BY Craig A. Jensen / Usenet Post
1. Graphics: 8.5/10 Graphics are well done, with relatively few polygon glitches and fairly smooth movement. Some moves appear rather wooden, but they're all miles better than, say, the moves in TSD3. The backgrounds are Tekken 1-ish, but still very colorful. Graphics are 60fps and the polygons are textured. In addition, the characters are fairly big on the screen and don't look too bad. 2. Sound and Music: 7.5/10 The musical melodies are average and fairly unobtrusive. Swords make ch-ching sounds when they hit each other, and people grunt and roar before some moves. Voices are in (I assume) Chinese and are not translated. 3. Control: 9/10 Tight and responsive. Moves are QCF's and DP motions, as well as f,f types of moves. As in, say, Tekken, if you enter QCF+(attack key) then your character does a crouch dash forward as you enter the QCF and then launches into the attack as you press the attack key. Similar things happen for the f,f moves, etc. 4. Gameplay: 8.5/10 The gimmick for this game is that "defense is as important as offense." There are two buttons for the two types of attacks: slashes and thrusts. There are two buttons for the two type of defense: parry and redirect. You parry a slash and redirect a thrust. Low attacks, some aerial attacks, and kick attacks can't be parried or redirected. Sidestepping is accomplished by pressing parry and redirect; it mainly protects against thrusts (high and low). Throws can be escaped by ducking. The manual lists 8 moves for each character, and there seem to be about 8 more for each character that aren't listed in the manual and that you can find by just mucking around. Hence there aren't all that many moves, and most of them are fairly tame (although there are exceptions.) As I'm sure I said before, it's all weapons based. Most characters have a weapon that (broadly interpreted) is either a halberd, a sword, or a mace. There's a "Chi meter" that increases when you do "brave" things and decreases when you do "cowardly" things. When the chi meter is at maximum, or when your life bar is flashing red, you can do either a flurry of slashes or a flurry of thrusts by pressing QCF+slash+parry or QCF+thrust+redirect. There are juggles in the game, but they're fairly tame and only a couple of extra hits (as far as I can tell now, at least.) 5. Originality: 8/10 Aside from the fact that it's a weapons based fighter, and there have been an awful lot of those coming out recently, it's pretty original. The historical background of it is nice, and they seem to have at least tried to create a fighter with a unique feel. 6. OVERALL: 8.5/10 A well done fighter that has almost no flash but is still competently done. --- Craig A. Jensen jensen@math.cornell.edu caj11@cornell.edu
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