| Kagero 2: Dark Illusion review |
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My family used to worry about my cousin James because he'd take string from the kitchen and use it to lynch his Action Man figures (back when Action Man was still Action Man). They couldn't have seen me coming.
I would use a beautiful wooden toy castle my Uncle Eric built me to play "Fortress Of Doom," which involved filling it with ants and seeing how many could escape with me trying to kill them. (The escapees were shafted anyway, because then it was the magnifying glass for them.) I would throw worms a huge distance (for a four-year-old) into the air multiple times and if they were still moving after multiple impacts on the concrete, I would let them go on the somewhat creepy premise that they had proven themselves.
I used to pretend I was a Bond villain and freeze my Lego men (alive, I told myself) in blocks of ice. One went in the fire. One went up on a rocket (that one didn't work out because his added weight caused the firework to go spiralling off into the hibiscus). One, in what I consider my magnum opus, was covered in glue and rolled in iron filings. He was them impaled at the apex of a pyramid of sparklers and each sparkler was lit at the bottom. Oh, if you could have seen the joy on my infant face as the sparks slowly travelled higher and higher before all meeting at the top and turning him into a fireball.
Dark Illusion is like an affectionate love letter to the childhoods of all little scumbags like myself. You, the princess, have been framed for the murder of your father by your evil power-hungry sister and now everyone in the kingdom wants you dead. Forget all that, though - all that's just an excuse to have a busty lolita in fetish gear as your avatar. On the run from the soldiers you stumble into an old chapel where your arm is possessed by a talking length of cruelly twisted metal that thirsts for blood. Activating it takes nothing more than a stab of the button.
At this point Dark Illusion turns into the game that Dungeon Keeper should have been. The player can enter each stage with nine-total traps selectable - three wall traps, three floor traps and three ceiling traps - and map one of each kind to the Triangle, Square and X buttons. Floor traps deal with landmines, springboards, bear traps and so forth. Wall traps encompass projectiles, magnets and pusher walls (the one with an iron maiden on the end of it is nice). Ceiling traps are versatile and devastating, running the gamut from Edgar Allen Poe-style pendulums to the inevitable Raiders of the Lost Ark giant rolling boulder. (These are all displayed pictorally on the menus, so there's no need to worry about Japanese text once you have the gameplay down.)
On top of these basic traps, there are three other ways to hilariously and satisfyingly maim your enemies. Firstly there are landscape features that can prove unpleasant if you can figure out the correct way in which to use them; setting up a pusher wall to send an anvil tumbing down the stairs or a springboard to catapult your unsuspecting victim into a seemingly innocuous fireplace, for instance. Secondly there are pre-set traps all around the three maps which are activated by touching switches (either personally or via one of your traps). These cause effects like turning the (giant) oven on, causing the chandelier to come crashing down a la Phantom of the Opera, and one particularly nasty fellow the causes a drawbridge to raise sending anyone standing on it tumbling backwards to land at its base whereupon a portcullis descends on them.
By far the most worthy of mention, though, are the Dark Illusions. These are giant setpiece traps which cause horrifying damage in even more horrifying ways, and have secret (and often bloody obscure) conditions for their activation. The first, for example, is called Symphony of Scream and its pressure plate is located under a carpet - but is locked unless the player has lit all the candles in the room. Assuming they have, a giant metal snare shoots out and grabs the victim, whereupon he or she is dragged into a giant music box then slowly and sadistically mangled upward through its gears (the accompanying sound effects are fantastic and sound like a butcher taking carnal advantage of his wares) before being spat out at the top for an extra few "insult to injury" hit points' worth of damage from landing on the floor. The first time we managed this we set it off on ourselves by accident, and didn't know whether to puke laughing or just puke.
Ostensibly the aim of the game is to complete the story, which can be altered by various things such as your style of play and which characters you elect to kill. Wiping out a main character can bring the game to an abrupt end but never fear - when you start again, all your advances will still be intact. This brings us to the big game of the piece - just how much damage you can cause with one combo. Our record starts with a pusher wall that knocks the victim down onto the floor. A pendulum then descends half way across the room and thuds into a gigantic stone pillar, which duly topples over and crushes them. The chandelier trap is then manually activated, bringing it down on them for further damage. Finally, the coup de grāce is to activate the springboard which they have been lying on all along which sends them flailing through the air to land on the carpet, and into the music box they go. Poetry.
The more varied and imaginative your performance, the more cash you earn for the stage. This can be spent on keys to unlock other areas of the maps (containing more setpiece traps) or on improving your own stock. In this way arrows become spears, bear traps become vacuum traps, pendulums become buzzsaws and the rolling boulder becomes spiked or explosive, depending on your bent (or, perhaps, you're bent). The subtle differences in the way these traps behave (their force, speed and recharge times) become particularly significant as the game progresses as it becomes necessary to tailor your traps to the type of enemy. Strong men, for example, are immune to pusher walls and will just shove them back. Ninjas are too light and agile to be caught by most floor traps. Mages have resistance to the damage type of their class (fire, ice, etc). Bosses can dodge projectiles, necessitating the use of instant-hit damagers like explosions or electric shocks. This, coupled with the replay value, survival mode and extra sidestory missions, means that no matter how repetitive things get, there's always something extra to unlock, attempt or experiment with.
It's also this element that makes the game a difficult one to judge. Speaking personally, I have never found a game to be actually distasteful until now. Sure, games like Grand Theft Auto are irresponsible, but they're also simply amoral. You can spend all day bashing whores' faces in, but you don't have to and you certainly don't unlock any new costumes for it. At the end of the day it's no more morally repugnant than Elite - it's just realistic, whereas Kagero is the first game that's ever struck us as being genuinely immoral. It dwells on, encourages and rewards undiluted deviousness and sadism like nothing that we've ever seen before, even in previous Keisuke Kikuchi games. If we were the kind of people who campaigned for video games to be censored (instead of the kind of people who used to land in Choplifter, lure the hostages to the chopper then take off and land again swiftly to crush them), this is the kind of game that would be on our T-shirts.
Of course, all that's happening far away in a parallel universe where we're responsible adults. A few years ago my mother asked me to help cut out the roots from a tree in her garden because its weight was threatening to bring the whole hedge down. As I dug around the roots I found an ancient Army Man nailed to them that I had, in years long past, simultaneously crucified and buried alive. That's why this game gets a big thumbs up.
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System: Sony PlayStation 2
Genre: Adventure
Developer: Tecmo
Publisher: Tecmo
Players: 1
Version: Japan
Reviewed: Nov 2005
Writer: Simon Dominguez
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Pros:
- Tons to do
- Brilliantly precise game environment
- Best fun EVER
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Cons:
- Essentially repetitive
- Completely repulsive
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