Hyvä peli
text by tim rogers
★⋆☆☆
“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”
In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.
I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.
Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.
Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.
Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”
Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.
How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.
Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.
Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.
Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.
★⋆☆☆
“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”
In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.
I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.
Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.
Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.
Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”
Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.
How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.
Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.
Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.
Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.
This review contains spoilers
Regarding that it’s a PS3 exclusive, I was curious to how this game just fell off the radar. So, I booted up the game on my PS3 and played the whole 6 chapters the game had. THIS GAME IS SHORT but rather beautiful with being a launch title.
There’s been discussions that this was a GOD OF WAR clone and the story is very familiar to Aloy from that cyber dinosaur game HORIZON ZERO DAWN but overall it ain’t make sense.
The gameplay or combat is very mashup, 3 stances by holding L1 for the range thing or R1 for the heavy, none for the basic quick attacks. So the combat is very fast paced, each stance is color coded so you gotta be in the same stance in order to block. THE FLYING FOX GUY AND THE LAST BATTLE WITH THE MAIN BAD GUY GOTTA BE THE MOST RIDICULOUS FRAME DATA MOVESET cause I ain’t block or counter none and the game also like big mobs so you get jumped all the time. You also play as this cat girl named Kai, and it becomes a third person shooter and omg the aim down is horrid, but the AFTERTOUCH, you slow down the projectile and turn it and stuff, pretty cool.
It was a nice little playthrough, very short tho, it’s a very beautiful game and too bad no sequel. This game could use a remaster or even a remake would give this game the spotlight that it needs.
6h
NORMAL MODE
77/129 symbol things idk wat it is
Idk what else to add
Tf is twing twang
There’s been discussions that this was a GOD OF WAR clone and the story is very familiar to Aloy from that cyber dinosaur game HORIZON ZERO DAWN but overall it ain’t make sense.
The gameplay or combat is very mashup, 3 stances by holding L1 for the range thing or R1 for the heavy, none for the basic quick attacks. So the combat is very fast paced, each stance is color coded so you gotta be in the same stance in order to block. THE FLYING FOX GUY AND THE LAST BATTLE WITH THE MAIN BAD GUY GOTTA BE THE MOST RIDICULOUS FRAME DATA MOVESET cause I ain’t block or counter none and the game also like big mobs so you get jumped all the time. You also play as this cat girl named Kai, and it becomes a third person shooter and omg the aim down is horrid, but the AFTERTOUCH, you slow down the projectile and turn it and stuff, pretty cool.
It was a nice little playthrough, very short tho, it’s a very beautiful game and too bad no sequel. This game could use a remaster or even a remake would give this game the spotlight that it needs.
6h
NORMAL MODE
77/129 symbol things idk wat it is
Idk what else to add
Tf is twing twang
This game....just really fell flat. It hasn't aged well, and with no real way of playing it aside from getting a ps3 or emulation, the amount of time I waited to finally get to it combined with how lackluster it is really made for a let down of an experience.
The thing is there is a good game in here somewhere. Perhaps it's buried under:
- The cringe dialogue
- The horrid aftertouch sequences
- The clunky combat system that's supposed to feel fluid and nuanced but instead is just frustrating
- The long playtime
- The appropriation of japanese culture with white voice actors
This is an easy skip - it may have been cool or stylish at the time of release, but it really, really is a flawed game.
The thing is there is a good game in here somewhere. Perhaps it's buried under:
- The cringe dialogue
- The horrid aftertouch sequences
- The clunky combat system that's supposed to feel fluid and nuanced but instead is just frustrating
- The long playtime
- The appropriation of japanese culture with white voice actors
This is an easy skip - it may have been cool or stylish at the time of release, but it really, really is a flawed game.
"Maybe I'll hit your weak point, for MASSIVE DAMAGE!"
Immediate start. Ninja Theory knows what the fuck they're doing when it comes to cinematically presenting video games.
Nariko legitimately looking straight into the camera and asking the player why they sent her here, saying that they turned her into a killer, and telling them she's not ready to die yet. And shouting "Do not abandon me! Not now I need you the most!" as I'm getting ready to turn the game off for the day.
Masterpiece?
Controls feel a little scuffed and a bit slow and unresponsive. But I'm so used to the DMC/Bayonetta super-quick style of hack-n-slash, and less of the rhythm-style of gameplay.
But I love how the gameplay never lets you settle down and go "this is what the game is." It's constantly switching things up, and breaking up the hack-n-slash with different gameplay sequences.
The aftertouch is one of most batshit things to watch. You literally make cannon balls go in upwards arcs.
The voice-acting is pretty fantastic, and Andy Serkis is a hoot (he was also one of the writers and directors). And the lip-syncing is surprisingly advanced.
And Kai is the best character ever created. And her voice-acting is beyond this world.
The script is legitimately funny. And legitimately dramatic. And legitimately tense. And seriously sad and frightening sometimes.
And one specific sequence, coupled with Kai's voice-actress, is seriously bone-chilling.
The gameplay can feel aged and unpolished, and you have to replay entire sections if you die, but the story, and structure, and pure execution of this game, more than makes up for it.
I found myself wishing it never ended.
Immediate start. Ninja Theory knows what the fuck they're doing when it comes to cinematically presenting video games.
Nariko legitimately looking straight into the camera and asking the player why they sent her here, saying that they turned her into a killer, and telling them she's not ready to die yet. And shouting "Do not abandon me! Not now I need you the most!" as I'm getting ready to turn the game off for the day.
Masterpiece?
Controls feel a little scuffed and a bit slow and unresponsive. But I'm so used to the DMC/Bayonetta super-quick style of hack-n-slash, and less of the rhythm-style of gameplay.
But I love how the gameplay never lets you settle down and go "this is what the game is." It's constantly switching things up, and breaking up the hack-n-slash with different gameplay sequences.
The aftertouch is one of most batshit things to watch. You literally make cannon balls go in upwards arcs.
The voice-acting is pretty fantastic, and Andy Serkis is a hoot (he was also one of the writers and directors). And the lip-syncing is surprisingly advanced.
And Kai is the best character ever created. And her voice-acting is beyond this world.
The script is legitimately funny. And legitimately dramatic. And legitimately tense. And seriously sad and frightening sometimes.
And one specific sequence, coupled with Kai's voice-actress, is seriously bone-chilling.
The gameplay can feel aged and unpolished, and you have to replay entire sections if you die, but the story, and structure, and pure execution of this game, more than makes up for it.
I found myself wishing it never ended.
quando era criança morri sempre no mm boss
Masterclass voice acting for 2007, great soundtrack, good facial animations and good graphics for the time. Everything else was eh.
Really wished they tried a sequel.
Really wished they tried a sequel.
A great story, but I had a lot of trouble with the game mechanic of guiding stuff by just titling the controller around like the Wii remote. Luckily most of the time you are just swing a sword around.
This was the 2nd game I bought for the PS3 back in 2008. The very 1st one I bought won't be played till 2016.
This was the 2nd game I bought for the PS3 back in 2008. The very 1st one I bought won't be played till 2016.
Fun story and great voice acting. The combat is fun when playing Nariko but the aiming parts with motion controls are rough. Not a long game as well. Overall recommend the game to play.
Pretty good but really short God of War clone that begs for a sequel that was unfortunately canceled.
I played this for the first time this year, and it's a hard game to judge without playing it back then. I can tell that the animations and visuals must have been great, it's still impressive to watch some of the cutscenes, and there are some massive scenes with hundreds of NPCs on screen, something we rarely see even today.
But these things won't carry the game in 2023. The controls are not as responsive as I would like, and the PS3 controller is not as good as modern controllers, the game can feel like walking underwater.
The game wants you to counter a lot with its 3-style combat system. But the slightly sluggish controls made me abandon that and I ended up button-mashing my way through the game.
I found the campaign to be too obsessed with large encounters, I wish I could run around and bump into one or two enemies, practicing my countering and combat styles, but it's structured in a way where you walk into an area and get swarmed most of the time.
There is also a good deal of motion sensor gimmick fights, where you tilt your controller trying to guide projectiles around. I'm not sure how people like these parts, but I actually liked these sections a lot.
And lastly, the characters in this game are so odd, Nariko the main protagonist is fine, even if she looks like a supermodel from another world compared to the other characters, but the enemies are so weird it's hard to describe it. They remind me of a Monthy Python sketch or a rude and crude version of Benny Hill. You really have to see it to believe it.
It's a rough but fascinating early PS3 game.
But these things won't carry the game in 2023. The controls are not as responsive as I would like, and the PS3 controller is not as good as modern controllers, the game can feel like walking underwater.
The game wants you to counter a lot with its 3-style combat system. But the slightly sluggish controls made me abandon that and I ended up button-mashing my way through the game.
I found the campaign to be too obsessed with large encounters, I wish I could run around and bump into one or two enemies, practicing my countering and combat styles, but it's structured in a way where you walk into an area and get swarmed most of the time.
There is also a good deal of motion sensor gimmick fights, where you tilt your controller trying to guide projectiles around. I'm not sure how people like these parts, but I actually liked these sections a lot.
And lastly, the characters in this game are so odd, Nariko the main protagonist is fine, even if she looks like a supermodel from another world compared to the other characters, but the enemies are so weird it's hard to describe it. They remind me of a Monthy Python sketch or a rude and crude version of Benny Hill. You really have to see it to believe it.
It's a rough but fascinating early PS3 game.
Looks crazy good for the time
physics, combat, and bosses were all fun
Still feels like it's missing something and the music is a bit bland
physics, combat, and bosses were all fun
Still feels like it's missing something and the music is a bit bland
un jeu qui manque de tout sauf de bons graphismes
Tried this game for a little bit before dropping it but it was just too bad...
I saw all the bad reviews of this game, and for the first Chapter or so, I thought I was weird for enjoying myself. The visuals were nice, the combat was fun, and the world/story seemed interesting!
Then I kept playing.
This game is so incredibly sub par in every way. The combat is satisfying at first, but the enemy variety, and repetitive level design makes it boring and annoying after the initial few chapters.
The voice acting and writing is awful, and cringe inducing, with the notable exception being Andy Serkis, who does a great job playing the villain.
The cutscenes themselves were fine, though the game too often would throw poorly telegraphed quick-time events, which would make trying to relax and enjoy the cutscenes impossible. The margin for error was slim too, which was especially frustrating for every single boss fight that had to end in that way.
Don’t even get me started on the “puzzles”. Throwing objects with poorly thought out and annoying to control motion sensors were some of the most frustrating parts of the whole experience. Even when I turned the motion controls off to control projectiles with the analogue sticks, it just slowed down gameplay for an already tedious game.
The last chapter however, was very fun. The final battles felt huge, and even with a choppy frame rate and some minor design annoyances, the entire chapter was a solid end to the prior levels. The final boss fight I found very satisfying to learn the patterns and timings of - though the aforementioned quick time events certainly ruined a lot of the fun I was having, even here.
I fear a lot of these issues are just due to this game ageing poorly - but all in all, I won’t be touching this one again.
Then I kept playing.
This game is so incredibly sub par in every way. The combat is satisfying at first, but the enemy variety, and repetitive level design makes it boring and annoying after the initial few chapters.
The voice acting and writing is awful, and cringe inducing, with the notable exception being Andy Serkis, who does a great job playing the villain.
The cutscenes themselves were fine, though the game too often would throw poorly telegraphed quick-time events, which would make trying to relax and enjoy the cutscenes impossible. The margin for error was slim too, which was especially frustrating for every single boss fight that had to end in that way.
Don’t even get me started on the “puzzles”. Throwing objects with poorly thought out and annoying to control motion sensors were some of the most frustrating parts of the whole experience. Even when I turned the motion controls off to control projectiles with the analogue sticks, it just slowed down gameplay for an already tedious game.
The last chapter however, was very fun. The final battles felt huge, and even with a choppy frame rate and some minor design annoyances, the entire chapter was a solid end to the prior levels. The final boss fight I found very satisfying to learn the patterns and timings of - though the aforementioned quick time events certainly ruined a lot of the fun I was having, even here.
I fear a lot of these issues are just due to this game ageing poorly - but all in all, I won’t be touching this one again.
I don't know how well this game sold, but back when I was young, this game was featured on EVERY SINGLE ps3 advertisement poster in my country. There's always been something about this game that just made me want to play it since I was a kid. Of course there's the half-naked warrior woman on the cover artwork🤣 but also the game's incredible art direction that somehow just got better to look at as I grew up. And now that I've played it, it's...... good. kinda.
Considering how low this game is rated on this site, I didn't go in with the highest expectations, but was quite impressed with the combat mechanics initially. But it didn't take long for me to realise how messy the controls actually are. There are three different stances in this game that are quite distinct, but the blocking mechanics in this game just suck. Your character automatically blocks when you're not attacking, and with a quick press of the attack button right after blocking you can cause massive damage to the enemy, which is my biggest problem here. You can either be on the offensive and deal little to no damage while getting interrupted and beaten by your enemies, OR you can wait for your enemies to attack you, so that you can counterattack them, which made the combat very monotonous for me. It's fun initially but gets boring over time. It's not annoying, but kinda dull
The combat is serviceable for the most part, but the game has other problems. It keeps throwing massive waves of enemies that don't bring anything new to the table, adding even more to the monotony of the game. And finally there are the absolutely cringe-inducing voice acting and live capture performances. Holy shit they're terrible. The story is cliche as well and fails to leave an impact on you.
Now that we're done with the negatives, here's what I liked about this game.... the art direction. This is always what kept this game on my mind for years. This is a 2007 game, and the just scale of this game, the attention to details, the interactability with the environment is mindblowing. There are some sections in this game where you're supposed to shoot arrows or fire cannons(oh and the aiming mechanics surprisingly don't suck) and just the number of things on the screen just blows my mind every time. Istg, if it wasn't for the incredibe art direction of this game I would've dropped it in no time. I'm not familliar with ninja Theory's other works, but I've heard that they're great at making their games cinematic, and if this is their worst, I'm REALLY excited to try out their other stuff.
Last but not the least, I just wanna say that despite the massive amount of flaws, you can tell that a lot of heart was put into this game. It's one of those times when you know that all the hardwork behind this game went completely in the wrong direction, but you can't help but still have some amount of praise for the team that worked on it. The amazing art direction aside, everything here is average to below-average, with the voice acting being an exception(it's straight up garbage), but the game never really annoyed me so just for that this is the rating I'll be going with. Would I recommend this, I'm not sure, but I'm kinda biased towards this game so yeah, that's my rating.
Considering how low this game is rated on this site, I didn't go in with the highest expectations, but was quite impressed with the combat mechanics initially. But it didn't take long for me to realise how messy the controls actually are. There are three different stances in this game that are quite distinct, but the blocking mechanics in this game just suck. Your character automatically blocks when you're not attacking, and with a quick press of the attack button right after blocking you can cause massive damage to the enemy, which is my biggest problem here. You can either be on the offensive and deal little to no damage while getting interrupted and beaten by your enemies, OR you can wait for your enemies to attack you, so that you can counterattack them, which made the combat very monotonous for me. It's fun initially but gets boring over time. It's not annoying, but kinda dull
The combat is serviceable for the most part, but the game has other problems. It keeps throwing massive waves of enemies that don't bring anything new to the table, adding even more to the monotony of the game. And finally there are the absolutely cringe-inducing voice acting and live capture performances. Holy shit they're terrible. The story is cliche as well and fails to leave an impact on you.
Now that we're done with the negatives, here's what I liked about this game.... the art direction. This is always what kept this game on my mind for years. This is a 2007 game, and the just scale of this game, the attention to details, the interactability with the environment is mindblowing. There are some sections in this game where you're supposed to shoot arrows or fire cannons(oh and the aiming mechanics surprisingly don't suck) and just the number of things on the screen just blows my mind every time. Istg, if it wasn't for the incredibe art direction of this game I would've dropped it in no time. I'm not familliar with ninja Theory's other works, but I've heard that they're great at making their games cinematic, and if this is their worst, I'm REALLY excited to try out their other stuff.
Last but not the least, I just wanna say that despite the massive amount of flaws, you can tell that a lot of heart was put into this game. It's one of those times when you know that all the hardwork behind this game went completely in the wrong direction, but you can't help but still have some amount of praise for the team that worked on it. The amazing art direction aside, everything here is average to below-average, with the voice acting being an exception(it's straight up garbage), but the game never really annoyed me so just for that this is the rating I'll be going with. Would I recommend this, I'm not sure, but I'm kinda biased towards this game so yeah, that's my rating.
Heavenly Sword was a project borne into a rough situation. Being one of the PlayStation 3’s headlining exclusives at the time meant it had the unenviable task of trying to sell the PS3 in 2007, which meant it had to convince people of two things: 1.That the PlayStation Triple Ballin’ was worth paying $599 US Dollars for and 2.That the SixAxis wasn’t a pile of shit. Unfortunately, this was not a task Heavenly Sword nor its developer Ninja Theory were up for.
Heavenly Sword certainly looks great. If there’s something Ninja Theory has always been good at, it’s the visual design of their games. There are some very good character designs here, the main character Nariko being the obvious standout, and your journey takes you through these lush locations inspired by both Eastern and Western fantasy (Ninja Theory named Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lord of the Rings as inspirations) that keep the game still looking good despite the fact it’s rapidly approaching 20 years old. The game isn’t free from technical issues, however. There’s constant framerate drops and some absolutely vicious screen tearing, and inconsistent audio mixing where cutscenes will be much quieter than gameplay.
When it comes to gameplay, that’s probably Heavenly Sword’s biggest stumble. In this game you block attacks automatically while you’re not attacking. If you press Triangle at the right time while blocking, you’ll counter their attack. Another wrinkle is added with your stances. You have three stances, and your stance has to match your attacker’s in order to block their attacks. In theory this discourages mindless button-mashing, in practice this and a crappy dodge roll just ends up with you constantly getting hit out of your combos, leading to a combat system that isn’t very fun, especially since you have to use the dreaded SixAxis to initiate air combos. Boss battles alleviate this a bit since you only have one enemy to worry about, but they’re extremely mediocre and one-note, which wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t take so goddamn long to get over with. They made 5-minute bosses that take 10+ minutes to beat.
The hack & slash gameplay isn’t all you’ll be doing here. At times you’ll be controlling Nariko’s friend Kai, whose weapon of choice is her trusty crossbow. Kai’s sections are the worst parts of the game. They move at a snail’s pace and you have to deal with aiming so bad you’ll struggle to hit enemies at point-blank range.
These days Heavenly Sword seems to have been almost entirely forgotten, and it’s no mystery as to why. Apart from its looks and cinematic presentation, there’s very little here to recommend. Doesn’t help that it released just two weeks before Halo 3. “Don’t buy an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, buy a PS3 and Heavenly Sword instead!” is an extremely hard sell. Really, I think the most interesting thing about Heavenly Sword is the context in which it was released. I have a fascination with early 7th gen releases. They have a special kind of jank that is different from that of the previous gen and also later in the generation. It’s a jank borne from developers still getting used to HD development being very excited to show off what they can do with the new hardware but whose reach still exceeded their grasp. That’s Heavenly Sword to a tee. As a game it’s not very good, but as a piece of PS3 history I’m genuinely enamored with it.
Heavenly Sword certainly looks great. If there’s something Ninja Theory has always been good at, it’s the visual design of their games. There are some very good character designs here, the main character Nariko being the obvious standout, and your journey takes you through these lush locations inspired by both Eastern and Western fantasy (Ninja Theory named Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lord of the Rings as inspirations) that keep the game still looking good despite the fact it’s rapidly approaching 20 years old. The game isn’t free from technical issues, however. There’s constant framerate drops and some absolutely vicious screen tearing, and inconsistent audio mixing where cutscenes will be much quieter than gameplay.
When it comes to gameplay, that’s probably Heavenly Sword’s biggest stumble. In this game you block attacks automatically while you’re not attacking. If you press Triangle at the right time while blocking, you’ll counter their attack. Another wrinkle is added with your stances. You have three stances, and your stance has to match your attacker’s in order to block their attacks. In theory this discourages mindless button-mashing, in practice this and a crappy dodge roll just ends up with you constantly getting hit out of your combos, leading to a combat system that isn’t very fun, especially since you have to use the dreaded SixAxis to initiate air combos. Boss battles alleviate this a bit since you only have one enemy to worry about, but they’re extremely mediocre and one-note, which wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t take so goddamn long to get over with. They made 5-minute bosses that take 10+ minutes to beat.
The hack & slash gameplay isn’t all you’ll be doing here. At times you’ll be controlling Nariko’s friend Kai, whose weapon of choice is her trusty crossbow. Kai’s sections are the worst parts of the game. They move at a snail’s pace and you have to deal with aiming so bad you’ll struggle to hit enemies at point-blank range.
These days Heavenly Sword seems to have been almost entirely forgotten, and it’s no mystery as to why. Apart from its looks and cinematic presentation, there’s very little here to recommend. Doesn’t help that it released just two weeks before Halo 3. “Don’t buy an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, buy a PS3 and Heavenly Sword instead!” is an extremely hard sell. Really, I think the most interesting thing about Heavenly Sword is the context in which it was released. I have a fascination with early 7th gen releases. They have a special kind of jank that is different from that of the previous gen and also later in the generation. It’s a jank borne from developers still getting used to HD development being very excited to show off what they can do with the new hardware but whose reach still exceeded their grasp. That’s Heavenly Sword to a tee. As a game it’s not very good, but as a piece of PS3 history I’m genuinely enamored with it.
Some nice ideas but kinda rubbish.
Another game which has been often spoken about and recommended leading me to believe it was well worth playing. Unfortunately in 2024, 17 years after the game’s initial release, it has not aged well.
Heavenly sword is an action-adventure developed by Ninja-Theory set in a fantasy world. The story revolves around Nariko who has been entrusted with protecting her clan with the powerful Heavenly Sword. The game starts off with a fierce battle and Nariko’s death, the rest of the game is told in flashbacks and the events which led to that battle.
At the time, having motion capture as well as having the king of motion capture onboard, Andy Serkis was a massive selling point of the game. However compared to today's standards of motion capture the results in Heavenly Sword look so unnatural to laughably bad at times. More notably than the motion capture is how wild the animation of Nariko's hair is. It just flails around in the air like when you see alpha footage of an animated film.
The game has not aged well. The framerate absolutely drags at times with lots of screen tearing making some combat very frustrating. Also as the game was from a generation where the game data is read directly off the disc, the load times are very long. Other poorly aged aspects of the game are its gameplay mechanics such as Quick Time Events which happen completely out of the blue during the slow frame rate and screen tearing meaning you will most likely miss the prompts first time around. THe graphics though, for the time are fine, as an early PS3 game they aren’t terrible.
The controls could be better, this was still before the time of a solid standardised control set among games. Not being able to freely jump in a hack and slash game is such a mood killer. Using the right-stick to dodge is too far for the player's thumb to travel in a short space of time. There didn't seem to be any way to change this. The game, being released early in the PS3's lifecycle makes use of the sixaxis controller feature much to the dismay of many. Luckily this can be turned off.
The main combat with the titular Heavenly Sword is very unsatisfying and unrewarding. You are given with new combos and artwork unlocks but for me, someone who struggles to remember combos and didn't have enough interest in the game to care about the art this all amounted to nothing. Each chapter you are essentially moving area to area while the game throws a large quantity of the same enemy at you. It reminded me of those mobile games you see adverts for which is one player mowing down an army of soldiers.
I liked the combat where you used a gun of some sort to fire projectiles. I found this much more fun than fighting with Nariko and her sword, defeating the main purpose of the game. The arrow firing missions can be frustrating though as each slow motion arrow takes ages to reach its target.
All boss battles up to the last one, Bohan, were beaten due to a complete fluke as far as I’m concerned. Nariko would carry out random moves that I had no idea how I was managing to execute. The last fight against the flying fox heavily relies on you countering which I only learned but never mastered in the last boss battle. I threw the towel in during the second stage of the Bohan fight due to how frustratingly hard it was. I could never get the timing of the counter attacks right. I was relieved to hear I was not alone in this, other players have struggled too.
There were at least two occasions (usually at boss fights) where I almost threw in the towel, at roughly 7 hours long I pushed myself to at least try and finish it. The only thing I’m glad of is that I can say I experienced the game and made my best effort but it’s not one I would recommend to newcomers in this day and age. If you played the game on release and you love it then good for you, I wish I liked the game that much.
Heavenly sword is an action-adventure developed by Ninja-Theory set in a fantasy world. The story revolves around Nariko who has been entrusted with protecting her clan with the powerful Heavenly Sword. The game starts off with a fierce battle and Nariko’s death, the rest of the game is told in flashbacks and the events which led to that battle.
At the time, having motion capture as well as having the king of motion capture onboard, Andy Serkis was a massive selling point of the game. However compared to today's standards of motion capture the results in Heavenly Sword look so unnatural to laughably bad at times. More notably than the motion capture is how wild the animation of Nariko's hair is. It just flails around in the air like when you see alpha footage of an animated film.
The game has not aged well. The framerate absolutely drags at times with lots of screen tearing making some combat very frustrating. Also as the game was from a generation where the game data is read directly off the disc, the load times are very long. Other poorly aged aspects of the game are its gameplay mechanics such as Quick Time Events which happen completely out of the blue during the slow frame rate and screen tearing meaning you will most likely miss the prompts first time around. THe graphics though, for the time are fine, as an early PS3 game they aren’t terrible.
The controls could be better, this was still before the time of a solid standardised control set among games. Not being able to freely jump in a hack and slash game is such a mood killer. Using the right-stick to dodge is too far for the player's thumb to travel in a short space of time. There didn't seem to be any way to change this. The game, being released early in the PS3's lifecycle makes use of the sixaxis controller feature much to the dismay of many. Luckily this can be turned off.
The main combat with the titular Heavenly Sword is very unsatisfying and unrewarding. You are given with new combos and artwork unlocks but for me, someone who struggles to remember combos and didn't have enough interest in the game to care about the art this all amounted to nothing. Each chapter you are essentially moving area to area while the game throws a large quantity of the same enemy at you. It reminded me of those mobile games you see adverts for which is one player mowing down an army of soldiers.
I liked the combat where you used a gun of some sort to fire projectiles. I found this much more fun than fighting with Nariko and her sword, defeating the main purpose of the game. The arrow firing missions can be frustrating though as each slow motion arrow takes ages to reach its target.
All boss battles up to the last one, Bohan, were beaten due to a complete fluke as far as I’m concerned. Nariko would carry out random moves that I had no idea how I was managing to execute. The last fight against the flying fox heavily relies on you countering which I only learned but never mastered in the last boss battle. I threw the towel in during the second stage of the Bohan fight due to how frustratingly hard it was. I could never get the timing of the counter attacks right. I was relieved to hear I was not alone in this, other players have struggled too.
There were at least two occasions (usually at boss fights) where I almost threw in the towel, at roughly 7 hours long I pushed myself to at least try and finish it. The only thing I’m glad of is that I can say I experienced the game and made my best effort but it’s not one I would recommend to newcomers in this day and age. If you played the game on release and you love it then good for you, I wish I liked the game that much.