2D side scrollers have had a massive come back due to indie titles flooding every known platform hoping to get the same kind of popularity as Braid, Limbo and super meat boy. But one thing I didn’t expect was to ever use the description of a bad streets of rage with anime characters. Now this is a very anime styled game obviously, and though it is published by NIS has, surprisingly, zero fan service which is nice for once, sometime I just like having no tits in my games.
So Battle Princess of Arcadias is as mentioned a 2D side scrolling beat ‘em up, you play as a princess who likes to battle, and for some reason takes orders from a talking duck who also seems to be the king, figure out how that works. So you’re a princess, the game starts off with you fighting what seems to be a Pokémon, everyone else dies but your some super warrior who can be the only one who can defeat it. So you go back after losing all your great men, to talk to king duck, and get some of your first party members, each with a different way of attacking.
So you have talking ducks and magical attacks, it’s good that this is a pretty good mix as the story is pretty bland and boring, there are battle princesses from each area of the world, they send them out to destroy everything and they are oddly powerful. The battle princess who you play as has a massive ass sword, she can use it pretty well as you would expect and she is the default fighter. There are others suck as Archers and mages, the standard for which we have all had for years before, but you know what you are getting they all seem useful so far, there are none of those “useless” classes to find here.
So gameplay wise its exactly what you might be used too, I mean you run around and bash the mobs around for combos, it’s pretty fun but mindless, there isn’t a wealth of combos to be found here, and you will mostly be using jump and attack for the time with this game. Switching out between your different characters allow you to mix it up such as brining out your archer to bring out far or flying enemies if you’re having some trouble with them.
When you’re in the game there are different modes of combat that you can choose, standard combat is your standard affair, kill loads of mobs and beat the stage without dying, it’s what you expect when you play a side scrollers fighter. Next is Siege mode, where you take on giant bosses with your fighters, this is all it really is allowing you to re fight bosses to make sure all your peons are levelled up to where you want them, and I guess you could also show off your super-fast times?
The final mode is skirmish, you control a corp of fighters who will go to combat in the background, with a rock paper scissors set up where you choose the correct weapon to fight against, if you don’t you will die pretty quickly, but if you do there isn’t much else to do as you will just wipe them out easily.
Graphically the game has an anime art style, but the characters have something off about them, the whole game has a weird flash game styled look, it doesn’t look bad, but after seeing some 2D fighters such as last year’s dragon crown, it makes the game look very dated and boring. Though it has to be given credit for actually looking HD, a lot of sprite based games come out and tend to be blurry around the edges so it’s nice to see a sharp looking game. All the enemies look different, though there are not many of them, their attacks and designs look distinctly different and it’s nice, I really liked the panda mobs and I’m not sure why.
If your reading this review and thinking for yourself, its seems pretty bland, well it’s because that’s all I could think to say about this game. I mean it’s not that the game is bad, but is not good, it’s a very safe game, it doesn’t do anything particularly well or bad, so it’s quite hard to be critical or praise apart from the HD graphics. Everything done here has been done plenty of times before, and in some cases much better too, and obviously the art style is going to alienate players if they do not like the anime art style, this is one of those games that I will forget very easily but could sit there and play to whittle away a few hours when I’m very bored. All in all I will give the game 2/5, just for, as I said, being a very safe game and not really pushing anything, and just being what is easily a generic 2D side scrollers that wouldn’t be out of place sitting next to Turtles in time and Golden Axe series.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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