One of the best games you've probably never heard of.
User Rating: 9.2 | Blood Will Tell: Tezuka Osamu's Dororo PS2
Congratulations! If you're reading this, than you must have heard of a Blood Will Tell. Sega's marketing and advertising department have yet again managed to do absolutely nothing for a great import and a great game (anybody else remember Otogi?). The basic story is simple. Demons have taken 48 parts of your body and you're going to maim, impale, slaughter, slash, bruise, and frappe everything in your way until you get 'em back. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? It is. It really, really is. Blood Will Tell is probably one of the most enjoyable games i've played this year. It is basically an action adventure game (similar to Onimusha) with some light RPG elements (like Castlevania or Metroid) that help you progress through the game and make your character more powerful. Your character starts with 2 sword arms (that can be switched to normal arms with a single, but more powerful sword), a machine gun in one arm and a cannon built in to one leg. Yes, i know it sounds ridiculous, but it makes for a great combat system. Your sword arms don't have the reach of the long sword, but they level up with use and give you longer, more powerful combos. Switching to the long sword gives you a longer reach, stronger attacks and wide selection of swords, each with different special abilities, but a slower attack speed. The cannon and machine gun both have very limited ammo supplies, but can be the winning factor in many of the boss battles. The most addicting part of Blood Will Tell's combat system is definitely the "Slash" mode. By charging your attack and striking an enemy, a series of button combinations will appear at the bottom of the screen. By hitting as many of the combinations as possible within a time-limit you can perform devastating attacks. The longer the combination, the better the items the defeated enemy drops. Eventually you'll catch yourself shooting for that extra 3 or 4 button combo that means the difference between just health or getting that spiffy new sword. On top of all this, the game has over 50 boss battles, most of which give the main character, Hyakkimaru, one of his missing body parts, improving his stats or giving him a new ability. The battles range in difficulty from ridiculously easy to controller-throwing hard, but are almost without exception entertaining. The weakest parts of the game are without a doubt the Dororo side-quests. You take control of Hyakkimaru's extremely androgynous sidekick Dororo and run off in search of some vital piece of information or something equally inane. They do provide a slight change of pace, and are usually relatively painless, so most gamers should plow through them quickly and be able to get back to mincing bad guys in no time. Blood Will Tell has a good, if somewhat obvious, storyline and voice acting that should be familiar to anyone fond of anime (cheesy, but not necessarily bad). The sound effects are unobtrusive and fitting. The graphics and character modeling aren't spectacular, but they have a good sense of style and fit in well with the medieval japanese feel of the game. The pre-rendered cinematics, especially the opening movie, are extremely well directed and animated. It's one of the few times I've acutally sat and watched the intro of a game 2 or 3 times. So, from a technical standpoint, Blood Will Tell is definitely nothing to get excited over. It's well polished and solid, with only a few framerate problems during large scale battles (but what PS2 game doesn't have that problem?). It more than makes up for its technical simplicity in length of gameplay (probably 15-20+ hours for most people) and, an often forgotten part of many games, fun! And that's what it all boils down to. Blood Will Tell isn't incredibly challenging, it isn't revolutionary, but it is a hell of a lot of fun to spend time with.
