This is tough to rate. I am enamored with the wuxia-inspired, non-specific Asian fantasy setting, with its striking landscapes and architecture. It's evocative without being a caricature or cliche. On the other hand, the game doesn't have much time for expansive worldbuilding and lore.
The graphics are great showcase for the PS3, but there are some baaad slowdowns and screen tearing occasionally. The mo-capped facial animations were truly next-gen at the time, though.
The writing is pretty good, but the superb voice acting takes it to a whole other level. The heroines Nariko and Kai, as well as the main villain Bohan (played by Andy Serkis), all have fantastic performances.
On the other hand, everybody is just a little bit nuts.
The villains come off as grotesquely buffoonish. Serkis’s Bohan walks the fine line between menacing villain and pathetic narcissist, a Trump-like figure, but the sub-bosses (Flying Fox, Whiptail, and Roach) are just cartoons that feel out of place against the seriousness of the rest of the story.
Nariko herself is a wonderful lead, a powerful, magnetic presence in the game, but the splash art on the title and loading screens make her look like a pornstar. Surprisingly, the sweet, crazy little Kai is not annoying at all thanks to good character design and outstanding voice acting (TWING TWANG).
The QTEs suck. They come up quite suddenly, can be hard to spot in the moment, distract from the cinematic action, and are quite strict. The ones that require directional input are the worst, because half the time you'll be a little too diagonal on the analog stick (down-left instead of pure left, for example) and the input will fail.
The battle system, focusing on predefined combos and a color-coded counter system, is enjoyable. In this game, you block automatically by waiting in the correct stance and not attacking, and then hitting the counterattack button at the right time. This is clever because it discourages button mashing. Either way, I suck at this type of game generally and there is no easy difficulty option, only a “Hell Mode” that unlocks after you complete the game once. That said, I only died during the boss fights, so the game isn’t too hard overall.
The main points of frustration are the QTEs and the energy beams you have to counter from the last boss, which are really strict timing-wise.
The sixaxis motion controls are terrible and make the game so much harder, but thankfully you can turn them all off. Once I turned off the gyro controls, I really started to enjoy the archery and artillery sections of the game. The game peaks in the 3rd chapter, when you have quick alternating scenes between Nariko and Kai.
I liked the game at first, then I started to hate it, but then I started to like it again towards the end... except for the frustrating final boss fight.
Incidentally, this game also spawned an animated feature film, but it was terrible. The main characters were fairly detailed, but the animations were stiff and lifeless, the non-main characters looked like NPCs from a PS2 game, and the backgrounds were just low-poly mounds with a simple texture applied. It looked more like machinima than theatrical-level animation.
The writing also took a huge nosedive. Boring, wooden dialogue. All the subtle characterizations from the game are gone, whether it’s Kai’s nuttiness, Bohan’s manic narcissim, the sad and tortured relationship between Bohan and his son Roach, or even the little rivalry between Flying Fox and Whiptail. Nariko’s voice actor reprises the role, but her fiercely impassioned delivery from the game is gone, and now she spends the entire movie sounding only lightly chuffed. Kai goes from twing twang in the game to I like blood in the movie. Just garbage screenwriting.
We do get a little extra backstory. Bohan was always a backstabbing jerk who never can get the respect he thinks he deserves. Nariko and Kai are actually biological sisters, because apparently their father Shen went on a big raping spree after Nariko was born, desperately trying to sire a son as the Chosen One. And in fact there is a son, named Loki, but he’s just a blacksmith who is literally stabbed in the back after spouting some contradictory dialogue. That's one way to subvert a trope, I guess, but the whole plotline is just a stupid waste of 1/3 of the screen time.
The whole thing (the movie, not the game) is just awful. A simple compilation of the cutscenes from the game would have been better. Apparently Andy Serkis not only voiced game-Bohan, but also helped write the dialogue and direct the cutscenes. His presence is sorely missed from the movie.
The graphics are great showcase for the PS3, but there are some baaad slowdowns and screen tearing occasionally. The mo-capped facial animations were truly next-gen at the time, though.
The writing is pretty good, but the superb voice acting takes it to a whole other level. The heroines Nariko and Kai, as well as the main villain Bohan (played by Andy Serkis), all have fantastic performances.
On the other hand, everybody is just a little bit nuts.
The villains come off as grotesquely buffoonish. Serkis’s Bohan walks the fine line between menacing villain and pathetic narcissist, a Trump-like figure, but the sub-bosses (Flying Fox, Whiptail, and Roach) are just cartoons that feel out of place against the seriousness of the rest of the story.
Nariko herself is a wonderful lead, a powerful, magnetic presence in the game, but the splash art on the title and loading screens make her look like a pornstar. Surprisingly, the sweet, crazy little Kai is not annoying at all thanks to good character design and outstanding voice acting (TWING TWANG).
The QTEs suck. They come up quite suddenly, can be hard to spot in the moment, distract from the cinematic action, and are quite strict. The ones that require directional input are the worst, because half the time you'll be a little too diagonal on the analog stick (down-left instead of pure left, for example) and the input will fail.
The battle system, focusing on predefined combos and a color-coded counter system, is enjoyable. In this game, you block automatically by waiting in the correct stance and not attacking, and then hitting the counterattack button at the right time. This is clever because it discourages button mashing. Either way, I suck at this type of game generally and there is no easy difficulty option, only a “Hell Mode” that unlocks after you complete the game once. That said, I only died during the boss fights, so the game isn’t too hard overall.
The main points of frustration are the QTEs and the energy beams you have to counter from the last boss, which are really strict timing-wise.
The sixaxis motion controls are terrible and make the game so much harder, but thankfully you can turn them all off. Once I turned off the gyro controls, I really started to enjoy the archery and artillery sections of the game. The game peaks in the 3rd chapter, when you have quick alternating scenes between Nariko and Kai.
I liked the game at first, then I started to hate it, but then I started to like it again towards the end... except for the frustrating final boss fight.
Incidentally, this game also spawned an animated feature film, but it was terrible. The main characters were fairly detailed, but the animations were stiff and lifeless, the non-main characters looked like NPCs from a PS2 game, and the backgrounds were just low-poly mounds with a simple texture applied. It looked more like machinima than theatrical-level animation.
The writing also took a huge nosedive. Boring, wooden dialogue. All the subtle characterizations from the game are gone, whether it’s Kai’s nuttiness, Bohan’s manic narcissim, the sad and tortured relationship between Bohan and his son Roach, or even the little rivalry between Flying Fox and Whiptail. Nariko’s voice actor reprises the role, but her fiercely impassioned delivery from the game is gone, and now she spends the entire movie sounding only lightly chuffed. Kai goes from twing twang in the game to I like blood in the movie. Just garbage screenwriting.
We do get a little extra backstory. Bohan was always a backstabbing jerk who never can get the respect he thinks he deserves. Nariko and Kai are actually biological sisters, because apparently their father Shen went on a big raping spree after Nariko was born, desperately trying to sire a son as the Chosen One. And in fact there is a son, named Loki, but he’s just a blacksmith who is literally stabbed in the back after spouting some contradictory dialogue. That's one way to subvert a trope, I guess, but the whole plotline is just a stupid waste of 1/3 of the screen time.
The whole thing (the movie, not the game) is just awful. A simple compilation of the cutscenes from the game would have been better. Apparently Andy Serkis not only voiced game-Bohan, but also helped write the dialogue and direct the cutscenes. His presence is sorely missed from the movie.