Azurik: Rise of Perathia

"Cease ye to vex me, X-box"

Taking advantage of EB's scrumptious ''buy two used games and get 10% off'' thingie, I picked up two games that I'd seen mildly impressive trailers for, Mad Dash Racing and Azurik: The Rise of Perathia. Okay, I lied. Mad Dash had a nice trailer. Azurik had a disgustingly cliche plot intro on the Halo disc. The plot's not really that bad, but on the little demo movie, it's the worst thing on the planet. Worse than the baby-killers of Quetzelzacatanango. (You get a cookie if you can name the reference)

Plot: 4/10
In Perathia, there are these guys called Lore Guardians who have these disks that keep the elements in balance and allow the Lore Guardians to harness them to serve their benevolent ends. The only trouble is that the Death disk disappeared some generations ago. Wouldn't you know it, the one Lore Guardian that has malevolent interests would find it after trying to kill Azurik. Curiously, this doesn't get him kicked out of the order. It's more of an ''Oh, Balthasar, you silly rapscallion. I never get tired of your antics, trying to kill the new guy and such,'' thing. So he gets all bitter and possessed by the mysterious Death Guardian, who shatters all of the other disks, even though the elements are supposed to be naturally kept in balance. Right.

Apparently, although the element of death has remained wholly unaffected, every other element begins going hay-wire immediately after the disks are destroyed. The choice is obvious: Take the apprentice Lore Guardian with the more annoyingly drolling whine than Mark Hammil and have him go recover the disks.

Innovation: 6/10
Well the magic system is something new. Sorta. You combine the four elements to do something to your little razor-edged quarterstaff, The Axion. (It's unclear whether or not every Lore Guardian receives an Axion or Azurik is just blessed to have one) It's nothing so amazing, though. Not like Nightcaster. And we all know how that worked out.

Graphics: 9/10
Beautiful, simply stunning. The backgrounds and foregrounds and fairegrounds are all works of art, if you're inclined to call them that. This really shows what the X-box is capable of. Character models are very nice too.

Sound: 5/10
Main-character voice-acting is nothing to sneeze at. Casting's fine. The music isn't always memorable but is never really bad. Oh, but if you go into 'town,' all the little NPCs have something to say. Specifically, the men have about four things they say, the women have about four things to say and the children have about two. These are complete and utter ****. ****, I say. They're both annoying and poorly done. The child sounds as though he's (Apparently there are no female children in Perathia, sort of like mainland China. Adrenix, you clever bastards) been at the studio for hours and just wants to go home. They're totally unnecessary and only detract from the game. I hate them I hate them I hate them. Waaah.

Control: 6/10
Tell me why someone would combine poor jumping with an unnecessary animation of Azurik's loincloth flying up and difficult jumps. I guess otherwise their game might be beloved or something. Anihoo, the control aside from jumping problems is actually quite good. I hear a bit about people complaining about being able to move in only 16 directions instead of 256, but if you're counting the directions he can move, I really don't want to have to argue with you. I fear your kind too much.

Magic is done quite easily, with each of the six buttons (A, B, X, Y, White and Black) activating an element to be combined. I thought it was a very nice touch.

Gameplay: 3/10
You have two attacks, a thrust-thrust-slash combination and a little spinny thing. You'll find that these are plentiful to take down a group of up to two 'real' enemies. Any more and you'll find yourself quite dead. Combine that with infrequent save points and you've got yourself a recipe for making me feel the need to write as scathing a review as this one. The jumping, as mentioned before, is a nightmare of mishaps. Of course, it's marvelous fun when you encounter them in groups of two and don't have to do so much jumping. The countless and small really stupid things they did just outweigh the good. Gameplay is also so incredibly non-linear that any attempts to pull this off without a strategy guide will just make you want to cry. I don't say that very often, but, in an attempt to be innovative, massively large parts of the world are available to you soon after the very beginning, and you'll have to go to the earth realm to get this, then to the water realm, then to the earth realm again, and it's all very stressful. You can go consult the older Lore Guardian, if you want to brave a trip through town. You'll have to get out of the realm you're in first, of course, which can be quite a pain. Then you'll have to walk up the hill, which'll take a good couple of minutes. And then you'll have to get back to the ground, which is even less fun, because Perathians curiously explode upon contact with the ground from drops of more than 15 feet. And even then, it's pretty much limited to ''Search the Fire Realm.''

Buy or Rent?
Rent it and see if you don't mind running around like a chicken with its legs cut off and a pack of hungry, although frequently similarly amputated, dogs following you. There are certainly enough people who do on the message board for this game. Like I said, it's a lot of fun when you're not being swarmed like Winnie The Pooh at a bee convention or walking around the elemental realms with no direction.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/07/02, Updated 08/07/02