Not Quite As Unbound As Advertised
Unbound Saga is rife with potential, but all of it is squandered on a painfully boring actual game.
Published: August 8, 2009
I hate, hate, hate seeing games with a really cool premise just go and waste it all on something so interminable as to make me wish it had been handled by a more competent team. Such is the unfortunate case with Unbound Saga, which shoots for a spiritual succession to the awesome Comix Zone on the Genesis and ends up falling way, way short of that game's execution. The basic concept of a self-aware comic book thug with tons of fourth-wall-breaking inner (and sometimes external) dialogue is, in and of itself, a great way to start off the traditionally repetitive and usually monotonous side-scrolling beat-'em-up genre of yore.
Problem is, most of the potential exists as a sort of nebulous, ethereal could-have-been store of untapped potential. For every moment where the game seems like it could have handled the unusually prescient main character as a foil for breaking out of the trite mainstays of old-school brawlers Unbound Saga instead punishes players with an "ah ah, you get to slog through another over-long series of mindless street fights instead!" payoff.
Even the addition of a second playable character (Lori, a more feminine and, uh, busty counterpart to enlightened meathead Ajax) that you can swap between at any time and the ability to pour points into upgrades to the moveset can't give the game the kind of depth or variety it sorely needs. No, this is a game about moving from panel to panel, dispatching enemies sketched in by an omniscient (and probably sadistic) hand in a quest to finally cut this puppet master's strings. The end goal is fairly clear, even if the end to all the waves of enemies isn't.
Maybe that's why the game feels like such a slog. You know there's a light at the end of the sloppily-executed tunnel, but getting there means dealing with see-sawing framerates, clunky controls, limited animation and a hilarious (read: retarded) bug where putting the PSP to sleep introduces an audio bug that plays like six slo-mo versions of the music repeated on top of each other at about 1/100th of the speed... until the very end of the level. I don't even know how something like that gets through both Vogster Entertainment's own internal QA and Sony's certification process, but that's the mother of all dropped balls, and it doesn't really matter who is at fault (both of 'em), just that it makes taking a break from the tedium a further punishment.
The problem is that it's not all terrible. The dialogue in the game is honestly quite good, and regularly peaks into vocal chuckle-worthy territory. The backgrounds have a detailed, nicely sketched look and the cutscenes that play out between levels are downright gorgeous at times (though, admittedly, I've always been a sucker for comic art). Again, though, these are simply reminders of potential that was never really properly tapped, instead relegating things to being a tired old beat-'em-up in a genre that's nearly entirely tired and old at this point. I'm not hating on the game for being the very thing the genre has represented itself for, I'm poo-pooing it because it's a bad version of that same endless grind of punching/kicking patterns.
It's also a deeply unforgiving game. Dying on the end-level boss means you get to do the whole level all over again, further slamming the tedium into your face. I rarely flat-out give up on a game out of frustration, but I'll fully admit to finally throwing in the towel about three quarters of the way through the game after just getting so frustrated and apathetic toward seeing how the story would conclude. When you can't get the guys whose job it is to slog through crappy games to finish yours, you know it's a problem. Then again, maybe that's what happened with the QA teams that let that audio bug through, I'm not sure.
All I am sure of is that I regret having to spend so much time ripping on a game that honestly just deserves to be skipped. Yes, there's potential here, and the premise is so poised to make for an awesome game, but the end result is such a slap in the face of everyone trying to search for the diamonds in the deep, deep rough that it all ends up going from hilarious to downright offensive. Do not buy this game. Do not play this game. Just imagine it never happened and should Vogster give the concept another shot, we can only hope they block it from their minds too.
Problem is, most of the potential exists as a sort of nebulous, ethereal could-have-been store of untapped potential. For every moment where the game seems like it could have handled the unusually prescient main character as a foil for breaking out of the trite mainstays of old-school brawlers Unbound Saga instead punishes players with an "ah ah, you get to slog through another over-long series of mindless street fights instead!" payoff.
Even the addition of a second playable character (Lori, a more feminine and, uh, busty counterpart to enlightened meathead Ajax) that you can swap between at any time and the ability to pour points into upgrades to the moveset can't give the game the kind of depth or variety it sorely needs. No, this is a game about moving from panel to panel, dispatching enemies sketched in by an omniscient (and probably sadistic) hand in a quest to finally cut this puppet master's strings. The end goal is fairly clear, even if the end to all the waves of enemies isn't.
Maybe that's why the game feels like such a slog. You know there's a light at the end of the sloppily-executed tunnel, but getting there means dealing with see-sawing framerates, clunky controls, limited animation and a hilarious (read: retarded) bug where putting the PSP to sleep introduces an audio bug that plays like six slo-mo versions of the music repeated on top of each other at about 1/100th of the speed... until the very end of the level. I don't even know how something like that gets through both Vogster Entertainment's own internal QA and Sony's certification process, but that's the mother of all dropped balls, and it doesn't really matter who is at fault (both of 'em), just that it makes taking a break from the tedium a further punishment.
The problem is that it's not all terrible. The dialogue in the game is honestly quite good, and regularly peaks into vocal chuckle-worthy territory. The backgrounds have a detailed, nicely sketched look and the cutscenes that play out between levels are downright gorgeous at times (though, admittedly, I've always been a sucker for comic art). Again, though, these are simply reminders of potential that was never really properly tapped, instead relegating things to being a tired old beat-'em-up in a genre that's nearly entirely tired and old at this point. I'm not hating on the game for being the very thing the genre has represented itself for, I'm poo-pooing it because it's a bad version of that same endless grind of punching/kicking patterns.
It's also a deeply unforgiving game. Dying on the end-level boss means you get to do the whole level all over again, further slamming the tedium into your face. I rarely flat-out give up on a game out of frustration, but I'll fully admit to finally throwing in the towel about three quarters of the way through the game after just getting so frustrated and apathetic toward seeing how the story would conclude. When you can't get the guys whose job it is to slog through crappy games to finish yours, you know it's a problem. Then again, maybe that's what happened with the QA teams that let that audio bug through, I'm not sure.
All I am sure of is that I regret having to spend so much time ripping on a game that honestly just deserves to be skipped. Yes, there's potential here, and the premise is so poised to make for an awesome game, but the end result is such a slap in the face of everyone trying to search for the diamonds in the deep, deep rough that it all ends up going from hilarious to downright offensive. Do not buy this game. Do not play this game. Just imagine it never happened and should Vogster give the concept another shot, we can only hope they block it from their minds too.
