Koei makes games. I mainly know them for an NES strategy game I never played and an interminable series of ancient Chinese beat 'em ups called Dynasty Warriors. Dynasty Warriors is powerful mediocre. Slash away at dozens of enemy soldiers until they all go poof. Crimson Sea 2 seems to be the sci-fi offshoot, occasionally throwing a roomful of angry bugs or humanoid reptiles at the player.
But Dynasty Warriors bored me silly. I just beat Crimson Sea 2 (just on easy, mind you) having gotten the highest possible rank in every mission. I believe that constitutes 60 missions, some played half a dozen times to secure the best rank. I believe my save file is somewhere in the 25-30 hour range.
Why?
Taming the audience certainly had something to do with it. All the cinemas from the first game are included. Watching them, I started to root for the folks trying to tell this funky story. Yeah, it's hyper clichéd. But like a good B movie, that all falls away when the action kicks in.
Variety helped. A lot of the missions were basically just killing lots of monsters or collecting stuff. But there are enough variations on the theme that I always kept on playing. There's even a stealth mission which didn't totally suck. Who'd have thunk it?
The collecting bug definitely got me. Bad guys will occasionally drop tokens which can be spent to power up guns, swords, or psionics. There's a guy on the space station who will pay for killing random types of enemies. And there's another guy on the station who will pay for hunting down these flying jellyfish things that only appear when you enter the level with no mission. Oh, and there are ways to get critical hits on bad guys that make them drop five tokens instead of one. I got bored with the bounty hunting as there weren't many items I needed. And I got bored hunting down the jellyfish, too. That guy was too stingy with the loot. But I'd still say the collecting element helped the game, overall.
The combat was pretty decent. Like I mentioned in a previous post, the combat is a non-standard system. Lock on or switch to strafe mode to roll instead of jump. R2 to burn 1/3rd of the psionics gauge in exchange for five seconds of slo-mo, during which your move set changes significantly. It's convoluted, but I still enjoyed it. Sure, there wasn't as much technique as Devil May Cry, but who needs technique when you're hacking and blasting away at a couple dozen rampaging monsters in slow motion. Plus extending combos and getting criticals was it's own game, one which I could strive for or ignore, setting my own level of challenge.
The game also has split screen co-op, but the control scheme is so arcane I doubt I'll ever inflict it on anyone. Maybe Matthew. :)
Final Score
4 of 5
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