Headline: I think jocular innuendos are funny.
I want a Jeepnie.
These are the form of public transportation in the Philippines, retrofitted Jeep Wranglers built for the purpose of mass transit. And they are hot.
Boktai is quickly turning into something very interesting, indeed. I told you before about the premise and theme but those were thumbnail sketches of the experience, more or less. Like I said before, you play a Vampire-Hunting gunslinger that uses concentrated sunlight as a device for exterminating the Undead. Most of the places you visit have a very barren, Corbucci/Leone-Western sort of rendering to them. Old crumbling buildings with lots of open ceilings, sandy forests, old caves with stairwells in them. Sort of a Western-goth, I guess, which accounts for the Corbucci reference; his westerns, it seemed to me, always took place in a reality that was not our own Old West but a world who’s frontier is still unsculpted as part of a speculative future. Therefore, you have an old west that has things like ruins and an anthrocentric mythology. I hope somebody knows what I’m talking about when they read that garbage.
The gameplay is seemingly simple from the beginning. For starters, the game can be played at any time. However, it’s smarter to usually play in the daytime; the game’s sensor picks up the UV emitted by the sun and uses it to affect certain factors in the game. For instance, during the day, light shines through windows and cracks in most of the dungeons, giving you an almost unlimited supply of ammo for your Solar Gun. The narrowcast interior sunlight also lends a strategic element to the proceedings as luring a Bok (the term for a basic zombie in this game) near one a window guarantees and almost instant Bok-fry. You can also only defeat bosses during the day. Now, this is not to say that you can’t play at night, but it requires an altogether different method of execution. There are stealth elements in the game (hence the isometric playout as seen in the screens) but these are deceptively superfluous if played during the day. At night, however, when you need to conserve your ammunition? Yeah. The sneaking becomes a little bit more than an alternative. But there are also some advantages to playing at night. There are different enemies out during this time and certain treasure chests don’t show up during the day. Now, UV sensor and internal clock are separate mechanisms, so the player could ostensibly choose to play the scheduled day missions during the night while they’re on third shift lunch break at the BP. The obvious failing of this is that even though you’d playing through the dayside, there’d still be a noticeable lack of sunlight which would make the entire affair pretty foolhardy. There’s also a neat aesthetic touch given to the stage opens by the internal clock: instead of telling what time it is when you enter a castle or a dungeon, it tells you how much time you have left before sundown. Spooky.
The game is also pretty puzzle heavy and they vary in from normal to somewhat difficult, but they are classics. Other puzzles are just variations on the time-honored practice of moving a block from one space to another. But it’s all good, meeting that agreeable medium between Cakewoxxle and Finish this next stage or embrace self-loathing”.
The aural embellishments are decent enough. The most noticeable part of the sound in this game is how mind-bendingly clear the voice samples are, like whoa. The music is like a few GBA games, fantastic in some places, downright awful in others. Luckily, in the most stealth-heavy areas, the music is good and it accompanies the mild tension level well.
So it’s a good game, and a unique way to lay out an otherwise fairly old-school style of game. If you liked the stuff from the SuperNES days, or if you appreciate a good Japanese novelty, dig it. There’s actually a very solid play experience in here, proving that sometimes a gimmick doesn’t always hide a bad game.
“OTENKO!”
