Shadow Madness

"One of the worst RPGs ever..."

In the history of the PlayStation, there were many RPGs. Some were good, some weren't, and then there was Shadow Madness, a game so bad that it's only really rivaled by Beyond the Beyond for the dubious honor of being the PlayStation's worst RPG.

My first impression was actually pretty positive; it started out strong and seemed pretty good. You start out as a thief named Stinger, whose town is destroyed for no good reason. Soon you find out that all the nearby towns are destroyed, and Windleaf, a sorceress from a nearby town, joins you. You spend the rest of the game trying to figure out what happened.

But slowly the story starts to fall apart. First, the game turns into yet another game with a predictable villain, who is, of course, a powerful wizard who has no real motivations to his actions. And then something called ''shadow madness'' starts to grip the people, but it is so poorly worked into the story that you might not notice. Did I mention the game is on rails, you usually can't go back to places you've already been to, and there is no bonus content other than a couple of mini-games?

The graphics are mostly forgettable. The pre-rendered FMV clips are actually pretty well done (especially the hidden ''black cauldron'' FMV...), but the in-game 3D characters were really poorly modeled, consisting only of a few polygons each. That, and the battle sequences induce motion blur for no good reason.

But wait, it gets worse! Even at the highest difficulty setting, the game is ridiculously easy. Pretty much everything goes down in one or two hits, you rarely have to heal your characters (let alone use magic), and you will most likely never have to revive a fallen character. To make things worse, there is a limit on how many items your characters can carry, there is no item archival service, and there are way too many items that do the same thing, thus cluttering up your inventory even more.

There is one timed mission in the game inside a twin pyramid, but due to a bug in the game's programming, it is possible to get yourself into a position where it's not possible to finish it in time if you go out through the wrong pyramid.

Now Shadow Madness' musical score is actually good. In fact, the music is pretty much the only good thing about this game. The sound effects sound like they are out of place half of the time.

But the music isn't good enough to save the rest of this game, which is no fun whatsoever after the first hour or so. I can't recommend avoiding this game enough...

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 12/30/02, Updated 12/30/02