Shadow Tower Abyss Impressions

From Software had its upcoming first-person role-playing game on display at Tokyo Game Show 2003. As the game's title suggests, Shadow Tower Abyss takes place in a huge tower, and your objective is to reach to the top so that you can escape from it. The tower is extremely dark and seems to have a dungeon-like atmosphere. The game's monsters all live in the tower, and seem to have regular schedules and activities--that take place independent of your actions--such as burning a bonfire and talking amongst themselves, until they spot you and attack.

Shadow Tower Abyss has over 500 different weapons, of which about ten were available in the demo at the show. In battle, you can attack parts of monsters' bodies to make them far less effective in a fight; for instance, you can cut off their arms with some weapon. The basic control scheme seemed similar to Capcom's Monster Hunter. Like in that game, you use the left analog stick to move and the right analog stick to attack. You can dodge your enemies' attacks with the L1 and R1 buttons, which cause you to quickly duck either to the left or the right. While the demo on display at the show was rather short, we did gather that Shadow Tower Abyss doesn't use a traditional level-based system, but rather, the "growth" system from the previous game on the PlayStation, in which you'd grow slightly stronger each time you vanquished an enemy. Shadow Tower Abyss for the PlayStation 2 is scheduled for release on October 23 in Japan at a price of 6,800 Yen.