A little bit disappointing to me
I am mostly disappointed about this game because everything about it changed. It is not an RPG anymore. unlike the last game where you could bring up a map and revisit places you've already been to and defeated what was mainly going on there and get some items you missed, in this one there is no down time, you are always in a place full of enemies, and you can't revisit previous environments to collect the items you missed.
Every single person who reviews this game complains about an extremely awkward camera angle. My review will not change that. The reason why the view is so bad is that the camera is set right behind your character instead of an obvious overhead view that would have been way better. And often the camera is positioned so that getting where you want to go means running towards the camera so you have no idea what is in front of you. The camera just makes you lose your sense of direction sometimes.
Despite not being able to be seen very well because of the camera, the game is an amazing artistic achievement. The graphics, technically, are slightly above what you'd expect in a current generation game, but Genji has incredible artistic visuals and colorful scenes that raise the bar and are a breath of fresh air from playing something like Resistance: Fall of Man where it looks life-like but is colored with 1800 shades of brown which is just so bland.
The game sounds great too. The music is a little repetitive. If you're in a level that's like a large battle where enemies are infinite expect to hear the song of people yelling something in Japanese which gets your blood pumping and fits the setting but is different from the first game where none of the background music had any lyrics. The game does things a little differently with voices too. Unlike the last game, the language defaults to English which is useless because there are still subtitles is cut scenes.
I personally switch the speech to Japanese because the English has thick Japanese accents anyway and Japanese speech has the original voices of the last game.
Now for gameplay. The most different feature in this game from the last is the ability to switch between characters. But this time there are four characters as Lady **** the wielder of Yosegane from the first game, and Lord Buson, the God of War in the form of **** greatest Greatest enemy.
Yoshitsune is the main character of the story and is usually the best choice for combat as his attacks are quite fast and do considerable damage. He is also the easiest to describe.
Benkei was the other playable character from the first game. He is seven feet tall and extraordinarily strong. He carries what I would call more of a support beam than a "club". He is slow but can take much more damage than the other characters. Unfortunately he cannot chain his square attacks like he could in the first game. He can charge his attacks and when fully charged, his attacks can do some cool things to certain enemies that other characters cannot do.
Lady Shizuka carries a fan-like blade that she can swing around and is very good with crowd control as she has better range than her comrades. She has the least amount of health and power. She can do this cool attack where she plants an explosive of sorts on an enemy. The next time you hit that enemy the item will explode causing an area effect
Lord Buson sucks ass. He is the God of War and he has taken the form of Yoshitsunes greatest enemy, Kagekiyo because his dead body was deemed suitable as a shell. He has the fastest attacks but he doesn't move as he performs them which makes him difficult to control. When he does hit an enemy they just move away and you cant continue to hit them and he does minimal damage. However you can chain the triangle attack of his fifth weapon and it looks so brutally cool but you could stab that enemy 15 times and he wont die.
Overall, Genji: Days of the Blade is a fun game like the first with amazing visuals and great audio. But with a better camera, better directions of what to do in some levels and multiplayer, It could have been a solid game.