With the PS3 version of Skyrim pissing me off with its crashes and bugs and Skyward Sword pissing me off from its sheer mediocrity (and Xenoblade on hiatus while I tried to get those two out of the way), it looks like hell has indeed frozen over: I have 2 PSP games to talk about. And great...they're both very flawed games that necessitate quite a few words. I think I'll split these up into 2 posts for easier reading.
Corpse Party - Alright, I'm a big fan of the When They Cry (Higurashi) anime, a story about a group of teenage friends who find themselves constantly repeating 1 particular summer week that always ends with all or nearly all of them dead in particularly nasty ways (often with one of the friends the killer). This game is kind of like When They Cry crossed with the Japanese horror film The Grudge, except not nearly that cool or interesting.
In this game, you play as members of a group of friends who incorrectly perform an occult ritual (because apparently all the cool kids these days are into that), sending them into a multi-dimensional Hell in the form of a derelict elementary school haunted by the ghosts of other occultists and serial killer victims. Over the course of 5 chapters, they have to find a way to find each other across dimensions and escape the school before the local Happy Haunts cause them to kill each other or themselves. Yeah, it's a happy story with some particularly grisly and painful deaths.
I know, it sounds pretty cool so far, right? Well, here's where the other shoe drops: it's a 16 bit-style visual novel game full of so-called "Bad Ends" typically triggered by the most seemingly-inconsequential and asinine of actions. And when you screw up, it's Game Over (sometimes 2 hours later) and up to 3 hours of play time lost if you didn't have a backup save early enough to change course. And of course you can't skip dialogue. Why would you
possibly want to skip such classic exchanges as two characters talking about sharing ass cream (no, as a matter of fact I'm
not making that up), "buttering [their] pooper", as it were? This is a game designed to be played with a FAQ in hand, because you will
not discover many of the obscure "Right End" triggers on your own. Throw in instant-kill ghosts that can really ruin your playthrough, and you have a game that can be pretty tedious to get through. And what little bonus content there is is pretty lame.
Visually, the game is pretty unimpressive. This was originally made with that old classic PC program RPG Maker, and it looks every bit of it (note that there is no battling of any kind in this game). The music fares much better with some
pretty cool tunes, though in the early going it's pretty inappropriate for a horror game. The Japanese voice acting is excellent, though, and the localization is pretty well-done. Finally, I really don't care for how the ending plays out, but that has more to do with my dislike for the traditions of Asian Horror movies (where
everyone is inevitably screwed no matter what they do). The game did get a sequel, though, that presumably tied up this incredibly convoluted and plot hole-ridden story.
Overall, Corpse Party was pretty average. I liked the story and atmosphere, but hated the trial & error gameplay and the way you pretty much
have to follow a guide to get through the game with what is deemed the only
good ending. I would probably play the sequel if it was ever localized, though, just to see how the story ends.
Topic: Rate The Last Game You Played (Read 189020 times)
