Partridge Senpai's 2016 Beaten List
41. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (360)This game is more or less Alice: Madness Returns meets Asura's Wrath, but it doesn't really do anything that those games do as well as they do.
The plot is based off of The Book of Epoch, which in layman's terms is more or less an old Hebrew holy book that didn't make the cut to be included as a part of the official New Testament (the second half the the Christian holy book). That, as a concept, is really cool, but it really REALLY harmed by the choice to make Epoch, the main character, a completely silent protagonist. The writer has said that he did this in order to make Epoch an easier stand-in for the player character, but that is an AWFUL choice for a game based on a legendary story like this! The game doesn't have that crowded or present of a cast in the first place, so as a result of your main character being silent, the game's story is usually just boring or in some cases downright off-putting and confusing because they're talking to him as if he has a character of his own. This leads to the game's narrative and gameplay having some serious pacing problems, which really almost kept me from finishing it.
The gameplay itself is a mixture of somewhat simple combat combined with 3D platforming, both of which suffer because of the aesthetic choices of the art design. The combat is a three-button 3D brawler, which really has no reason to be 3-button at all. A jumps, X attacks, and RB blocks. While LB is used for something else, both triggers and the other two face buttons literally do nothing. With how many alternative moves can be pulled off by timing your attack button presses in some arbitrary confusing manner, or some combination of block and jump or block and attack, the game really would've benefited from some more combat diversity, such as perhaps a light and heavy attack button. You do have 3 different kinds of weapons you can steal from enemies (you're almost never unarmed and you're usually pretty screwed if you are). There's the Gale that lets you do a horizontal dash as well as fire projectiles, the Shield/Gauntlets (I'm not sure that's the real name, but that's what it is) that lets you have a much better block as well as hit harder, and the Arch which gives you a slight hover to your double jump as well as being a quicker melee attack. These add a little to the combat with sort of a rock, paper, scissors mechanic on which ones make enemies that use them stagger more, but the Gale just leaves you SO open to attack in most arenas that it's almost never worth using. Additionally, a lot of the platforming is such pixel perfect jumps that you almost require the Arch's better double jump to even make them, so I used the arch almost the entire game because the platforming is so annoying.
The platforming is very annoying due to two things: The aforementioned precision jumping in a 3D environment and the art design of the environments. The art and environment design is very ethereal and mysterious. As a result, it's very cell-shaded with tons of floating pieces of rock to jump on, as well as the path you're on being just about the only land present to even explore in. Only, because of how much it's just floating platforms that you're moving between, and because the camera can NEVER be moved manually (although it's usually pretty good), it's often very difficult to judge weather or not you're going to land the jumps you're trying to make, especially if the platforms are falling beneath you or constantly moving, as they often are. Additionally, the battlefields you fight in often have totally invisible floors, making dodging some attacks very difficult because you don't even have your shadow on the ground to judge where you are in the air.
If you carry the arch through the whole game like I tried to do, you can come across some secret areas that require its better jumps to access (some also require the shield to bash down a cracked wall, and the Gale's dash is far too imprecise to be useful for platforming: It's much more for dodging). You can usually just get red power orbs in these locations, although if they're valuable or not, I'm not sure, which brings me to another complaint: The game is TERRIBLE at giving useful information to the player.
The red "power" orbs are never clear on what they do. I eventually sort of settled on that they make your boost meter better, although I have no idea how it gets any "better." You have a boost meter which lets you activate an overlimit mode that staggers enemies a ton, but there's no actual gauge that shows when this will activate!!! It just randomly turns on, and lasts for some mysterious amount of time, and there's really no way to know when it ends. Bosses and enemies never have health bars, so sometimes you won't even be sure if you're damaging them at all. This is especially confusing because there are some boss fights that you just get sucked into, which apparently have no penalty or benefit for winning or losing. Why are they there? Probably some achievement? I HAVE NO CLUE. Not until you beat the game once (it's about 7-ish hours long) do you UNLOCK the ability to have bars and gauges. That is such an awful design choice in a game that already is so confusing and makes the player feel like their time isn't being respected.
There are also secret areas where you get to play a sort of platforming mini-game to get extra collectibles. There's a pan out of the circular hold you're in to show you where it is, but there's no good bearing on where you actually start in relation, and the whole area looks the same, so once I got to the 3rd one, I had absolutely no idea where the collectible was, so I just gave up on them. I have no idea what these collectibles achieve other than probably just some achievement, but what I do know is that if you die during the mini-game, you get to watch a REALLY long game-over cutscene (it's like 2 or 3 minutes), and I couldn't find any way to speed it up or skip it. And the loading times ain't too quick either, so retrying these segments for that collectible takes foreeeever.
The main good things I can say about this game, are that it is VERY pretty, and there are some good boss battles. The art style is sort of realistic, sort of surreal, and the stale-ish voice acting actually works to the game's favor in depicting that the actor's talking aren't used to human speech, most all of them being angels or some other demi-god-type being. However, the lip-movements haven't been synced to the English voice acting on most cutscenes, so it often looks pretty off-putting when you see characters speak. The music ranges from atmospheric to really pumping as well, and I thought it was very good, and a good portion of it I wouldn't mind throwing on my phone to listen to at some point. Complaints about the combat system aside, there are some good boss battles, especially the non-angel ones. The ones where you're fighting big monsters are often much better designed, with more easily swappable weapons, changing boss forms, and the arena-style fighting making much more sense. The final boss especially is great.
Verdict: Not recommended. To be honest, most of what this game did was make me wish I was playing one of the better games of last-gen that are so similar to it. That's not to say that El Shaddai is awful or even bad, but it's just so "okay" that it's hard to recommend when there plenty of other great games in the cool plot/concept + 3D platformer/brawler sub-genre of last gen (Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Alice Madness Returns, Asura's Wrath, Splatterhouse, etc.) that do everything that this game does but better.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
