El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron

[Toptube]

I played the El Shaddai PS3 demo last week.

Some really good music and prickly audio stuff

visually arresting. Its like some proto alternative traditional japanese art dream, or something.

The game seems to be about halfway to Killer7 levels of whacked.

The combat is very simple. Think Prince of Persia Sands of Time, but with a couple of simple modifiers, mostly with the block button. In playing the demo, its not terrible. But it will probably get old over the course of the whole game. I set it on Normal though and its actually challenging, for good and bad reasons. Good reasons in that multiple enemies don't wait for eachother to take turns attacking. Bad in that some enemies just have a TON of health. I died several times on what appeared to be basic enemies, due to them outlasting me 3-fold.

The platforming is all pretty simple, but sometimes the camera angle plus the visuals can make it frustrating. Once you get the hang of those parts, its fine. but the first couple of times you'll hate it. The sidescrolling platforming is simple, but has some cool stuff happening.

The demo sections are rigidly linear. I haven't tried to dig up too much of this game, but from what I've seen there aren't any even semi-large areas to run around in. We'll see how that turns out.

I'm gonna play the final game. Maybe buy it, if only to encourage more of this type of thing. Its got problems, but at least its an actual Japanese game in a time when Japanese games are trying to be un-Japanese.