Blood Will Tell, or: Enough experimentation, already

For what hopefully represents the last of my experimental purchases for a long, long while to come, I picked up a copy of Sega’s rather obscure PS2 slash-em-up Blood Will Tell. duckroll ordered a copy during Play-Asia’s February sale, and delivered me enough good impressions about it that I decided to try it out. I’d ignored the game since its announcement circa E3 2004, having passed it off as “just another slashing game.” Upon trying the game, I find that my early snap judgment was…not too far off, really.

It’s a linear slashing-action game set in feudal Japan and based on Dororo, a manga by Osamu Tezuka (who’s best known for Astro Boy). It has the action-RPG elements that seem to be stuck into everything these days (statistics, hitpoints, equipment), though here they make a little more sense than usual. As the game’s introduction goes, the main character Hyakkimaru had all of his body parts taken by demonic fiends who were afraid of the power he’d eventually gain. He was abandoned by his father and later found by a Chinese scholar, who fashioned artificial body parts to allow Hyakkimaru to function relatively normally. Much to the player’s benefit, these parts include short swords, a chaingun, and a cannon hidden in Hyakki’s arms and legs.

As Hyakki defeats each fiend in the game (there are 48 in total), he regains a body part. Parts that are more essential to Hyakki’s well-being usually have more of an on gameplay: regaining his left leg lets him dash, his nose lets him sniff out nearby fiends, and when he exchanges a blade-concealing false forearm for a real arm, he’s able to hold a proper sword at the same time his other arm’s blade is exposed. Less essential parts, like individual muscles, internal organs, and so on, usually add a few statistic bonuses here and there.

The fiend bosses are easily the game’s highlight. Nearly each one has a unique and grotesque design, drawing heavily on Japanese mythology and Buddhist tradition. Each fight is heavily pattern-based, and while some are more fun than others, it’s satisfying to have so many individual challenges to attack in a single game. The attention to detail in boss and enemy design reminds me of the Shin Megami Tensei series, and also served to remind me how much I appreciate strong, interesting enemy design (even if the enemies are just pulled from mythology as they tend to be in so many games).

Combat is a clear descendant of the Dynasty Warriors school of thought. It usually involves hitting square a few times to chain moves together, with branches to mashing on the triangle button possible after any amount of square presses. Early on, when both playable characters (Hyakki and his thief companion Dororo) are fairly weak, enemy behaviors, attacks, and priorities are important, and this gives the game a feel not unlike a traditional Castlevania game. However, as Hyakki becomes stronger and faster and gains a longer combo chain, making the game easier and easier in the process, this sort of play becomes simply unnecessary.

Dororo, the other playable character, is weaker and slower than Hyakkimaru, and he never gains a longer attack chain or stronger attacks. Therefore, his style of play remains pretty constant throughout the game. Later in the game, though, it can become easy to lose patience with Dororo’s sections after one has become used to Hyakki’s relatively easy means of death-dealing.

Most of Blood Will Tell manages to be either mildy fun or mostly inoffensive, aside from a few moderate flaws. Load times occur too often and are too long. The camera can be a bear to work with when in tight, enclosed areas (which there aren’t many of, thankfully). As the game wears on and chapters become somewhat longer, backtracking and repeated sections become the norm, and fighting the same enemies over and over tended to grate on me. The controls can be difficult to get a handle on at first, and even when I became familiar with them, they could still seem uncooperative at times. Attacking and jumping controls are simply very particular, and they don’t allow much room for error. This is especially true about the platforming sections. The bits and pieces of levels are generally well-modelled, but there’s not much to the level design in general but long, twisty, corridor-like paths.

After spending eight hours and five chapters (out of eight) with the game, I’m mostly hoping for it to end quickly. The game wore out its tricks within the first few chapters, and it seems to be spinning its wheels now. The story is still mostly interesting, and the voicework from the leads has stayed consistent, but the game hasn’t challenged me in a new or engaging way or built on its foundations for several hours now. The game is worth the money I paid for it, but as a whole it is merely adequate.

It’s adequate enough, though, that I still feel comfortable enough with the game to want to finish it. It’s much the same feeling that Mercenaries gave me after I passed its halfway point, and it’s the sort of feeling that I want to eradicate from my gaming time entirely. It’s easy for me to figure out what’s obviously not to my taste and what’s obviously crap, but when a game like this tickles my interest with the potential for me to see something done in a slightly original way, I tend to lower my barriers just enough to let through games that I find inoffensive but wouldn’t waste my time on otherwise. This is a habit I have to get rid of, because at this point it’s resulted in me buying the kind of thing that’s cluttering up most of my backlog. I feel that I know my tastes well enough now that I could stick with my 100% sure bets from here on out and never run out of games to play. I’ve experimented enough, and the experience I’ve gained from this sort of behavior will serve me well in making the best of my gaming time.