It’s been a very interesting experience going back to 2007 era games. I remember when the newer systems like the xbox one and ps4 came out there was a lot of questions as to what was so different about these new games that it required a hardware refresh. I remember seeing diagrams going around online showing how upping polygon density in successive hardware generations had improved graphics in every hardware cycle but also how adding more after the xbox 360 generation essentially made it mathematically impossible to make enough of a difference for people to notice. There was a sense that graphics had gotten as good as they were going to get and any new hardware was just companies milking us for extra money. I reflected back on that sentiment while my ps3 gave itself a hernia trying to render the final boss arena at such a bad frame rate that it actually made me physically ill playing it
The final showdown is against a boss flying over a battlefield with his entire army scrambling all over the screen. This includes soldiers running in front of the camera and in between the characters while they’re fighting. Not joining in the battle, just adding visual noise. There are also the boss’s giant black wings made of some kind of black smoke cover half of the screen. If you need a visual, look up those notorious shots in the Star Wars prequels where there's screen to screen characters walking in every direction so your eyes can't focus on anything. Except this time add the bosses giant black wings covering both your character, the boss, and some of the background so it gives the impression that you’ve got rotating blind spots in your eyes. Then when you factor in the camera zooming in and out and shaking like you’re in the middle of an earthquake you have an experience so nauseating I'm genuinely getting queasy just reporting it back to you. Also, becaise this is a God of War style game, the final boss is about 10 times as hard as the rest of the game combined, ensuring that you’ll be playing this uniquely terrible part for hours, not just because you need to memorize the attack patterns but also memorize all of the dance moves in the quick time events to actually kill the fucking thing. I genuinely had to take an hour long break halfway through playing it so the throbbing in my head would stop. So yes, polygon density is not as important these days, but trust me when I say the playability of games these days is wonderful compared to the “things will never get better than this” days of the mid 2000s. Not saying you need to rush out and get an rtx 4090, but sometimes all of these remasters are good for more than just keeping the game in print.
So, in what’s becoming a running joke of this project, I played Heavenly Sword all the way to the end. This time however, I did it intentionally. Partially because it's a God of War clone and I love the early God of War series, and also because I wanted to give myself a reward for slogging through the 12 hour road trip through Pennsylvania that was playing Fable. Truth is, I played a little of Heavenly Sword a few months before starting this project just to test out the disc and wound up playing hours of it because I enjoyed it so much. By the end of fable i was openly vowing to anyone in earshot that i was going to play the shit out of this game. And despite my opening, the game kicks fucking ass.
God of war is a great series, and the thing about God of War clones is that they were seen at the time as me too cash in type games. So I get the feeling that a game like Heavenly Sword bounces off of game collectors as completely unworthy of checking out due to reputation alone. I haven’t played a lot of these types of games, so it's hard to me to judge the “genre” overall, but my issue with that attitude is I beat the first three God of War games in something like 2 weeks because they were so amazing i couldn’t put them down and that also they’re remarkably short for a series that’s as fondly remembered as it is. I guess that’s not an issue if you’re the type of person that replays a game 700 times because they keep unlocking new harder difficulty levels and modes, but for someone who doesn’t, I was definitely enthusiastic about playing a new game just like it. I think some of the Heavenly Sword’s reputation comes from God of War 2 being released the same year on the ps2, and the ps3 being as popular as crotch rot in 2007 because it was 600 dollars and sony was acting like they were doing us a favor for letting us buy it at all, which caused the entire gaming public to verbally burn them in effigy.
The game starts out with the aforementioned battleground with a million billion people rushing your character, Nariko, with swords held high. However, you have the legendary Heavenly Sword, so after dispatching a bunch of bad guys in a tutorial you immediately….. die. it turns out the sword is cursed. However, Nariko’s voice starts narrating the story and the game cuts to five days before.
The story of this game is strange to talk about. In one sense, it's a typical bland martial arts movie plot that I barely remember, and in another sense I was hooting and hollering with delight through the entire thing. The overarching story is a typical story of feudal Japanese warlords fighting over some sort of ancient all powerful sword. At least I think they’re feudal japanese. The guy who plays the main villain, Bohan, is played by the guy who played Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The rub is that the villains of the game are absolutely fantastic in every scene they’re in. The game starts out boring, just another hackneyed adventure plot with an overserious bunch of good guy characters and one wacky one to annoy the shit out of me, but then the villains prance on screen acting like power ranger monsters channeling emperor palpatine. In order you fight Flying Fox, played by the villain of James Bond’s Octopussy, who’s over the top classical villain accent and ridiculous army of HUT HUT hutting guards who he literally pushes off a ledge to fight against the protagonist while they complain like teenagers being told to take out the garbage. Whiptail, a fish woman femme fatale who hisses and insults you with all of the subtle sexuality of barbarella. And Roach, an ogre who is also Bohan’s illegitimate son who talks like he’s about 5 years old and becomes actually a very sympathetic character.
One interesting thing ninja theory does is use neuro diverse characters in their plots. In games of this time that’s a bold step that I genuinely don’t know if anyone was doing, or if anyone else was, if they were doing it with any tact. Ninja theory is most known these days for their series Hellblade, which famously is about a woman going through psychosis and had both mental health experts and people with history of psychosis advising them to give the proper respect and accuracy to the subject. In Heavenly Sword, there’s characters worth highlighting. One is Kai, the main character Nariko’s adopted sister. Kai is from a clan that was completely wiped out by marauders when she was a child. She has both a strange way of acting and speaking due to both being from a completely different culture, but also as some fans speculate, a severe and untreated case of ptsd. To me though, she reminds me a lot of my autistic friends when they finally stop masking around me. Not being able to read the room when everyone else is deadly serious and making jokes that fall flat to the rest of the cast or having strange nicknames for her tools like “playing twing twang” for her crossbow she uses. Although come to think of it most of my autistic friends have ptsd, so i may be conflating the two. This sort of thing could come off bad in reading, but the important part here is that while Kai is a character in a silly game, and therefore a little silly, she’s never played as a joke. She’s a bad ass who saves multiple people and has not only agency but important consequence to those around her. And she does this while acting like herself, not turning into a taciturn stone faced warrior. The fact that her issues are never specified but she’s just allowed to exist and taken seriously says a whole lot to me. As someone who does have a lot of neurodivergent people in my family and friend group, she’s a character that I felt like I knew without sensing any cheap jokes, and I genuinely appreciated her being in the game. It reminds me of a take on old kung fu movies like, and brace yourself because this is such a stunningly horrible name you’re not going to believe me when I say it's worth bringing up, the crippled avengers. Now that’s such an awful title it sounds like a joke, but it's old enough that I think that was actually the proper phrasing at the time. The story is four warriors are disabled due to being wounded in battle and all help each other work through their disabilities and strike back at the big bad who wounded them. They’re both stories where ability is neither mocked nor something that you triumph over, but a fact of life that everyone deals with, especially during the horrors of war. PTSD being obviously one of the most common side effects of war, and I could imagine an autistic person in antiquity when no one had any concept of mental health doing what Kai does, being a little bit of an outsider in society but ultimately being successful and accepted by people that rely on her. And it makes me happy seeing characters who remind me of people I know in historical settings.
The other character worth bringing up is Roach, Bohan’s ogre son, who I'm a little more iffy about but I still think he’s worth bringing up. He’s either mentally handicapped or extremely young, it's impossible to know because I'm not an expert on ogre anatomy and the game doesn’t tell you. But considering he’s like 7 foot tall and talks with a man’s voice, i don’t think it's unfair to project him being an adult with intellectual disability through the lens of fantasy. Bohan is extremely dismissive of Roach, telling him never to call him daddy in public and putting him down in front of the others. Now, whether being verbally mean to Roach during these kinds of cutscenes is good or bad while we are talking about a cabal of power hungry murderers and literal monsters verbally sniping at each other the entire game might be reading too far into things, but mainly i don’t take it serious because its more cartoonish than emotionally serious. It reminds me of Shredder talking down to Bebop and Rocksteady from the teenage mutant ninja turtles, with Bohan seconds away at any time from screaming “CURSES” while twirling his mustache. Later in the game however, Roach is the only character who truly shows the cruelty of Bohan, as the rest of the plot is so swashbuckingly whimsical that it's hard for anything else to have any emotional weight. He’s pushed into battle against Nariko when he’s genuinely scared of her, and it's actually sickening to watch him being put through that. He’s also the only main “villain” who gets any kind of resolution to his story, as Nariko clearly wants to help him even before the battle is over and spares him at the end in the first true acknowledgement of his humanity.
The point that makes me iffy about it is that it's bordering on sketchy to use a character who’s talking like he’s about 4 years old in this way. At the best it's emotionally manipulative, but at the worst it could be infantilizing to a group of people who society already dismisses. However, if someone *were* to take advantage of someone like this, which does happen in real life, they would be a rat bastard who you would want to kill with your bare hands. And importantly, when we do get into that point in the game, it swivels on a dime from silly pulp fiction to something more serious and heartfelt. It stops short of having sad emotional stings of music and just lets it happen organically, but I was still affected by the moments significantly. I never got the feeling I was supposed to be laughing at Roach, other than the normal silly moments of dialogue that all characters in the game have, but making him a gentle giant who’s pure hearted virtue to get him sympathy can also have the effect of being patronizing if you’re not careful. I think the game pulls it off by fleshing him out well enough as a side character in a short game and making his storyline meaningful, but it's fair to say that while writing this i’m genuinely not sure i’m *correct* by saying that. So overall I'm going to go out on a limb sight unseen and say that hellblade is a better portrayal of neurodiversity and mental illness, but I appreciate the effort. There’s clearly a theme of generational trauma in the game’s story that would be too much to get into every aspect of in this review, but its matter of fact depiction without both being cruel or feeling the need to over explain at least seems to be a good building block for the team’s later work and a worthy topic I’m excited to see what they do with as this series goes on. I like the idea of differently abled people being able to be whimsical and have fun without having to worry about being a perfect representation of their group while being given the space to just exist.
As for the gameplay. It’s God of War classic. In that you do heavy attack all of the time and steamroll everyone and dodge when there’s an unblockable attack. It also has a lot less of the God of War style quick time events. In God of War you can do them for basic enemies all of the time, in Heavenly Sword they’re only really there for boss characters, and frankly even then they’re only one or two button presses. It seems almost like they were making a normal hack and slash and then someone in marketing told them to make it more like God of War so they added a few in. I don't like this as much. Say what you will about quick time events, but if you’re not doing them in game for hours at a time then you don’t practice them at all and they become harder to deal with. I play a lot of different game systems, and this is probably the first time i’ve played a playstation game in six months, so excuse me for not remembering which squiggle is where the x button is on my xbox controller or the y button on my switch joycon or the 123 button is on my amiga cd32 gamepad.
The game also breaks up the pace with motion controls. There are sections of the game where you’ll be controlling a catapult or Kai will use her crossbow as well as some puzzles. When you launch the projectile you can enter a bullet time and then use an aftertouch with the sixaxis to control where the projectile is going. This is actually a pretty fun mechanic. It has its drawbacks, the sixaxis controller will immediately nosedive any of your projectiles if you have the controller on your knees like most people do when you’re playing, so i had a bad case of t-rex arm when I was playing any difficult section, but it was a nice arcady side mission that reminded me of stuff like the bonus stages in shinobi. However, a few of them do outstay their welcome, especially Kai’s sections where you need to snipe people from far away and the long shots can last about a minute of controller tilting. Overall it was fine for this game, but it was a diversion from the actual gameplay. If games worked like this all of the time it would probably be really annoying. At the time of release it definitely was scaring video game fans that stuff like this was going to become so commonplace that games would wind up being 90% wiimote flails, but because it didn’t even last the lifetime of the ps3 or wii, its neat to take a look at this weird little side path of gaming history. If anything the game should have leaned in a little more to the motion controls. Especially in the place of quicktime events considering they weren’t worth doing. Instead of two button presses over the course of about 20 seconds, why not have a few waggles instead? I mean, maybe the t-rex arm thing would make it less fun, but overall I think it would have made more sense considering the game was already having entire sections with it.
Overall Heavenly Sword was pretty great. It had its issues but nothing unforgivable aside from maybe the headache inducing final level. The story is very fun, and although it’s not without faults, who wouldn’t want to be a samurai type character sword fighting power ranger monsters. That being said, my recommendation comes with a lot of qualifiers. For everything it does right, and I do think it does a lot right, it’s still just another God of War style game. Even if you’ve completed all of the God of War games, I can't say this is better than any of the other ones just like it. Honestly, it feels impossible to say if this is one of the good ones until later in this series when i actually *do* play a bunch of games in this style all the way through the trend. However, from what i understand, one of the main things all of these types of games steal from God of War is the miserable and overserious stories, which even by God of War 3 was getting so ridiculous that people were openly saying the series had jumped the shark and should end before they ruined it anymore. A sentiment that I wholly share. In contrast Heavenly Sword is a delightful romp in a fantasy world that’s equal parts hilarious and satisfying. It's also pretty short, I think only about 7 hours, and I don’t regret playing it at all. If you have a disc laying around and you never got to playing it, it's not a bad time to do so, and if you don’t it's about 5 dollars anywhere you can buy old games. But if you never get to playing it I can’t say you’d be missing out on enough for it to make a difference in your life.
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