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« on: March 05, 2011, 07:33:56 AM »
Hmm. No one's talking about this game. I am disappoint.
Let's get one thing out of the way with this game. They dropped the ball big time when it comes to DLC. Now I'm cool with having extra characters available down the line. But not when they're in the intro cutscene. And not when they're available day 1. It makes me think that the character DLC is unlock codes, but I don't know for sure, so innocent until proven guilty. But still, the 2 extra characters (so far, anyway) could have easily been made unlockable through beating the game. One for beating Arcade mode, one for beating Rising mode. But they decided to make them separate downloads for $2.50 each. Effectively making the game a $20 game. You know I'm far more forgiving of DLC than anyone else on this site, maybe even the whole internet, but this case was pretty gay.
Doesn't help that Harley is a waste of space. The only perk to using him is that he naturally starts with 4 health, and can be upgraded to 8 max in Rising mode. Some of his upgrades are cheaper, as advertised, but some are more expensive in turn. He can start with the two weapons that Bahamut and Krystal can't start with, but I can't say Crash Missiles are worth it. And he looks badass. But that's it. In the end, he's not worth it at all.
Sayuri, on the other hand. She is worth 9 times the price you pay for her. Sayuri doesn't use guns. She's got a sword. And this sword is [tornado fang]ing strong. Now, Harley is supposed to be the easy mode of the game. Far from it, cause Sayuri lowers the difficulty quite a bit just from her pure strength. When you know what you're doing, you can plow through the game with her. She certainly makes Arcade mode easier because she doesn't have to worry about keeping lvl3 Laser the entire game just to survive. And it just feels so satisfying to slice through everything. The game is already a pretty fun Contra, but Sayuri makes it even funner and throws in some Strider fun too. So swallow your pride and shell out the extra money, you pussy. You'll thank yourself later.
No matter who you're playing as, this game is really fun. Sure you'll get your ass kicked early on, but it's the kind of asskicking that makes you get back up and try again, getting a little further every time. However, a PSA about the earlygame difficulty. When you first start the game, you have 3 continues if you die. Now at your skill level at the beginning, you'll likely use them all up not even a quarter of the way through the game. Now when I first played, I thought to myself "I have to do this whole game on 3 credits? Oh this is going to be impossible!" However, the game isn't that much of a [sonic slicer]. Each time you play either Arcade or Rising, whether that be to completion or running out of continues, you earn an extra continue to use the next time you play. And if you play the game 100 times, you'll cap at 573 continues. More than you'll ever need, but yeah.
tl;dr If you're turned off by how brutal the game is early on, just stick with it and it will get easier even if you skill level refuses to rise.
The only true flaw with the game is that it doesn't detail how to do many of the special actions you have. For all except the bullet reflect, you have to be dashing to use the action. And they're actually very useful. But the game has so many more plusses than that. It looks and sounds fantastic, just what you should expect from ASW. The voice acting is terrible, but in that PS1 funny terrible. It controls really well, although the option to turn off command dash would've been nice. The stages are big, but only slow if you never dash. The bosses are fun (Stage 4's is a hilight; the game turns into a shmup). And it's Contra.
If you have a 360, get this game right now. If you have a PS3, get it the second it's available, whenever that may be.
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