My mom used to be nuts for greatest hits albums. She thought they were the best invention since toilet paper. A bunch of the very best songs by your favorite artist, without all those 'meh' songs that you get in a regular album. Good deal.
Blades of Time is exactly that. A greatest hits album.
This fast-paced action game by Konami borrows A LOT from other platinum titles in the genre, but it does so gracefully enough that it doesn't feel like a rip-off. Drop God of War, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, Fable and Final Fantasy into a blender, and you'll get a Blades of Time smoothie.
The general outline of the story seems familiar: you play Ayumi, a treasure hunter. Ayumi is looking for, wait for it.. treasure. After a series of events, she ends up traveling to an alternate world trying to score some booty. The shiny, glimmering kind. A bunch of dead meanies and twists later, turns out Ayumi, who also happens to be a dual-sword-wielding, steaming-hot piece of ass, mind you, was meant to save the world or somesuch. The story not being super original is not a big deal. The real problem is that the narrative feels completely ripped off from the actual game. For 90% of your playtime, you'll be going from point A to point B just because the game tells you to, but without a clear idea of where the plot is leading you or why.
Graphically, the game looks very tasteful. It doesn't go overboard with crispness and detail, which is good, but overall it looks fantastic. The textures are very clear and defined, some landscapes are textbook eye-candy and the effects and lighting come together to make you go "Ooo, pretty!" without getting in the way too much. Worth mentioning, the game pulls all this off with an incredibly smooth engine. I think this is one of the best, if not *the* best engine I've seen in terms of performance-quality ratio since the original Assassin's Creed came out. With a mid-range computer, with only 2 gigs of the crappiest RAM you can find, I've had no problem running the game maxed out without a single hitch, fps drop, stutter, freeze or anything. On top of that, this is a console port so mad props to Konami for some excellent coding that we rarely get to see these days.
To even things out, the music and voice acting is kind of a let down. Music is not all that present in this game. Some random, generic fantasy-themed backing track will kill the silence every once in a while but no amazingly original soundtrack happening here. The voice-acting is also pretty bad. It's not so much the actors being bad at delivering their lines, but rather the actual lines being bad or the dialogue not feeling cohesive. Maybe more annoying is the fact that Ayumi digs talking to herself. A lot. Like, really, a lot. I'm assuming this was dubbed over an original Japanese version, where certain parts of dialogue or inner monologue might make more sense, so I guess this is forgivable.
The gameplay is where the juicy stuff is. It's definitely Blades of Time's biggest selling point and it's here where most of the borrowing happens. The combat feels very reminiscent of other action games but without being too overly complicated. You have your combos, you have your fireballs and ice lances, you have your firestorms and blizzards, you have your air-jumping, you have your dashing, you have your execution sequences and you have your Huey-Lewis-back-in-time power. The beauty of it is that every element of combat or movement feels extremely natural and it's super easy to pick up. There are no complicated input strings to get that combo you want or a skill bar with a gazillion hotkeys. This results in very fun and rewarding combat sequences. Not unlike Charlie Sheen, combat in this game has only one speed: go. That being said, the game does have a respectable amount of frustrating bosses and puzzles.
So: what's wrong with it? Well, nothing, really. By all accounts, this is just a great game however you want to look at it. But the same way a greatest hits album is not praised for being original, but rather for doing a good job at putting a bunch of great songs together, you can't have it both ways in video-games either. Be it plot elements, the general setting, some concepts in art and presentation, combat and movement, mission design or puzzles, Blades of Time borrows the good aspects from other well-known games. The trade-off is that there's no originality, no break-through, no innovation. There's nothing about how this game plays that hasn't been done before.
Konami did a heck of a job at taking bits and pieces of what's made other action games great, really polishing them and putting them all together into Blades of Time. It's nothing ground-breaking by any means, but at least it's honest in what it does. More importantly, it's fun. So, if you're in the mood to play a somewhat brief, very smooth, albeit generic hack-and-slash game, give it a whirl. If you're looking for that hidden gem that might be imperfect but has something unique and original to offer, you won't find it here.
Blades of Time is exactly that. A greatest hits album.
This fast-paced action game by Konami borrows A LOT from other platinum titles in the genre, but it does so gracefully enough that it doesn't feel like a rip-off. Drop God of War, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, Fable and Final Fantasy into a blender, and you'll get a Blades of Time smoothie.
The general outline of the story seems familiar: you play Ayumi, a treasure hunter. Ayumi is looking for, wait for it.. treasure. After a series of events, she ends up traveling to an alternate world trying to score some booty. The shiny, glimmering kind. A bunch of dead meanies and twists later, turns out Ayumi, who also happens to be a dual-sword-wielding, steaming-hot piece of ass, mind you, was meant to save the world or somesuch. The story not being super original is not a big deal. The real problem is that the narrative feels completely ripped off from the actual game. For 90% of your playtime, you'll be going from point A to point B just because the game tells you to, but without a clear idea of where the plot is leading you or why.
Graphically, the game looks very tasteful. It doesn't go overboard with crispness and detail, which is good, but overall it looks fantastic. The textures are very clear and defined, some landscapes are textbook eye-candy and the effects and lighting come together to make you go "Ooo, pretty!" without getting in the way too much. Worth mentioning, the game pulls all this off with an incredibly smooth engine. I think this is one of the best, if not *the* best engine I've seen in terms of performance-quality ratio since the original Assassin's Creed came out. With a mid-range computer, with only 2 gigs of the crappiest RAM you can find, I've had no problem running the game maxed out without a single hitch, fps drop, stutter, freeze or anything. On top of that, this is a console port so mad props to Konami for some excellent coding that we rarely get to see these days.
To even things out, the music and voice acting is kind of a let down. Music is not all that present in this game. Some random, generic fantasy-themed backing track will kill the silence every once in a while but no amazingly original soundtrack happening here. The voice-acting is also pretty bad. It's not so much the actors being bad at delivering their lines, but rather the actual lines being bad or the dialogue not feeling cohesive. Maybe more annoying is the fact that Ayumi digs talking to herself. A lot. Like, really, a lot. I'm assuming this was dubbed over an original Japanese version, where certain parts of dialogue or inner monologue might make more sense, so I guess this is forgivable.
The gameplay is where the juicy stuff is. It's definitely Blades of Time's biggest selling point and it's here where most of the borrowing happens. The combat feels very reminiscent of other action games but without being too overly complicated. You have your combos, you have your fireballs and ice lances, you have your firestorms and blizzards, you have your air-jumping, you have your dashing, you have your execution sequences and you have your Huey-Lewis-back-in-time power. The beauty of it is that every element of combat or movement feels extremely natural and it's super easy to pick up. There are no complicated input strings to get that combo you want or a skill bar with a gazillion hotkeys. This results in very fun and rewarding combat sequences. Not unlike Charlie Sheen, combat in this game has only one speed: go. That being said, the game does have a respectable amount of frustrating bosses and puzzles.
So: what's wrong with it? Well, nothing, really. By all accounts, this is just a great game however you want to look at it. But the same way a greatest hits album is not praised for being original, but rather for doing a good job at putting a bunch of great songs together, you can't have it both ways in video-games either. Be it plot elements, the general setting, some concepts in art and presentation, combat and movement, mission design or puzzles, Blades of Time borrows the good aspects from other well-known games. The trade-off is that there's no originality, no break-through, no innovation. There's nothing about how this game plays that hasn't been done before.
Konami did a heck of a job at taking bits and pieces of what's made other action games great, really polishing them and putting them all together into Blades of Time. It's nothing ground-breaking by any means, but at least it's honest in what it does. More importantly, it's fun. So, if you're in the mood to play a somewhat brief, very smooth, albeit generic hack-and-slash game, give it a whirl. If you're looking for that hidden gem that might be imperfect but has something unique and original to offer, you won't find it here.
