Stunningly Bad: A Case Study In Squandering Infinite Potential.

User Rating: 3 | Kengo: Legend of the 9 X360
By nappan | Review Date:
As my review deck indicates, this game is just terrible. Truly, this is a game that took an amazing premise, a brand new generation of console, and experience in the genre and flushed it all down the toilet. Now, before someone accusses me of simply hating the Kengo/Bushido Blade series let me say that I strongly disagreed with Gamespots rating of the PS2 Kengo game (Kengo: Master of Bushido). I felt that game was a fine simulator of very traditional katana training. What it did, it did well and claimed to be nothing else.

Kengo: Lot9 on the other hand, claims to be some kind of samurai epic, and ends of being a shallow husk of a game. All of the technical aspects of movement from earlier Kengo games (which the review in the gamespot article refers to as the "Cement Sandals" effect) is there, but the swordplay is now DUMB. The shuffeling movements of a tradtional swordfighter felt RIGHT in the fights of older Kengo games where positioning and fast clashes and blocks MEANT something. That same shuffling and spinning paired with spastic and ridiculously easy hack and slash mechanics feels absurd.

Now, I mentioned hack and slash, and apparantly the makers of Kengo thought that Hack and Slash meant "players should have two buttons. Hack. Slash. Really, the game has been reduced from a swordfigting sim where basic moves are times and used to create real action, into a two move juggernaught of failure. There is a surreal and sad feeling that springs up as you shuffle through hordes of generic enemies, mindlessly and lifelessly hacking them to bits with the same two buttons. To be fair, there ARE environmntal moves, but they are so contrived and unnnecessary to the process that they do not really count as part of the gameplay scheme. It is an interesting feeling to fight through your first ninja horde and mindlessly butcher a boss and realize "This is it". Your natural reaction will be to check the other colourfully named gameplay modes... all of which should be condensed into:

1.) Chop the same two or three guys to bits a hundred times the same way MODE

and

2.) Mindless VS Battles with NO ****ing online MODE

Really, the whole experience boggles the mind. When you combine this atrocious gameplay with bland previous-gen graphics and some of the most soul-deadening voice acting EVER, you have a real loser. The sound is bland, the graphics are bland, the gameplay is terrible, and I should really make the point that when I say the voice acting is bad... it's not "funny" bad... it's "MAKE IT STOP" bad.

So there you have it. The only reason I don't give this game a 1.0 is that technically it works, and isn't broken.

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