X Misses the Spot
X-Blades makes a valiant attempt at breaking into the action genre, but just can't quite find its feet.
Published: March 6, 2009
It's not even that Gaijinworks, the game's developer, faltered in delivering the final concept. With the exception of some hitching during the pre-rendered movie bits (really, when it's just streaming a video off the disc, guys?) and when the framerate starts to chug during moments of especially dense action (ho ho, get it, double meaning, punny!), things actually run at a rather decent clip. Ayumi isn't without her own kind of speediness, but it doesn't translate into the actual combat system. When you character, zipping through crimson-bathed ruins that actually start to look kinda cool before all the mindless fighting starts, can't even move after landing from a jump for a few seconds, you know things have gone awry somewhere. The animation for the moves gives the little anime babe some speed, but they don't flow smoothly, nor do they look clean enough to really recognize cool moves.
The result is exactly how the combat exists in the game: so vanilla and trite and... there that you can't help but think with some upgrades that it might get a little better. Perhaps if you collected more of those little emblems that upgrade your pistols or blades? Nope, sorry. Run-of-the-mill from start to finish. That enemies can pound on you freely (and almost always do) when you're recovering from your jump or while a boss lobs fireballs at you from off screen only makes the game more frustratingly bland.
If there's one part of the game where things definitely dip into "bad" territory, though, it's the audio. The generic nu metal/butt rock/electronic music grates far, far more than it actually helps, and usually ends up being a painfully basic set of guitar riffs looped ad infinitum until you go scrambling for the remote (and I did, I will confess, actually have to mute the damn game during a boss fight because I couldn't handle the music anymore). If the music doesn't do it, there's a decent chance that Ayumi's "tee hee, I'm a sassy tough chick!" voice will. Were she not supposed to be a famed (and apparently quite successful) adventurer, it might not matter, but the doe-eyed anime look doesn't really help things one way or another. The rest of the sound effects are more or less the same; you'll hear plenty of singing blades as they slice through nothing (or don't feel like they're hitting anything, anyway), some roars and some giggle-worthy voice acting for everyone beyond Ms. Thang.
I would love to throw out some kind of qualifier like "eventually things get good" or "there's still some fun to be had here" but I honestly couldn't drum up a lick of enthusiasm for any part of the game. Nothing goes untouched by the ghoulish spectre of mediocrity, leaving the whole experience as flat and worthless as the disc it was pressed onto. Well, I suppose that's not true; thanks to Blu-rays being seriously scratch-resistant, it would probably make a decent lifelong coaster. But dropping even $30 on a coaster is a terrible way to get rid of your hard-earned money. Fittingly, so is picking this one up, and if you do, you too will likely get sucked in by... something the game seems to have, yet at every turn will be repeatedly beat over the head with game's mind-numbing gameplay. Save yourself the trouble and skip this one.
