Inuyasha: The Secret of the Cursed Mask Review - PS2

Conventional wisdom for years now has stated that anime licenses add up to bad games. Bandai-produced projects based on Japanese cartoons are the far eastern equivalent of old Ocean movie tie-ins: quick, dirty, ugly, dull.

All those lousy Mobile Suit Gundam games alone could probably stack to the stratosphere by now. Sure, there may be exceptions to the rule – Sony’s old Ghost in the Shell shooter, say -- but you could probably count them on one or two hands.

The surprising thing about this Inu Yasha RPG, then, is not that it’s very good -- it isn’t -- but that it isn’t nearly as bad as it ought to be. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the Namco merger, but one way or the other, Bandai’s quality control is improving. Not enough to make this an unqualified recommendation, but every little bit ought to help.

Down the Dog-Demon Hole

Inu Yasha: Secret of the Divine Jewel is naturally based on the Japanese cartoon series of the same name. Even if you haven’t seen the show or the comic, you probably have, after a fashion – the plot has an awful lot in common with any number of other RPGs and games in general. A girl falls through a magic well and winds up lost in fantasyland with a mixed bag of cute/stern/irascible sidekicks. That ought to sound at least a little bit familiar.

If the character concepts are pretty basic on paper, in practice they’ve got a respectable amount of personality. Rumiko Takahashi (the artist behind it all) has years of experience at drawing simple, likable archetypes, and whoever made the game did a good job preserving her basic designs.

In fact, the whole game looks surprisingly good all round. The sprites and background artwork have a shocking amount of detail – it’s easily on par with your nicer-looking early PlayStation RPGs, like Arc the Lad. There’s a lot of elbow room to the towns and field map locations, and many of those areas aren’t just the same basic pieces repeated. Each screen worth of background often has a lot of different window-dressing.

Which Way Is Out?

That’s not true of every location, though, which is where the game starts to have problems. From early in the game, some of the “dungeons” tend to be hard to navigate. They stretch off in different directions that aren’t all that clearly defined, and while the backgrounds are certainly nice to look at (an early swamp area mixes different greens and browns with dots of bright color from patches of flowers), they don’t offer a lot of cues as to which way the next goal is, or whether you’ve already visited an area without knowing it. A well-done soundtrack provides some pleasant accompaniment when you’re lost, but it doesn’t cut the annoyance quotient all that much.

Instead, the annoyance quotient is usually spiking, because the random encounter rate in this game is absolute murder. Inu Yasha’s battles pop up out of nowhere, old-school console RPG style, and they pop up much too often. You can literally take three steps after finishing one fight and the next one will stroll right up and jump you, with no chance of avoiding it. What makes matters worse is that any given area can’t muster more than a couple of different enemy types. As often as not, you’ll take out a group of monsters and then fight their identical twins five seconds later.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the battles themselves. On the contrary, the combat system is actually pretty decent, and it moves fast enough that by itself it wouldn’t have been a problem. For once, the big-eyed cartoon heroine isn’t necessarily a fount of untapped superpowers – instead, she gets to hang back and command a rotating crew of all those different sidekick characters. The party’s usually pretty good-sized, which offers a lot of different skills to take advantage of. A couple of interface tweaks might have been wise, like an option for shorter attack animations and some more obviously differentiated item icons (as it is, several different items look alike at first glance), but that’s not too much to moan about.

Down, Rover, Down

It’d take a better system to make this many encounters worthwhile, though. Just plain decent doesn’t cut it when you’re fighting the same battle twice inside of a minute.

This isn’t recommended for the ordinary RPG fans, then. Strip away the license and it’s a by-the-numbers production – not irredeemably bad, but not remarkable enough to plow through for tens of hours.

Considering the license, though, and the way anime licenses have historically been a major drag factor on games like this, Inu Yasha’s impressive in an understated way. Die-hard fans of the series just might find it a pleasant little surprise. If Bandai works its way up to really doing right by its popular animation properties, maybe we’ll eventually see that conventional wisdom change.

Article by: D. F. Smith