Otogi 2 - Immortal Warriors review

Along with aliens and zombies, demons are one of the gamer's most notorious foes. The hordes of the underworld never seem to relent in their attacks on humanity, and thus they have returned once again in From Software's Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors. Raikoh, the un-dead hero from the first game, must once again defend Japan from the threat of demonic conquest, and this time (as the Hollywood style intro goes) he's not alone. Five immortal warriors have joined him in the fight for truth, justice and a decent game. Well, a half-decent one at any rate.From the start, you can tell the developers at From Software were out to impress with Otogi 2, and considering the original game's lack of sales in Japan, America and Europe this is understandable. The game has an amazing graphical coating on everything; environments, enemies, rubble, they all look outstanding. One of Gamestyle's particular favourite graphical touches is the way the enemies die, crying out in pain after a quick blur effect then ceasing to exist in a flash of light.Unfortunately, at times the Xbox can't seem to keep up with this graphical excellence if you manage to kill multiple enemies at once. The bane of all graphics-heavy games, the dreaded frame-rate slowdown, rears its head in Otogi 2. Although such slowdown does not happen frequently, when it does it has a large impact on the presentation, even in the in-game cutscenes. Gamestyle wonders why the game can happily display a 50ft Spider demon boss crushing arches and rocks under its massive 8-legs as wind blows its hair in all directions, yet slows to a snail's pace when we manage to kill more than five demons simultaneously. In addition to this, the game's camera, while competent enough, sometimes has trouble following the speed at which attacks are launched and can have Raikoh and Co. disappearing off-screen for a second when attacking or being attacked. This can be especially frustrating in the boss-battles, which are confusing enough in themselves.The core gameplay of Otogi 2 presents a problem as well. Despite there being a variety of demons to slaughter unmercifully, as well as numerous different beautifully rendered destructible environments to strut around in, the mission structure rarely deviates from 'kill all demons'. This gets extremely tiresome in a short space of time, especially if the missions are just plain annoying. One Gamestyle particularly dislikes is where Raikoh must protect his own spirit in order to escape the Underworld. The spirit only moves towards lanterns so you have to spend time destroying all the lanterns in the level and protect your spirit from the nigh-on-invulnerable enemies that can only be destroyed by smashing them into a nearby river. The level isn't difficult, just extremely tedious.The multiple character angle adds a new dimension to Otogi 2, though not in the way Gamestyle envisaged. Despite claims to the contrary (in the manual and on the back of the box), each character handles almost exactly the same, with light attacks, heavy attacks and magic. The only major differences in the characters come from their looks, animation and attack strength. As you might expect from every other game made since the dawn of time, the huge character Kintoki can't move very fast but is the strongest of the six; while the smallest Sadamitsu, is weak but fast, allowing her to chain larger combos altogether. Also, while progressing through the game's story mode, the game only allows you to select a character once per "phase" and not allowing their usage until 2-3 levels later, forcing you to play as each character. While Gamestyle admits this adds some variety to the game, making sure players use all 6 characters, it also feels rather constricting as you are forced to use a character that you may dislike.Just like in the original Otogi, you can upgrade your characters by buying weapons and various stat upgrades (health, strength and so on) for your characters from gold gathered from defeated demons. Gamestyle feels that, just like in the previous game, this is tacked on and doesn't have a large impact on the experience. The same goes for the experience points gained from defeated demons that level up your character.Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors attempts to improve on the formula established in the first game, but does not succeed; instead it feels almost exactly like the first game, but better looking. Even the game's Japanese legend inspired story failed to grab Gamestyle's attention and we found we didn't really care what was happening in the cutscenes. The only real improvement over its predecessor is the graphics, but that isn't enough to make up for the repetition and somewhat pointless multiple characters. At the end of the day Otogi 2 is no better or worse than the original, so with that in mind it will be awarded the same score.