I had been in a funk with video games lately only playing full retail games, which have several pros and cons. As far as the main pro for a retail game is the (sometimes) high production value on a retail game tends to be higher as there is more money put into development, the con is that this cost is passed directly to the consumer with most new retail games coming out in the $60 dollar range. The reason behind my retail funk is that most retail games aren't normally a pick-up-and-play affair, meaning any time you play you have to carve out a decent chunk of time to play. This is where XBL arcade games are great, sometimes I only have 10 or fifteen minutes to kill and these games are built with this in mind.
Now as for Black Knight Sword, it was released during the holidays, December 12th on Xbox, and while I had heard about it I didn't have the funds or the time to get it. This led to this week when I downloaded the demo (another great feature for XBL arcade) and within the first 5 minutes I knew I needed to get the full game. Not exactly a breaking the bank occurrence as it was 800 Microsoft points (about $10.) I have always had a high opinion of Grasshopper Manufacture, Inc. and have been a day one purchaser of their previous games, like the criminally underrated Lollipop Chainsaw, and Shadows of the Damned (the only game I've seen with an achievement with the word "Fuckin' " in the title) and knew I would not be let down.
The game starts with the tale of a beautiful princess whom is equal part beautiful and ruthless. In the same land as the princess there lives a sword spirit that opposes the princess. The sword spirit imbues your character with the powers of the black knight sword. You begin playing as a corpse hanging from a noose in an empty hotel room, falling from the noose and obtaining the sword and the black knight armor and powers, which leads you into a tutorial for movements and attacks. The controls are quite basic, a multi-directional attack, right trigger attacks with sword spirit and you unlock the use of magic with the "Y" button later.
The star of this game however is not the controls but the art. The game is done in the style of a paper puppet show. This game looks like the marriage and then odd baby of Castlevania and Monty Python art. With complete honesty when I mention something is like Castlevania it is high praise indeed as Symphony of the Night is my favorite game of all time.
Along with the paper art puppetry things are quite odd in this world too. The only real world enemies are wolves that you only see a few times, everything else is deformed and hideous, most enemies are brown wrinkled heads with appendages. Bosses are normally deformed animals like an enormous wolf with the head of what looks like Miyamoto-San (head honcho of Nintendo) wearing an eye patch, or an enormous spider wearing a gas mask and an abdomen made of a face that spits out smaller flying faces. Far and away the kookiest level has to be a level where you fight a 30 foot tall chicken. After defeating the chicken your character jumps on it and you play a flying(?) mission, akin to Galaxia shooting lasers and collecting powerups to battle an onion shaped head. During this level my wife walked into the room and stood bewildered and stunned (a condition I have deemed "Suda-Ed") by the crazy kookiness that is what I expect from Suda51 and Grasshopper. When she looked at me weirded into silence I looked back and said "Gotta love Japan."
The only downfalls I could find in the game was that one the story is almost nonexistent, with small stories being told along the way in rhyme but with nothing really connecting everything together. Second, the character you play as is silent, all previous efforts by Suda and Grasshopper have had great characters with funny personalities, and the silent black knight is devoid of this. Lastly, death makes you start the entire level over again making the last level a trudge, I got wiped out twice at the last boss and had play the massive last level again. These things are mere blemishes on a well made kooky game and should not stop you from playing. This game is a must buy, so go download it and have a great . . . Knight.
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Disclosure: This review is sponsored by Grasshopper. I received free product for the purpose of this review. All opinions are my own and no further monetary compensation was received.
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