Afterlife Murder Mystery
Folklore mixes devilish repetition with heavenly visuals.
Published: November 4, 2007
There's also the issue of the game's camera. While you're given the ability to lock onto a target with the L1 button, the lock is broken if the characters take any damage, and the lock is lazy at best, so quick enemies or bosses can dart around and get into position to attack you before you can properly counter or dodge. During some of the multi-stage boss fights, you'll have to dip into your stable of ids to come up with the proper combination of attacks to weaken and kill the Folklore, and with all the pausing, not to mention attack radii, it can be needlessly confusing and frustrating to try to hit quicker enemies.
It's a shame, too, because actually capturing the souls is pulled off by holding R1 to grab an enemy (or enemies) and then using the SIXAXIS to reel them in. On smaller enemies, it's just a light little tug, but on tougher ones, you'll have to pull at the right time or bounce them around by tilting side to side and so on. Some later bosses require multiple techniques, and it's fun to switch between bouncing a creature's soul around and holding them in place. It's actually one of the more novel and natural ways of using the SIXAXIS controls, and it works wonderfully.
There is one little bonus for actually running through the full game with both characters: the bestiary you unlock can be plied directly into creating dungeons of your own that you can then upload and have people run through, with rankings for uploaded dungeons as well as info on how well people did on your dungeons. Granted, it's more a feature for the hardcore and those that haven't yet tired of the grind of the single-player game (since it's more or less the same thing in a confined, user-created space), but the fact that an online component was included at all is a nice treat.
Despite the almost hyperbolic level of gushing about the visuals, they aren't perfect. The framerate can hit some chunky stretches when plenty of effects are going on, though the hiccups aren't constant, nor are they especially frequent, but it's enough to be a little annoying. Trivial, perhaps, especially when considering the level of the visuals in the first place, but it's definitely something that can't be ignored.
Nor can the voice acting, which bounces between perfectly decent and sometimes stilted and even a little embarrassing at times. It really only crops up during the pre-rendered sequences (which look incredible, by the way); everything else is told through simple text boxes and manga-style panels. I personally dug the approach, but there were surely be those who will see it as a cop-out rather than an artistic approach to things.
The rest of the audio, however, is fantastic, and the game even supports a headphones option if you happen to be playing the game that way. There isn't a ton in the way of epic, wrap-around sound effects, but the splashy zooms and hits all sound great, as does the music, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Danny Elfman's work -- particularly when he teams up with Tim Burton, which is fitting considering some of parts of the Underworld and some of the creatures look like they were pulled from Burton's head as he dreamed.
If not for the fact that the game flat-out forces you to explore those jaw-dropping environments twice, Folklore's combat, visuals and innovative use of the SIXAXIS would be a much easier sell. Instead, the repetitious gameplay and drawn-out storyline may end up turning some folks off before they even get a chance to see past the levels that were shown in the demos that are up on the PlayStation Store right now. Not graphics whores, mind you, the pure excitement of seeing the next world may well be enough to keep them going, but for everyone else, Folklore is probably best left as a rental.