After starting my game up, I died almost immediately. :( You lose VIT(vitality) while wandering around the "town" outside the tower, and when you run out your health starts ticking down. I didn't know this so I ended up entering the tower for the first time with only about 75% of my health. I then proceeded to get surrounded by these wheel looking enemies that kept ramming me until I died. :(

And holy fuck I loved every second of it.

This game is GRUESOME. That's really the only word for it. You heal HP and VIT by consuming the raw flesh and hearts of your enemies, if you can get them to drop. Most of the other items in the game are equally horrible, such as the status boosting parasites that you can inject yourself with, and branding irons that you can stab yourself or your items with to gain different kinds of powers and abilities(One I found in my second tower trip allowed me to start each tower floor with 10 seconds of invincibility, which is really nice). One of my favorite items so far are the bones, which have different kinds of effects from warping you places to blowing up to making you briefly immune to damage. The thing I like about them is that you get the effects via chewing on them, and I just get this image of the hero running around with a big soup bone in his mouth growling at enemy meta-beings.

Other than the style, however, it's pretty close to your standard rogue-like affair. You find shit randomly, enemies appear randomly, and the grand idea of the game is to figure out how best to deal with the enemies you're fighting with the equipment you have. Sometimes you find items that aren't identified and you have to guess at their effects, which can sometimes backfire (I hope this bone is an immunity bone *chomp* *kaboom*), but it's all good and if you play smart you don't have to worry about it.

The combat too is also very rogue-like in origin, where an awful lot of it is "I hit him and he hits me until one of us dies". But so far, almost every enemy I've fought has some kind of pattern to its attacks, and exploiting that pattern allows you to win without taking damage. The Wheel enemies that killed me on my first run can ONLY attack via the edges of their wheels, so if you can circle around to their flat side, they're completely helpless. You can also perform a stun attack by shaking the Wii remote(I assume there's a more conventional command for the PS2 version) that can interrupt enemy attacks, which also plays heavily into the combat strategy.

Also: BEST STATUS AILMENT EVER. There's a status ailment in this game called "Lust" where your character becomes overcome with feelings of animal attraction to EVERYTHING, and so he sees himself, and every enemy and item on the floor as a slutty Geisha. I lol'ed when it first happened to me. You have to be really careful and pay very close attention to everyone's shadows, since they don't change.

The only thing I feel I need to complain about is that the camera could have used a little work. The camera is fine as it is; it swivels responsively and you can auto-focus it by tapping Z. But from a purely ease-of-use point of view, I really wish that when you locked onto an enemy with the Z button that the camera followed it. It tends to make strafing a little bit harder than it needs to be, and enemies like to sneak up behind you a lot, and it's hard to get it to swivel fast enough sometimes.

If you like dungeon crawlers and horror-themed stuff, this game is the best thing ever. If you're squeamish or need your hand held, you'll probably get frustrated.

Oh, and Nintendo Power are a bunch of fucking sissies. This game isn't even close to as hard as they made it out to be, provided you can think on your feet. Once you get used to the camera and figure out the meta-being's patterns, they're pretty easy, like old-school megaman bosses. And besides that, there's a TRAINING DUNGEON you can do after your first trip into the tower that's easy as shit and gives you a free leather coat and a basic sword to start yourself off with. come on, most other rogue-likes don't give you that much help!



tl:dr this game is great and Nintendo Power is a poor magazine. This game is worth every cent.