Title: Blood Will Tell: Tezuka Osamu's Dororo
Platform: PS2
Released: September, 21 2004

I would like to begin this review by talking about birthdays. Naturally, if we’re talking about birthdays, we may as well get to the best part: the presents. Among your family or group of friends, maybe you’re given only the gifts that you want. No socks or scarves or useless ornaments, but instead that latest videogame you’ve had your eye on or maybe, if they’re feeling exceptionally generous, an iPod to replace your aging MP3 player. Like I said-stuff you’d actually want. And maybe among all of your family and friends, there is one person whose present you especially look forward to. This person has never given you a present that is less than awesome. Either they’ve always given you something awesome or they just gave you the cash to get what you want. Then, one year, you’re having a birthday party and everyone’s there, including Awesome Present Person. You open each present, thanking each person in turn before getting to the last present. This is it, Awesome Present Person’s . . . present. You take off the elegant packaging, wondering what it could be. You excitedly rip off the last of the packaging. In your hand sits a nice, presentable dress shirt. As you listen to Awesome Present Person talk about how you were growing up and they wanted to get you something that would reflect your maturity and blah, blah, blah, in the back of your mind you’re secretly disappointed. Sure, this is still a present and, yes, it must have cost them a fair bit but you still feel like this particular gift is not up to the standards of their previous ones. Welcome to Blood Will Tell!

This whole game reeks of, “been there, done that.” Playing it is frustrating for the simple reason that you get the feeling that the developers could have made the game much, much better if they’d only tried a little-and I do mean a little. After all, this game was made by WOW Entertainment, a division of SEGA, that was created out of a merger between two Sega divisions: Overworks and AM1. Between them, those two development houses were responsible for the following series: Streets of Rage, Revenge of Shinobi, House of the Dead and Phantasy Star. They were also responsible for Skies of Arcadia. You’d have figured that they could make a good hack-and-slash action game right? Wrong. Apparently, all that experience and practice making good games had to be balanced by making one very, very mediocre one.

It’s not like they didn’t have a good base to start with. Blood Will Tell is based off an old (think 1969) manga by Osamu Tezuka. That’s right, the creator of Astro Boy. It tells the story of Hyakkimaru, a young man whose father sacrificed his then unborn son to 48 demons in return for power. Born without legs, arms, a nose, a mouth and 42 other various body parts, Hyakkimaru was discarded by his father. Rescued by a doctor trained in ancient Chinese medicinal techniques, Hyakkimaru is given limbs and trained to fight against and defeat the demons that now have his various body parts. Each demon defeated gives Hyakkmaru one of his body parts again. Oh, he also has swords inside of his fake arms, a gatling gun in one of his arms and a big ol’ cannon in his leg.No complaints about the story, that’s some pretty epic historical fantasy. Hyakkimaru is also pretty badass, no problems there. So where did it all go wrong?

Let’s start with the graphics. . . which would have looked fine in 2001, but looked horribly dated in 2004. Blood Will Tell is an eyesore. Low resolution textures, low detail character models, aliasing, the list just goes on and on. It’s like there was some internal competition to make the game look as horrible as possible. It’s not like this team didn’t know how to create good graphics either. As I noted previously, WOW Entertainment was a merger between the AM1 and Overworks. Overworks made Skies of Arcadia, which came out 4 years earlier (2000) than Blood Will Tell and looks better than. They made Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube, which came out 2 years earlier and looks far, far better. Lastly, they also made Shinobi for the PS2, which came out in 2002 and looks better. There are no excuses for how technically poor this game is in the graphics department. I don’t really have any complaints about the art style, but when the game engine isn’t up to snuff, you can’t get by on having an “OK” art style.

I often look past the graphics if the gameplay is good and here again the game fails. The worst part is that it fails in such a long, drawn out fashion that, while you’re playing, you stay hopeful that it could, possibly get good. It never does. Somewhere in the early stages of the game, for example, the combat system just stops evolving. Part of the problem is the choice of weapons Hyakkimaru has. Since he doesn’t have his real arms at the beginning of the story, he has to use either the blades hidden within his prosthetic arms or a single sword that he carries around with him. Once he gets his arms back he switches to using two regular swords. This would be fine if the developers allowed for a wide variety of combos and moves. No dice. I hope you really like the initial combos and combat animation for Hyakkimaru because you’ll be seeing them time and time again. Other games have this same issue where the combat gets repetitive. But, somehow, almost miraculously, Blood Will Tell manages to seem more repetitive than, say, Shinobi which also had the problem of repetitive combat. I think part of this is that Hyakkimaru is simply not animated well. There is no real sense of weight, power or brutality to the combat. The sole exception to this occurs when you activate your stun combo. Stun an enemy and you can enter into a quick time event-style combo that allows you to rack up massive damage on the enemy, possibly killing them. Additionally, the higher the final number of hits you record, the more items the enemy drops. This stun combo is the most effective way to get healing items and ammo for your gun and cannon, so it’s quite a clever mechanic. However, the stun combo gets old really, really, really fast and again you’re left with the basic combo tree. The absolute worst part is that you can’t simply avoid the enemy grunts and run on to the next part of the level. The game usually gives you this option, but fighting enemies is the only way to level up your swords, which you need to do because otherwise fighting some of the 48 demons takes a really long time. This in turn means that you’re often stuck fighting enemies you really don’t want to, just to level up your swords. Combined with the repetitiveness of the combat system, it gets very tedious, very fast. The other component of the combat is your spirit attack which acts as Hyakkimaru’s magic attack. I have no complaints about the spirit attack, but one special attack doesn’t make up for the general lameness of the combat system.

Then there’s the main draw of the game, the 48 demons that you fight to reclaim your body parts. These demons function as boss fights and while 48 bosses sounds good, there are a few things you should keep in mind. One minor complaint is that some of the bosses are just palette swaps of each other. They may move a little faster and hit a little harder, but they retain the same basic attack patterns making them very easy to beat the second time around. Of course, you’re probably not going to have that hard of a time beating them the first time around simply because quite a lot of them pose no challenge whatsoever. Some of them float around the arena serenely, letting off their attacks almost reluctantly. You feel almost bad slaughtering the vast majority of them. The other problem is that all of them, and I really do mean all of them, have a very easily discernable attack pattern. This often means that the only reason that a fight takes a long time is because you spend so much time waiting for a demon to enter the vulnerable phase of their pattern. Then when you do actually beat a demon, apart from a few key body parts like your eyes (which let you view the world in color, you get these near the very beginning of the game), your legs (which allow you to dash) or your arms (which allow you to use actual swords) the vast majority of the body parts just give you generic bonuses to your HP or small boosts to your spirit gauge. It feels like a bit of a copout on the part of the developers. The final point about the demons is that you have to backtrack through old areas to fight some of them. Now this wouldn’t really be a negative if it didn’t expose you to the odious combat system by having you fight the regular enemies again.

Last but not least is the Blood Will Tells awkward camera system. Once again, the developers have found a way to create something with all the basic elements of a good camera system and totally mess it up. All too often you’ll be hit by attacks from off screen because you couldn’t get the camera to focus on the enemy in time. It somehow manages to make jumping between platforms a hit-or-miss affair too. While playing any game that has platforming elements, after a while you eventually develop a sense of where you’re going to land after jumping. You develop a sense of where the camera is focusing and you’re then able to work with it. That never really happened for me in this game. For some reason, platforming was quite difficult and I never really felt comfortable with it.

I’ve just spent 4 paragraphs detailing everything I don’t like about Blood Will Tell, but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t have its good points. The music, for example, is pretty good. It’s nothing too memorable, but it sets the tone quite nicely. The story itself is also another strong point and it’s often the only reason you’ll want to continue playing the game. The last thing that makes the game good is Hyakkimaru’s child companion, Dororo. I’m not quite sure if Dororo is supposed to be a boy or a girl (I’m leaning boy) and the game never makes it quite clear either, but Dororo is well implemented into the game. Sure he has an annoying voice, but he’s actually quite helpful. In combat, he’ll attack the enemy on his own. However, you can also order him to go pick up various powerups and health items that you may not be able to get and bring them back to you. Additionally, he also has his own short levels which, in a total break from videogame tradition, are not annoying at all. They actually end up being kind of refreshing, taking you away from the rather repetitive Hyakkimaru.

If I sounded like I was picking on Blood Will Tell more than I should, I was. I held this game to a higher standard than I would a normal B-grade action game because it came from some truly talented developers. It’s not a particularly odious game, but neither is it as good as it could be. This is a shame because the setting, story and characters lend themselves very well to a well done game. The bottom line is this: the game costs about $10-15 to buy nowadays. Are you okay playing through a long and mediocre experience for that much?

-Nikhil