this is a musou in the sense that a paper airplane can fly.

while you do follow characters from behind, and engage in hack and slack gameplay that involves combinations of a light and heavy attack, with a special move that charges with time - structurally, this game is almost entirely linear. the only fail state, barring one specific mission (in which you defend NPCs for about 4 minutes), is death. a single split path exists for one character - maybe they wanted to add more?

in a better built musou, since the combat isn't the part that involves your brain, what you are doing is making decisions of priority - x is being attacked but so is x, if i don't get to x first will he live? while not exactly 4x strategy, it uses some part of your brain. this does not. kill goblins.... or humans... or undead... things... and then move on to the next pile ad naseum.

there are 7 playable characters, each of which are distinct, and one of which has what i can only describe as the musou equivalent of a shmup gun (mash the fuck out it, it autoaims) as her light attack, which is kind of neat if simple. stages are reused for most characters with slightly different scenarios. the final boss is absolute horseshit without cheesing him, and the game just kind of ends afterward.

this game's selling point, the giant amount of enemies onscreen with minimal stutter, holds up. i found myself impressed with the sheer volume of enemies for the time. generally the framerate remains rock solid, but some of the bit special AOE moves that affect the physical engine absolutely obliterate it. really, any time more than like 3 things are moving tied to the physics engine at once, the game shits itself. the troll's in particular once reduced the game to literally 1 fps.

is this game worth playing? honestly, not really. if you are the world's biggest kingdom under fire fan... maybe. but hey, the music is good.

while many anime games these days settle for a 3D arena fighter, ubisoft threw caution to the wind and shit out an open world (sort of) naruto game with a focus on replicating the movement of the series - and the actual movement feels pretty good! great sense of speed, stops on a dime, mostly co-operative camera.

its just everything else that doesn't. calling the core fighting game-style combat anemic is an understatement, and the missions that aren't story related are extremely dry and often involve a long stretch of backtracking for about 30 seconds of new content. its trying.

additionally, while the game features clips from the show, it also features different voice actors for most of the minor cast, including iruka, jiraiya, sarutobi, and ebisu - and they are all extremely canadian and cannot pronounce ramen to save their life. everyone in this game says "ray-men" and it drives me up a wall.

this feels like a tech demo. fingers crossed the sequel irons the kinks out - and hires the voice actors.

ggirlls? wrestle....


girls


.... wrestle

fever dream. someone's oc in their custom gmod campaign. an example of what happens when devs build around exciting new technology and forget to make it coherent.

from the moment i watched the extremely cavia intro cinematic, i was hooked. bullet witch is surprisingly comfy despite its wonkiness, and i laughed out loud several times at the bizarro cadences of the actors who definitely had zero or no voice direction. is it mechanically rich? no. is it stupid as hell and headscratching? is the final boss (as a reminder this is a third person shooter) like literally 30 minutes long? yes. but like... in a fun way. promise

mom can we get metal slug

no we have metal slug at home

metal slug at home: