Soul Sacrifice – Vita Game
What are you prepared to sacrifice?
Embark on an epic adventure to learn dark, powerful magic as you fight to free yourself from a nightmare prison – and escape the clutches of an evil sorcerer named Magusar.
As you awaken, trapped and alone, your fate seems sealed: to be the next living sacrifice to Magusar’s dark arts. But just as all seems lost, a mysterious talking book appears and reveals the secrets of magic to you, drawing you into its pages and setting you on the path to relive the story of an all-powerful mage.
But with great power comes great sacrifice, and for each brutal creature you face and every magical ability you learn, a price must be paid… Are you prepared to sacrifice your allies, your body or even your soul to defeat Magusar and win back your freedom?
Features:
• Battle huge, terrifying creatures in epic fantasy landscapes.
• Learn powerful sorcery and choose which magic abilities to take into battle.
• Fight alongside up to three allies in co-op quests – either online or via Ad Hoc Mode – and choose whether to save or sacrifice fallen comrades.
So, i played demo a while back and decided i wasn’t going to bother with the main game. I was given a copy free, with the pre-order DLC so i feel obligated to at least try it again, which i now have done. What was the result however was a feeling of wasted time, and wondering why anyone would buy this game.
What i will say however is that Soul Sacrifice is a great show model for the vita, since it clear shows what the vita is capable of and does it amazingly well. It uses the vitas abilities to the max, giving you high fidelity graphics, decent music and game mechanics.
While this game shows off the capabilities of the vita perfectly, it also shows off the vita’s weaknesses. Firstly we have the sound, which coming through the vita’s speakers is bad, it’s tinny, no bass, and frequently gets muffled by your thumbs covering the speaker grill. Also since the game can take time, I’ve had a round go as long as 20minutes, for people like myself it becomes very painful to hold and use. Though admittedly these are device problems, they’re highlighted by the game.
The game is billed as an JA-RPG, so that immediately sets certain things in mind when it comes to how the game plays and progresses. However it never really lives up to those element.
As an action game it’s pretty solid, the combat is high paced and hard, and i do mean hard. The combat is very tactile, and responsive you find yourself really getting into the combat at times. The general every day monsters are fairly easy to kill, which admittedly is a bit unsatisfying. Having a critter die in two hits is never fun. however the ‘bosses’ are a different matter, they’re hard, they think, they respond, and they wipe the floor with you if you’re not careful. Playing the game you can clearly see the inspiration it’s take from the Monster Hunter series, for better or worse.
The abilities you get as a mage are highly satisfying, but also get used up quickly. You need to sacrifice a monster ever few kills otherwise you’ll lose your weapons. I personally found this very frustrating, especially since i had a fairly high magic level. One of the core elements of the game is the ability to save or sacrifice your kills or team mates. However due to the way the game is built this choice is really an illusion. You have to balance saving and sacrificing if you want to do well in the game. If either side gets to far ahead you’ll find yourself getting creamed.
Rather frustratingly is the fact the game decides to penalise you if you do something outside of it’s programming. On one occasion i decided to save some one that i was sent to kill. The game gave me the option to save or sacrifice, and since it had spent a good while building this character up as a love interest i figured screw it, save her. She promptly killed me and gave me a game over. After this i sat wondering what was the point of giving me the option to do something without following it through. TBH i felt the potential for game would have been amazing if it had followed through on that and gave you proper consequences, rather than simply killing you. That’s what makes an RPG.
The RPG aspect of the game is weak, and i do mean weak. Each arena is prefaced by a lore section where you get a bit more history and story. For this I’ll give it praise, the lore of the world looks and sounds amazing, drawing you in and making you live and breath it. However the way it’s implemented is bad, it’s drip fed with the info coming at you so sllloooooow i found myself pressing the next button thinking that was the end only to miss a load of stuff.
The customisation of your character is weak as well, you get a few outfits to choose from, and a basic character editor, but nothing to really get excited about. This is especially true since your character is pre-defined as a guy, you can’t change that, all you change is the character you see through the book. For me this created some immersion problems, and attachment issues, in that i didn’t care for the character on any level.
Since the game was released we have had 4 separate DLC packs released, but rather unusually these were all released for free. They added missions, clothes and dark arts, which in and of themselves aren’t a substantial set of DLC, but i could easily see them charging £1-2 for them so was surprised to see them given for free.
I’m also surprised that i haven’t see the pre-order DLC offered for sale, though they’re pretty weak as well.
For me one of the biggest gains from the pre-order DLC was the Japanese audio. Frankly it pisses me off when company strip out a core element of the game and slap it as a pre-order bonus. for me this is especially true when it comes to stripping out the original voice packs and slapping a bad localisation version. The fact they haven’t offered the Japanese voice pack as a paid DLC, something they said they would do, is also rather worrying.
As i said in my Demo review there was synch issues with the voices and the animations. The argument given for this was due to the multiple voice packs available, however even the Japanese voice pack suffers from a synch issue as well. What’s more is that the game uses multi voice commentary, this is where you get several voices doing the same commentary at the same time. In movies and PC?console games, these build tension and sound awesome. On a handheld device they sound horrific and out at times almost unrecognisable gibberish.
There was also the fact that the voices for a lot of the characters, especially Librum, are frankly terrible, no matter which voice pack you use. In the entire game there was only one voice i loved and thought was done really well, and I ended up having to sacrifice her (typical).
Another aspect of the voice pack that drove me round the bend was that you can’t change the voice at the start of the game, nor do you get access to your DLC stuff until later in the game. When you start the game you have no access to the options menu, you have to play for a while and suffer some terrible English dialogue until you unlock the options menu and can then change to Japanese. As for the weapons and costumes, forget using those off the bat, you’ve got to wait until you unlock the network feature of the game, which is only done by reaching a certain level of the game, and then you get them. With the offerings and black arts, i can sort of understand, since they are seriously OP weapons. However the clothing is purely cosmetic and has no benefits to it so there’s no reason to have those, and the language options, right from the start.
The problem this game has is that it tries to be both an arena fighter and an RPG, but fails to really succeed in either. The RPG side of things feels tacked on, but the arena side feels unsatisfying in anything other than boss fights. Especially true since there’s no item finding, which makes games like Monster Hunter so much fun.
After playing for around 8 hours now I’ve given up on the game. It’s going into my exchange pile and will most likely end up in my local CEX store. As a show piece it’s really good, and i hope other game dev.’s look and see what the Vita is capable of and produces some good stuff in the future.
As it stands though, i wouldn’t bother with it just yet. The price has been plummeting since the game was released and is currently down to £19.99 down from £34.99 when it was released just a month or so ago
It’s nice of them to offer free DLC and I dig this game’s art style. I haven’t completed it though as it’s so grindy.