Played it at TGS. Looks very cool but has massively long animations for the combat, many of which are criminally non-interruptible. Basically, it plays like a dog - especially after Bayonetta.

It's horrible....

I'm so starved for this stuff that I keep watching vids on Nico-Nico trying to find out what's going on with the system - just in case I'm missing some awsum. I see that you can interrupt certain animations with his evade now, but everything else looks just as you say - LOOOOOONG... (especially if you miss a Launcher and he's stuck in a long float animation)

These guys had previously worked on Viewtiful Joe and Devil May Cry, but I cannot for the life of me work out what they're doing with this one. I think there's a blocking or even a Parry System in there, but watching the enemies, it's blatantly obvious they're not communicating enemy attacks to the player. Attacks just seem to spring out from nothing as they do in Ninja Gaiden and other such shite.

I bet I end up buying it anyway!

The Viewtiful Joe/Devil May Cry guys on El Shaddai were from the art team (not design/planning). The creative lead was the lead artist on Okami and he apparently "designed" the combat system for El Shaddai.

Ah - thanks for that,

I know from the work I was doing that the guy who handled the enemy routines in Viewtiful Joe, RE4 etc is now over at Platinum. He worked his magic on Bayonetta too - I swear throughout the whole world it's just this one guy who actually UNDERSTANDS!!!

The system in this looks balls. But I'm so dying for my next fix that I just cannot accept it.

Enoch's a WICKED dancer though! >XD

Did you nab this Saur?

I keep swaying towards buying it but end up not.

I badly need stuff to be able to write up for another writing job I'm doing, but there's nothing I can work with. I'm hoping Shadows Of The Damned has some trickery I can explore.

I'll probably end up picking this up so that I can cover it for the western release, there must be something in here. The only other games about are SF4, Marvel and Mortal Kombat but the single page stuff I'm doing is not enough for these games, nor do I want to step on the toes of proper guides/sites who deal with them.

It's getting weirdly positive reviews:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-01-el-shaddai-ascension-of-the-metatron-review

Weird in the sense that they sorta say it plays like clunky balls BUT looks lovely, so that makes it "amazing".

That's all they ever go on about ¬_¬

It's impossible to get any kind of clue about how it plays from the videos I've seen so far or preview texts, there's no breakdown of the mechanics anywhere. From what I've seen it plays simplistically, but I'm not sure if that's how deep it goes or not.

I know what - I'm getting this.

The crew behind it have been given free-reign to create what THEY wanted. This alone deserves support, I'm going to wait on the western version - hopefully they'll still have the Japanese track, but if not no biggie. I really hope there's another layer to the combat, we've had nothing since Bayonetta - NOTHING! T_T

- and don't anyone mention that PS3/360 Castlevania non-game. It's like a visual guide about how NOT to handle 3D action.

Did you get it?

There is a demo up on JPN PSN. Looks pretty, can't get a handle on the combat.

I will have a look - nice one.

I did contact the European publisher to secure a promo copy when they get them in. I'm supposed to be doing a writeup but no idea what to make of this, I've been looking forward to a new action game - I really hope it isn't too simple.

I can't make head or tail of that PSN, I found a list of trailers but cannot find the demo.

Edit: Found it. Silly me, thinking all El Shaddai content would be in one place. You can't get to the demo via the Trailers page, and you can't get to the trailers via the demo page.

Wow....don't know where to begin.

This game is a collection of all my pet hates with 3D action games. The problem is that the player is given nothing to react to or push against. Imagine playing a 2D shoot em up where all enemy shots are invisible - this is exactly what fighting is in El Shaddai.

There is no communication of enemy attacks whatsoever, attacks come out of nowhere and you are not given anything at all to react to. You can block and Just block, but with nothing to gauge your timing against it's incredibly difficult to judge correctly when surrounded. Being surrounded should not matter in a 3D action game, in fact THIS is where it should become even more fun - but it's not.

In order to Evade you have to hold the Block button, then move the stick in the direction you want to go + Jump button. The problem with this is that it only works if you input the command way in advance of the attack closing in, there are NO invincible frames whatsoever! Most enemies have multi-hit attacks, so if you're still in the middle of the Evade animation during this attack - you WILL get hit. There is no Lock-On system either, so Enoch will not track around his nearest enemy automatically - meaning every evade you attempt is literal, you MUST completely clear the enemy attack animation manually.

Blocking is a function, but the odds are unfairly stacked against you. Everything Enoch does is LONG, every single animation goes on and on and you have no means to quickly cancel out of anything. So you have to be very deliberate and accurate when making use of his functions. In the case of the Just Block function (blocking JUST before an attack hits), the incoming attack will be completely nullified if you get it right - but there's NOTHING to gauge your timing against. Why don't developers understand this? How on earth are you supposed to accurately time a Just block if you are surrounded by multiple enemies who attack without any audio or visual cue? Don't you dare think that Block interrupts damage animation, if you get hit when surrounded - you're taking all of it!

Enemies also do not react to your attacks, to the point that they can completely rip through your melee strikes! Even when you think you've got an enemy pinned under a barrage of strikes, it'll just launch an attack - and win! There is no communication to the player as to when and why this will happen. I don't have a problem with this, but at least give me some sort of feedback telling me why I can't pin enemies! Launching is the same deal, it's all so fuzzy - it's not clear when you can launch and when you can't. Enemies also drop out of aerial combos for the simple fact that Enoch is LOOOONG, his attacks have such a huge amount of excess animation that your standard chains have gaps in them a mile wide.

This would be great if they'd just throw out all the prettiness and go back to the very beginning and design a game first. This needs to go back to the drawing board, the very first fighting encounter in one of these games should be a voyage of descovery. Instead it's a horrible broken mess where you are committed totally to each any every massive character animation. Don't you dare make a mistake - you'll have to sit through it and watch your error SSSLLLOOOWWWLLLYYY unfold...

This drives me up the wall. Spending 20 minutes on the first pair of enemies just gave me a huge list of things that don't work. Why the hell didn't they spend some time here? They should have got the core game down first! The relationship between the player and enemy, the way the various aspects of the fight and the properties of techniques are communicated to the player are all critically important! El Shaddai provides nothing, you're playing through a blindfold.

Ah, it is a shame the combat doesn't work - the only thing that seemed to change when I played was the level of aggression from the enemies as I went through the demo,

Block just didn't work for me, as you say you can't cancel out of an attack move, I basically failed every time I tried to block an attack.

Also, does Enoch have any choice over what weapons he can use? It seemed to be whatever he had stolen most recently.

It does look pretty though!

So in summary it's shit.

There's really no excuse for this these days and from what you say this game appears to lack even the most basic of systems.

Yeah the weapon you use is simply the last one you stole. That's all there is to it!

Seriously I give up. Things were pregressively becoming more and more amazing last generation, but now it's a steep downwards spiral. Apart from Bayonetta we haven't had a single action game this generation with even a fraction of the mechanical depth of any of the greats from last time round.

I understand why they're trying to make games more "inclusive" but this over-simplification just makes these games utterly boring, broken and completely unfair.

It is weird isn't it. I guess it is partly making games less daunting, but also that games seem a little more rushed.

Shadows of the Damned could have been excellent given another 6 months polish, but it seems to have been rushed out the door.

It also seems to relate to a decline in JPN game design generally, and the rise of higher production values but simpler game mechanics in Western games.

I'd say that is more the problem than anything.

I really miss the days when you could import any unusual looking JPN arcade game, and it would always be good fun.

I really miss that too.

I loved the way a friend could pass you random game you've never heard of, then you spend the next few weeks blowing up over it. There's none of that now. It's either indie titles which play like shit, or massively overblown interactive movies which also play like shit.

I was very disappointed with Shadows Of The Damned, the way they billed that was very misleading. I don't think Shinji Mikami had very much to do with the title at all. A look through the credits more than hinted at the fact that the game was quickly thrown together by a western team using every conceivable piece of middleware. There are no play mechanics to learn, the game is extremely easy and there is no incentive to play it again.

A scoring hook would have been a really good idea. As the enemies are so damn easy, why not intruduce a specific way to score points while encouraging the use of Garcia's various actions?

Taking Bayonetta as an example again; every single action she can perform has a purpose. Her regular Square Button gunshot does fuck all damage, but you end up using it ALL the time - why? Because it gives you 4 seconds instead of 3 to score the next hit to keep your combo going. Same with her Taunt, it's not just for show - the different Taunts you can perform both freeze the combo timer as well as build your Magic Gauge to a varying degree. Freezing the combo timer becomes vital when going for Pure Platinums, it allows you to hold onto your score multiplier between enemy waves or within a gap in a boss routine.

There's stuff to learn about each and every action. I'm not saying that ALL games should be like this, but there is no middle ground. On one hand you've got guys showing you how deep they can go with these mechanics, then on the other hand you have everything else which has NO mechanical depth whatsoever.

What I find confusing is that I thought that Bayonetta got the middle-ground just right, but on talking to a number of friends who picked up the game, they're just not feeling it the way I did...

This is deeply concerning, because the system in Bayo is completely and utterly accessible regardless of player skill. Even at the most basic level the game is fun to play because you 'the player' have complete control over how she flows with the hold commands. The connection between player, pad and screen is immediate and direct.

And yet virtually all 'casual players' I know who've picked up the game just can't get to grips with it. Something has gone very badly wrong here. It's like videogames, as a culture and a thing, have moved somewhere else and we're left behind. Perhaps we're as irrelevant as point and click adventures?

Glad I didn't bother, sounds exactly like what I played at TGS; clunky balls.

Its the visual style I reckon - too much for a lot of folk.

I think so, arcade games in general are becoming entirely niche and archaic. Or simplified to the point of dumbness/mini-games (eg. Geometry Wars/Wario Ware).

Have you ever read The Marching Morons? The cars people drive in that story are exactly what games have become. The whole experience is fake, and nothing but a massive ego massage. It's the same with those idiotic trophies you're forced to have now, these fuckwits NEED a virtual pat on the back for each and every action they perform.

It feels like gaming has been hijacked by the people I used to HATE when I worked in arcades. They were a complete waste of time, they didn't spend much money and they were never repeat visitors.

Them people who used to destroy the housing on joysticks because they couldn't understand that they were digital; pushing them REALLY hard did not make the players run faster in Virtua Striker. So they proceeded to push even harder.

They would FREAK OUT because "the steering wheel is moving by itself" on Daytona, not understanding the concept of force feedback. Nope, the machine was "driving itself".

Anything which is not spelled out really slowly, and does not represent a real life activity baffles them. All they want to do is play toy soldiers with the FPS genre, pointing and shooting is about as technical as they can manage.

Gah I reackon people will get bored of fps soon enough. I don't have an issue with the genre conceptually as there's still loads of scope for some originality there if devs were permitted to deviate from the totally banal 'realism' direction. I just can't abide Call of Duty or any of the clones doing the rounds. It's barely even a game in my eyes.

One thought on the demo - was there a 'demo may not indicate final quality' warning?... there is always a chance...

Seems unlikely though eh.