"A mediocre 3rd person action game."

Introduction

Maken Shao Demon Sword is a game in 3rd person on the PS2.

Story

The cut scenes are spoken in Japanese and have subtitles in English. The translation is too direct. The characters say some rather unusual things like “We must kill the vicious ones but leave the prominent ones” and “I must honour my father”. The words and syntax have been translated but not the context. The story is hard to follow because of the bad translation. Some information isn't covered in the cut scenes and can only be learnt from an information/glossary menu.

The story is set in a future where there is great tension between China and USA. A group of scientists in Japan have been developing “image engineering” technology. An “image” is essentially a soul. The character you start off becomes merged with an artificial life form called Maken. Maken can take over other bodies by use of “brain-jacking”. Maken becomes involved in a conflict between a Chinese God called Mr Meteor who wants to destroy the world and a secret society called the Fukenshi who want to save it. Mr Meteor can also brain-jack people who become his Hakke (henchmen).

There are multiple story paths and unlockable features. The levels are located in a variety of places e.g. Hong Kong, India, Amsterdam, Portugal. You need to brain-jack certain characters in order to access parts of levels. Even though the translation is poor, the setting is quite good.

Game-play

What sets this game apart from any other 3rd person game I have played is the way it rewards the player for avoiding getting hurt by use of the “image flare” system. The player gets image points by killing enemies. Image points are used to brain-jack other characters and learn new moves with the character you are being. Once all of a character's moves are learnt, the character gets a bonus to some of its stats.

The player also has an image flare level. The image points you receive for killing an enemy is increased multiplicatively for each level. The image flare level starts off at 1 and can be increased up to level 5. Your image flare level increases for each enemy you kill but goes back to level 1 if you get hurt. To upgrade your characters quickly, you must avoid getting hurt.

The controls let your character attack, guard, lock-on, jump, use items etc. The characters you can be have there own short range weapon e.g. swords, batons etc. Rather than running around shooting enemies, you would be running around beating them up.

Graphics/Music/Sound

The in game and cut-scene graphics are ok. I quite liked how the camera angles changed during the cut scenes. While playing the game, if the camera zooms into your back too much, then your opaque character is replaced with a translucent silhouette so you can still see what you are doing.

The music is quite good. The sound effects are pretty average.

Final Recommendation

This game is fairly mediocre with the image flare system seeming like the only original feature. It can be frustrating at times but shouldn't be too difficult with practice. Some parts of the game may take many attempts before success.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/25/06