Castlevania: Lords of Shadow...
From the first trailer, my mind was writing it off. Looks like generic high fantasy, I thought, seeing the goblins and trolls and ogres. Usually I feel alienated by anything remotely resembling D&D -- swords and sorcery is done to death, the king of clichés, and I just wasn't interested.
Then the GAF hive-mind weighed in, and did what it does best, fixating on the game's faults to the exclusion of all else. There's the occasional aimless wandering, they said, and imprecise platforming that causes cheap deaths. The hit detection is spotty, they claimed, and the Titan battles are poor imitations of Shadow of the Colossus... I read the criticisms and in my mind, the game was diminished.
Still, I needed a Christmas gift for my brother. He's big on the DS Castlevanias, from Dawn of Sorrow to Order of Ecclesia. I knew this was different, but he was smitten with the eight-minute Kojima trailer, so I got him the game.
Come Christmas, I watched him play it... And play it... And play it... Several nights and 12 chapters later, he had finished the game, I had seen the adventure in full -- and I'm still thinking about it.
It's a wonderful game. I'm astounded to say it, but it's true. I can see the basis to every criticism leveled against it. I can see where there's room for improvement. At first the story seemed heavy-handed and over-dramatic. At first, even the HUD seemed overdone. But if ever there was a case of "The game is more than the sum of its parts," this is it. It's SO much more than the sum of its parts.
First, in terms of its creative, I'm surprised how well it all came together. The game feels like a love letter to three distinctly different genres -- high fantasy, horror and weird fiction -- and it executes each of them exceptionally well.
The first third of the game, the Land of the Lycans, is the high fantasy, with fairy-filled glens, haunted hollows, the ruins of ancient civilizations... Werewolves, wargs, goblins, trolls, Titans... Bright colors, a sense of whimsy and wonder.
Then you move to the horror, the Land of the Vampires, from a village and cathedral in a snowy forest, to the flickering candles and ice-glazed corridors of the castle. Here there are corpse-eating ghouls, blood-soaked vampires, a shambling mechanical spider -- stuff far scarier than the magic and monsters of earlier chapters.
The game then takes a turn for the bizarre as you enter the underworld... which I won't describe here for fear of spoilers, but suffice it to say, it's otherworldly.
The thing they all have in common is they're lushly, lovingly rendered, by artists clearly in love with the fictions that inspired them. It's the sort of enthusiasm I can get behind, even if I don't normally share a penchant for, say, D&D. It's infectious, in other words; you can't help but feel like a seven-year-old again, enjoying it all for the sheer badass-ity of the moment.
And there are some beautiful sights, including panoramic shots paralleled only by Uncharted 2. The tracking shot of the flying buttresses of the castle come to mind... There's a great sense of scale, and so much detail, too.
Thinking back on it all, though, it's the variety that's most impressive. You go to so many places... The game has a feeling of fullness to it that I haven't quite experienced since Resident Evil 4. You feel like you've come so far by the time you reach the end. It truly feels like an adventure, as cliché as that sounds.
One fun to play, too. In my experiments with the game (as I mostly watched my brother play), I found the controls tight and responsive. The platforming wasn't as problematic as I had heard, and I played one of the allegedly trickier sections, the clock tower. The combat is delightful, thanks to a masterful magic mechanic where regular hits give you light or shadow magic -- your choice -- and then using light magic restores health with each hit dealt, while shadow magic deals more damage. It's a great risk/reward dynamic: sacrifice magic for health, or risk health for magic.
And the story driving it all, while cliché at first, takes an appreciated turn for the tragic as you get deeper into the game. Gabriel starts as the romanticized knight in shining armor, but thanks to Patrick Stewart's narration in-between chapters, you get a strong sense of Gabriel's growing alienation from his order, his life, even God. There's a beautiful melancholy to the music, too -- Belmont's Theme and Waterfalls of Agharta are two of my favorites.
I guess I don't know where I'm going with all of this, other than to say that if you were deterred from this game by impressions that made it sound less than airtight, or if you were, like me, initially turned off by what appears to be cliché-riddled fantasy -- don't be. Give it a chance. Lose yourself in its warm blanket of detail. You may find Lords of Shadow is a wonderful experience.
From the first trailer, my mind was writing it off. Looks like generic high fantasy, I thought, seeing the goblins and trolls and ogres. Usually I feel alienated by anything remotely resembling D&D -- swords and sorcery is done to death, the king of clichés, and I just wasn't interested.
Then the GAF hive-mind weighed in, and did what it does best, fixating on the game's faults to the exclusion of all else. There's the occasional aimless wandering, they said, and imprecise platforming that causes cheap deaths. The hit detection is spotty, they claimed, and the Titan battles are poor imitations of Shadow of the Colossus... I read the criticisms and in my mind, the game was diminished.
Still, I needed a Christmas gift for my brother. He's big on the DS Castlevanias, from Dawn of Sorrow to Order of Ecclesia. I knew this was different, but he was smitten with the eight-minute Kojima trailer, so I got him the game.
Come Christmas, I watched him play it... And play it... And play it... Several nights and 12 chapters later, he had finished the game, I had seen the adventure in full -- and I'm still thinking about it.
It's a wonderful game. I'm astounded to say it, but it's true. I can see the basis to every criticism leveled against it. I can see where there's room for improvement. At first the story seemed heavy-handed and over-dramatic. At first, even the HUD seemed overdone. But if ever there was a case of "The game is more than the sum of its parts," this is it. It's SO much more than the sum of its parts.
First, in terms of its creative, I'm surprised how well it all came together. The game feels like a love letter to three distinctly different genres -- high fantasy, horror and weird fiction -- and it executes each of them exceptionally well.
The first third of the game, the Land of the Lycans, is the high fantasy, with fairy-filled glens, haunted hollows, the ruins of ancient civilizations... Werewolves, wargs, goblins, trolls, Titans... Bright colors, a sense of whimsy and wonder.
Then you move to the horror, the Land of the Vampires, from a village and cathedral in a snowy forest, to the flickering candles and ice-glazed corridors of the castle. Here there are corpse-eating ghouls, blood-soaked vampires, a shambling mechanical spider -- stuff far scarier than the magic and monsters of earlier chapters.
The game then takes a turn for the bizarre as you enter the underworld... which I won't describe here for fear of spoilers, but suffice it to say, it's otherworldly.
The thing they all have in common is they're lushly, lovingly rendered, by artists clearly in love with the fictions that inspired them. It's the sort of enthusiasm I can get behind, even if I don't normally share a penchant for, say, D&D. It's infectious, in other words; you can't help but feel like a seven-year-old again, enjoying it all for the sheer badass-ity of the moment.
And there are some beautiful sights, including panoramic shots paralleled only by Uncharted 2. The tracking shot of the flying buttresses of the castle come to mind... There's a great sense of scale, and so much detail, too.
Thinking back on it all, though, it's the variety that's most impressive. You go to so many places... The game has a feeling of fullness to it that I haven't quite experienced since Resident Evil 4. You feel like you've come so far by the time you reach the end. It truly feels like an adventure, as cliché as that sounds.
One fun to play, too. In my experiments with the game (as I mostly watched my brother play), I found the controls tight and responsive. The platforming wasn't as problematic as I had heard, and I played one of the allegedly trickier sections, the clock tower. The combat is delightful, thanks to a masterful magic mechanic where regular hits give you light or shadow magic -- your choice -- and then using light magic restores health with each hit dealt, while shadow magic deals more damage. It's a great risk/reward dynamic: sacrifice magic for health, or risk health for magic.
And the story driving it all, while cliché at first, takes an appreciated turn for the tragic as you get deeper into the game. Gabriel starts as the romanticized knight in shining armor, but thanks to Patrick Stewart's narration in-between chapters, you get a strong sense of Gabriel's growing alienation from his order, his life, even God. There's a beautiful melancholy to the music, too -- Belmont's Theme and Waterfalls of Agharta are two of my favorites.
I guess I don't know where I'm going with all of this, other than to say that if you were deterred from this game by impressions that made it sound less than airtight, or if you were, like me, initially turned off by what appears to be cliché-riddled fantasy -- don't be. Give it a chance. Lose yourself in its warm blanket of detail. You may find Lords of Shadow is a wonderful experience.
