One of the main Discord servers I'm active in decided to start a gaming equivalent to a book club and chose this first because "niche PS2 game with a moody atmosphere" is like crack cocaine to our primary demographic of trans people with pretentious opinions on games. The first couple days of the month allotted to beating it went well with glowing praise for its combat mechanics, atmosphere, etc. and it seemed like we would have had the right to be contrarians about this overlooked PS2 game secretly being good. However, as the days went by, more and more people started to get filtered in a variety of places: Chapter 3's initial test of your knowledge of the combat mechanics, the Chapter 8 boss, the grind before the final boss. The English version's inflation of enemy stats in comparison to the Japanese version was just too much for us to handle. But when it seemed like no one would be able to beat this game, one brave hero rose up: GingerV
While weaker game club channel posters cowered in fear at the challenge posed by Chaos Legion, GingerV rose to the challenge and opened up a speedrun for the game's hardest difficulty. From there, they not only learned a lot of the game's mechanics that weren't explained well but noticed how odd it was that the run spent 40 minutes on Chapter 5 when its times for the other chapters were usually about 10 minutes. They then realized that these 40 minutes were spent farming health bar upgrades and decided to do the same, giving them the tools they needed to clear the game with little effort. The PS2 action game that filtered a server with several unironic DMC2 fans had finally met its match and could be laid to rest.

Reviewed on May 14, 2024


9 Comments


18 days ago

CL is a great game but it's so godawfully explained it's not even funny. i've seen so many people assume that you need to kill enemy spawners with melee and complain about it taking forever - meanwhile you can just snipe the antenna and be done in a matter of seconds

i think the fact that this game was marketed as a DMC clone really does not help matters. it encourages button mashy mindlessness when the actual design is nothing of the sort

18 days ago

@chandler I dont even think you are meant to be sniping the generators. Like they have inpenetrable defense initially that gets reduced by clearing the enemies that it spawns, so you are probably expected to engage with 1 or 2 waves each time you encounter one. Its just sniping them with Malice is so much easier and more intuitively to gleam as effective.

18 days ago

@GingerV I don't know how much it matters that you're "meant to" or not, it's a strategy in the game that works...

18 days ago

@gingerv the generators are entirely fleshy but they have metallic antennas. do you intend to tell me that those antennas are receptive to a completely different damage type for no reason?

18 days ago

@Archagent Sure intent doesn't matter compared to lived experience but the main point I wanted to make is that the game does not expect to limit 1 of your only 2 available legion slots is to be hard committed to Malice the whole journey, even if that is what effectively ends up happening in practice, because the 'intended' way to take out generators is so obtuse.

18 days ago

@chandler not the antennas specifically. The generator has an obtuse mechanic that makes it so bulky (that sniping it with Malice lets you ignore)

"The generator will keep making them but after a while it tires out and can't make them anymore. When it's tired it's defense goes down and you can attack it directly."

18 days ago

@gingerv that's not really an obtuse mechanic. that's just the enemy wearing itself out because you're taking too long to kill it. more like a failsafe. malice is way quicker, but even if you didn't want to use malice you'd still have a faster time with guilt than what you claim is the "intended" way

18 days ago

@chandler Sorry I think we are in accord and i am just poorly articulating what I mean to say. The novice to Chaos Legion will strike at the generator ineffectively not understanding why the damage is so minimal when there are 'multiple' avenues to deal effective damage that pop up in a tutorial note before you understand their significance and disapear from your conciousness forever. I entirely agree you should be sniping generators and the metallic tip exists for that intended purpose. Just that even knowing that, I was unaware that generators tired themselves out until very late in my playthrough (which is useful to know for the few chapters when you need to prioritise running other legions over Malice)

18 days ago

@gingerv aye. i get what you mean now. my bad