Let me start by saying I've never seen the Soul Eater anime, when I originally got the idea to do this blog I worried that I might not be the most qualified person to write this. After spending some time with the game I'm fairly sure that my lack of knowledge on the universe does very little to hurt my ability to judge this game. The game starts with a cut-scene --- not animated mind you, but a series of pictures and japanese text. I don't speak or read japanese, so I was SOL on that front, but I've played a number of import games before and could usually get an idea of what was going on just fine. In this case I couldn't, so I let myself play the game hoping that I'd pick up on what was going on as I went along. Sadly, this never happened so I can't say anything about this game's faithfulness to the anime.

Story Mode
Moving on to the actual game the first three levels are simply tutorials for the three characters, there's loads of text and it appears quite frequently, but moves slow as Christmas. All of the dialogue takes place on the top screen: the characters say their bit and have little pop ups to show their emotions. Having three tutorial levels seemed quite unnecessary to me, but there may have been some story set-up in them that was lost on me. Each character controls fundamentally the same save for their abilities that help the player navigate the levels. They do serve different purposes, however, one seems to be focused on powerful attacks and close range combat, another combos and a combination of melee and ranged combat, and the third an all-out ranger. Once the third tutorial level is complete you are set off on your own and can swap between the three playable characters on the fly.


Not pictured: the insane amounts of text.

Of the levels that I was able to complete everything was pretty linear --- move through a few screens, killing things all the way, move to another that has a split in the path blocked off by fire barriers. Then take the one route that's open, flip a switch, return to the previous screen and continue. Every level I played ended in a boss fight. Before every boss fight I had to wade through some dialogue between the characters and the boss then the fight would begin, if I died then I'd start at the beginning of the fight and sit through all of the dialogue once again. The bosses were quite easy, it was a matter of finding out their attack patterns. While this is true of many games every boss had the same damn attack pattern: guard - attack - be open to damage shortly after attacking.


First boss you encounter, I died a few times figuring out that the bastard is only vulnerable after he attacks.

As for the actual gameplay I found this too to be lacking. The player moves using the D-pad and can jump by using any other button. All attacks are carried out using the touch screen and according to the tutorial can be modified by changing the direction the player slashes on the screen, but this was quite dodgey and I simply tapped on each enemy until they were dead with the same amount of success. There's a gauge that builds up for each character to allow them into a special mode. This special mode didn't seem to do much except allow the player to get out one special attack. Overall, I found the gameplay to be terribly lacking.



And finally, from the standpoint of presentation I also found the game to be lacking. The character models were cute, but the enemies felt extremely generic. While traversing the various levels I couldn't help but feel a sense of deja vu as I'd enter a room that looked exactly like the one I just left. The music for the most part was annoying and the character voices were sparsely used. For a game coming from a company who's games are known for pushing the limits of the graphical power of the systems their on I found this game to be a terrible let-down.

Worth Importing?
Unless you're a huge fan of the anime and a decent background in Japanese, then I'd say no. The menus are very unintuitive --- I had trouble starting the first level for the last time, then later had trouble trying to figure out how to load my game when returning to the game later. There is text everywhere and unless you can figure out whats going on based on the characters and knowledge of the show expect to be lost the entire game. Oh, and I got stuck in a level due to my inability to figure out what the hell was being said. The final nail in this game's coffin is that it's just not that fun to play.