much to the oddball charm of this game that I'm still sorta surprised at how well that enhances the overall experience XD
Verdict: Recommended. You can probably find this game for pretty cheap these days, and if you want a pretty solid third person shooter with a pretty damn odd theme, this is a really good fit. To yet again use a phrase I say a lot, it's not setting anyone's world on fire, but the odd theme and competent gameplay mesh together to make something quite memorable. When I mentioned I beat this game in the Slack chat, AJ mentioned that he would've never thought I'd play this game. I retort to that in that weird games are suuuuper up my alley, even for genres I don't often enjoy, and this completely fits the bill X3