Publisher: Bandai
Developer: CyberConnect2
Release Date: 3/8/2000
Date Played: 10/8/2019
Region: USA
Time Played: 30 minutes
What’d you think?: This game is rad. The gameplay is reminescent of a top-down shooter, but you’re a person running and jumping through a 3d space, placing bombs on the ground or throwing them onto locked-onto enemies. As bombs blast radii intersect each other, they chain, growing more powerful and earning more points. It’s fast, frantic, and fun. It’s all packaged behind some broadly generic scifi tropes (would you believe that in the future a corporation is in charge of government? It doesn’t go well!) where even the game’s own characters don’t know how to balance tone. The tutorial sees our game’s protagonist commit a war crime, and the first cutscenes after show how thoroughly traumatized he’s become. Dead-eyed, he flatly talks about how destruction is his only purpose anymore, and his shipmates treat this as a fun personality quirk, laughing about how Jutah (the J is silent) “just can’t wait to blow things up!”. Sadly, I didn’t get to see how much worse that part of the game got, as the game part was fairly challenging, and my one try ended on the second boss.
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrganSv8_RE
