Ryu’s Musings – Soul Sacrifice Demo (Vita)

 

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What are you prepared to sacrifice?

Embark on an epic adventure to learn dark, powerful magic as you fight to free yourself from a nightmare prison – and escape the clutches of an evil sorcerer named Magusar.

As you awaken, trapped and alone, your fate seems sealed: to be the next living sacrifice to Magusar’s dark arts. But just as all seems lost, a mysterious talking book appears and reveals the secrets of magic to you, drawing you into its pages and setting you on the path to relive the story of an all-powerful mage.

But with great power comes great sacrifice, and for each brutal creature you face and every magical ability you learn, a price must be paid… Are you prepared to sacrifice your allies, your body or even your soul to defeat Magusar and win back your freedom?

Features:

• Battle huge, terrifying creatures in epic fantasy landscapes.
• Learn powerful sorcery and choose which magic abilities to take into battle.
• Fight alongside up to three allies in co-op quests – either online or via Ad Hoc Mode – and choose whether to save or sacrifice fallen comrades.

So i pre-ordered this game, and after playing the demo for a while I’ve cancelled it. The game isn’t bad, it’s just not what i was expecting it to be. The game was classed as Dark Soul’s for the Vita, and the ultimate RPG on the vita, sadly neither is really the case.

The game is graphically pretty damn good, as good as Ragnarok Odyssey. The character designs are pretty awesome, well detailed and rather interesting to look at. As the game progresses and any sacrifice parts of your body you do get graphical feed back for it, which is great.

The scenery of the game isn’t that great, but it does fit the story so it’s easy to forgive what it looks like.

What the game has in spades is lore, even in the demo there’s a shed load of lore revolving around the monsters you fight. You get to learn how the monsters came about, and some of them are pretty damn grim, but fun to learn.

There are however a lot of things which make the game turn from a potential great game, to a bad game for me.

original

First and foremost, the english dubbing in this game is horrific. The timing between the animation and the voicing is so out of synch it’s ridicules. Watching Librium talk is rather fun, since his mouth wasn’t moving but we were hearing him talk. This is a common thing in the game, especially when it comes to reading the book, one of the central points of the game. A lot of the lore is given to you by Librium telling you the lore, however there’s some rather annoying long pauses. These pauses are extremely long, so much so several times I’d pressed the key to move on only to realise there was more to come.

IF you pre-order the game you do get the japanese voicing as a free DLC, which solves the problems. However the voice pack should  NEVER be a DLC it should be part of the core game. What’s worse is that the voice pack is going to be sold later on a paid DLC. Bad business practice all around.

Finally we have the biggest problem for me. While it does have some RPG elements to it, it doesn’t really play as a RPG. Rather it’s a series of arena battles. So there’s no open world battles or exploration to it, which is very bad IMO.

The combat is fun, and HARD, damn HARD. It is a bit heavy on the button mashing, it’s not like your general hot key RPG. Which could be a good thing since it does change it up a little. I have to admit that i did enjoy the combat a little bit, but it does get a bit tedious at times.

morality

What the game does well is the sort of the morality choice. When you kill a monster you get to chose whether to save or sacrifice their souls. Doing either raises either your defence and health (saving) or your attack and magic (sacrifice). So doing either constantly isn’t an option, you need to do both. I do like that aspect of the game, but sadly the bad english, paid DLC and the arena style fighting just doesn’t appeal to me. I’m going to wait till it either goes on sale or comes on the PSN Plus for free.

Author: Ryu Sheng