Gamesugar

July 29, 2011

Ascending the Metatron (Or Something) in El Shaddai

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
The demo for El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron has been available on Xbox LIVE for a while now, though you may have overlooked its strange offering, as I initially did. In my capacity as an official Sugar Human, I recommend you reconsider.

The demo takes place in what might best be described as a bizarre drug induced hallucination; a world made of shadow and glass, laced together like a spider’s web. At one point, the perspective shifts to that of a side-scroller, where I leapt across rolling waves of clouds and flying rocks as the sun rose and fell, replaced by some ominous face in the background, again and again.

The demo is strange and dreamlike; sheathed in angelic armor that breaks away to reveal what appears to be some kind of surfer bro in jeans, the protagonist platforms through areas that seem only tangentially related, finding demons to fight in glassy arenas made of light and dark.

I challenged a boss, only to suddenly find myself somewhere else, platforming again, as in those strange dreams where you walk through a door to find the nature of the dream has completely changed.

It’s going to be a pretty thin summer for games this year, so it may be worth your time to check out this bizarre action entry; I played for half an hour, and though I’m not entirely sure what it is that I played, I can tell you that it was awesome. El Shaddai will arrive in North America on August 16 for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

April 21, 2010

Check Your Enthusiasm – Arc Rise Fantasia

Filed under: News Feed — Tags: , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:10 pm

Arc Rise Fantasia
If you’d asked me how I felt about Ignition Entertainment at E3 last year, I would have been fairly optimistic – the company genuinely seemed “in it to win it”, grabbing Muramasa away from XSEED and focusing on a social media push that worked pretty damn hard to spread the word and help that title perform long after its release.

Even now, the willingness of gamers to love a bad game for being bad, as in the case of Deadly Premonition, makes it appear as if Ignition is on the ball.

But let’s talk about Arc Rise Fantasia.

Siliconera posted IGN video from the game yesterday, with a pessimistic appraisal of the work so far seen in the dub of the title – producing a landslide of comments from gamers who have every right to rage when a game that is anticipated is so instantly derailed by an apparent lack of respect for the source material.

What remains is some of the worst voice-over work I’ve yet heard in a videogame, and I survived two Magna Carta titles.

I don’t use the phrase “affront to God” often, but I’m backed against a wall here – particularly when the potential for XSEED to have done an English voice track while still offering the original Japanese one was on the table.

But don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself after the break – and please give your own two cents, because it’s increasingly obvious that feedback from you needs to be continually ringing in the ears of people who let things like this happen. And also because the possibility of Ignition handling Heroes’ Paradise at this point makes me feel a bit ill.

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