Not fun at first, but before you know it, you've played 5 hours, and want to finish just this one last quest.....
So in goes the UMD, and for the first few hours, no kidding, I couldn't figure out if it was fun. Yes, that sounds strange, but there I was playing and playing, discovering things I didn't like about the game, things that were downright annoying. But hour after hour passed with me riveted to the screen, and before I knew it, the story was 65% complete. It was then, and only then, that I decided that, indeed, it must be fun, despite the flaws. So what is the good and the bad about this game?
The basic structure is a real-time slash-em-up battle system in nearly the same vein as Dynasty Warriors, but with a storyline, cutscenes, and a few sweet pieces of eye candy in the form of landscapes and scenery (some marked with a signpost garishly pointing out the fact that this is a pretty view). Your character grows in experience with each enemy you defeat, and you can pick up taichi (their version of gold) and items to fix up your broken body.
The gameplay consists of you going from place to place, talking to the right people to advance the plot and discover what the next task is going to be. Standard stuff, but the experience is distinctive and seems new due to the mechanics of your character development. You equip a scroll that essentially dictates the moves your character will perform when you hit the attack button. Different scrolls, different moves. There’s more to it than that, such as the fact that each scroll is aligned to a particular element, and different elements are strong or weak against enemies aligned to other elements (water-aligned attack puts a serious hurt on any fire-aligned enemy, etc.), but you can figure that out if you get the game. Suffice it to say that there’s an extra degree of depth to battles that results in you continually modifying your attack to suit the nasty you’re facing.
The nasties themselves are pretty much set in their respective areas. When a portion of the map is loaded, the enemies will appear in the same place every time. This means that later on, as you find yourself back-tracking for the zillionth time to talk to the guy you were told to talk to, you will be able to predict what is going to come at you. In other words, any attempts at immersing you in the game are lost, gone, kaput, as you realize the game consists nearly entirely of you moving your character to trigger the next enemy appearance/cutscene. Yes, all games are like this at their root, but most others do a better job of hiding that fact from the player.
This lack of immersion is further enhanced by the fact that you have no control over the camera angle, and that angle is predominantly a side-view. As a result, a lot of the game ends up being....you guessed it...... a side-scroller.
Yuck.
Yes, there are times when the camera sweeps behind you, affording a spectacular view of some temple you’re heading toward, but those times can be counted on one hand. So, you end up feeling like this is a suped-up version of some Mario Brothers game…no wait, they don’t side scroll anymore either. There’s a REASON they don’t make side-scrollers anymore.
Ok, maybe this gripe is just me being picky.
What about the story, a key component in determining the success or failure of any RPG?
Well, here, the game sticks to tried and true techniques. The relatively decent story is driven by a series of talk-to-the-right-NPC or kill-the-big-bad-bug triggers, which activate pseudo-cinematic cutscenes that use pretty much the same graphics engine the rest of the game uses. That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the absolutely horrific voice acting. I mean….it is truly terrible…any reviewer who thought the acting was good probably thought Showgirls was Oscar-worthy. It was as if the actors were simply handed the lines to say without any idea of the context in which the lines would be used. Also, for some weird reason, they decided to include text subtitles, so you can read along as the characters agonize over their next mangled line. It was like everyone was trying to imitate Captain Kirk, pausing dramatically in...... the wrong..... places.
Additionally, finding the right person to talk to, or even the right town to go to next, is sometimes quite vague. This, though, shouldn’t bother any RPG players who don’t need their hand held. You youngsters who need the next place to go highlighted on the map are missing the point and cornerstone of the classic RPG experience: exploration.
The silver lining here is that the game is actually pretty lengthy. Depending on how long you spend running around finding the next trigger or leveling up, you can easily log 20-30 hours getting your character buffed up for the final battle. So, if collecting gold and stuff to use and sell while leveling up to kick the next big boss ass is your cup of tea, then you might enjoy this one.
Look, I love RPGs, so I played through to the bitter end. Yes, the Sly Stallone School of Acting graduates doing the voices came very close to ruining the experience. Add that to a largely side-scrolling, repetitive slash-em-up set of battles, and it seems like this is a terrible game. But for some weird reason, it was still fun. Or, at least, the game had enough of that certain 'something' to keep me from putting it down. I still don’t quite know what that 'something' was, meaning it is very possible you won’t like Kingdom of Paradise at all. If you choose to rent it, though, don’t give up until putting in at least a couple of hours.