This is the first video game I've been able to finish for a while!
On an impluse I decided to buy this game for he Gameboy Advance, I'd never really heard anything about it before but it looked suitably anime/fantasy for my usual tastes, and appeared to have a good storyline to it as well. On playing it, however, I wasn't too impressed...
There's not a lot to it to be honest, all you're really doing is running around an isometric gaff punching things. This would be OK if the game made you feel it's part of something huge, but it really doesn't; the characters have quite extreme and obsessive personalities to the point where they're just not believable, and while the stages of the game do have a 'mission based' feel to them, there's not much to suggest it's linked to any overall huge plot beyond the first couple of levels where Yusuke dies and becomes the Spirit Detective. The game ended on a bit of a low, where you fight the final ridiculously-tough-but-disappointingly-normal-looking boss Toguro, and the game ends with the idea that there is more to do. I mean yes, keep them wanting more, but when there wasn't all that much there in the first place it's not really given me that incentive.
To be fair, there's some fun to be had from the fighting elements of the game. The actual fighting never really strays from the "let's find something and kill it" speil, but you can manipulate the game's tougher fights by being extremely careful on your approach so that only one enemy appears at a time. The best levels are probably the timed ones, where you have to pick up a certain amount of items to win the level, and therefore you need to pick your fights carefully. It's one thing to gain a lot of experience from winning fights, but it won't help you if you can't finish the level!
You get four characters to play with in the main bulk of the game, but to be honest I couldn't see the point. They each have a different special attack, and one of them is supposed to be slightly faster, but in reality there's not much difference. Yusuke has a ranged attack that none of the others have, making the other characters a bit redundant. Hiei, for example, has the ability to teleport short distances, but there's no real reason to use it. Kuwumara has a spirit sword, but that can only be used in close range, and as the enemies can't attack you while you're pounding them anyway, the only real reason to use it is if you're heavily outnumbered and re-he-hearly need something to die quickly. You do have to use them all though; at some point in the later stages of the game they each have to take on a boss alone, and they all need to be levelled up before they can stand a real chance. Thankfully, I've played some of the video RPGs before (by which I mean games that are NOT based on Dungeons and Dragons or anything like that, where it actually matters what experience you're doling out to what character) and picked up on this fact early; if not I'd probably have played most of the game using Yusuke, got stuck and have to play through the entire game again.
The game is quite short; I'm not sure what I think of that. On the one hand, the approach to fighting monsters in the game gets old, so I probably wouldn't have played it for much longer anyway. On the other hand, the short game doesn't really give it time to develop. Having looked in to it a little, I've now discovered that it's based on an old Manga comic of the early 1990s, and it appears to follow the plot faithfully, to the point that they literally couldn't have made the game any longer than they did without making a competely different game anyway. For fans of the series, it is at least a faithful reproduction - but I'd be interested to know how many people old enough to remember the manga have a GBA or a DS. All in all, not a very good game.
But do you know what, I've actually read manga comics, and there is usually a far more intricate development of the plot than this game suggests. It's something I'd be interested in checking out, if I had time. For now though, I bought Tournament Tactics as part of the same purchase, so you may be hearing about that in future...
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