This is a game you play for the narrative. The gameplay is just there so you can call it a video game instead of an interactive novel. Since I play games for the storyline anyway, this game is just perfect! Let me reiterate this: DO NOT get this game for gameplay. The fighting, such as it is, is repetitive. With the Dash skill alone you can beat every battle, and there are no boss battles at all. Again, NO BOSS BATTLES! I beat the whole game with no effort at all. And that's alright, because this game is not supposed to be a challenge. This game is supposed to tell a story, and tell it in a very good (and quite amusing) way. If you play this game for the story, you will love it. Each time you start the story you have choices to make. Each choice determines what your future choices will be and each series of choices determines how you will end the story. Usually you will die, horribly and gruesomely. But the magic book will always take you back to the beginning, with new knowledge that you will use to make better choices next time. Or... maybe not. Maybe you will make a different bad choice, knowing full well it's a bad choice, just to see what happens. I did that a few times before I finally took the right path. Enjoy the story. You might find yourself replaying it just to find out more of the story, or what might have happened if...
Odd how some things you can accept as normal in a game and other things throw you. Technically this game is pretty good. Graphics, gameplay, voice acting, even the story is pretty good. Normally this game would get five stars. I can take in stride that a shinobi and an orphan from the street could take out a whole map of thugs without being noticed. That's just part of the game mechanics. But what I could not deal with was when the samurai betrayed his master. Nope, can't handle it. It completely broke the whole story for me. I stopped playing it and went to youtube for a let's-play of the rest of the game to save time. Samurai DO NOT betray their masters.
Some games are made for the purpose of selling another game, and a story is added as an afterthought. This game is not one of them. Xanadu Next is a story with a game wrapped around it, not a game that has a story thrown in at the last moment. It's a pretty good story, about a great evil that has been sealed away and is once again stirring, the hero who is to defend a land against that evil, and the people from the past who sealed the evil and got sealed in stone themselves. If you like to play games for the story, get this game. This is not to slight the gameplay, mind you. This action RPG has simple but effective gameplay, solid upgrading and leveling up that you can feel in play and a good inventory that never feels really cluttered. You'll like fighting in between story events. But I stress the story because it outshines all the other elements of the game. And you'll never believe who the Black Bride is.
The title says it all. The game play was fair, the summons were usable, we have the makings of a good game here... but the story was thrown together with a dash of this and a pinch of that just for the sake of making a story to go with the game. Unfortunately I play games for the storyline so I didn't even make it halfway through before getting bored with this game. All the characters were forgettable and all the plot twists were predictable. Three stars for a mechanically good game. If you play games just to be playing them you'll like this one. If you play games for the story, move on. (Xanadu Next is probably what you're looking for, it has a great story.)
