Blood+ One Night Kiss

By Nicholas Fricke . October 4, 2006 . 11:04am

In my experience as an import gamer, I’ve learned that buying games based on an anime series is akin to playing Russian roulette. Sometimes you come out on top and you end up with a pretty entertaining game; usually high on style and presentation, low on depth and innovation, but still fun to play and features characters and settings from your favorite series. Other times, however, you  come out as the loser, but instead of a bullet in your head, you end up with a $60 piece of garbage that looked great in screenshots, but just isn’t very fun to play at all. With that information in mind, I’ve become more apprehensive about buying anime-based games, and I usually don’t open my wallet unless I know who developed the game and what type of gameplay is featured.

 

However, Blood+ One Night Kiss is one of those games that instantly caught my attention from the first screenshot I saw. It’s visual style was unmistakable. Using the same dark shadows, flat-shaded polygons and unique lighting and camera work of Killer7, it was obvious that this was the product of developer Grasshopper Manufacture and director Goichi Suda, aka Suda 51. In addition to creating Killer7, Grasshopper also made the hack-and-slash game Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked, which adopted elements of Killer7’s visual style, featured an amazing soundtrack, and was fun game to play all around. With Blood+ looking like a combination of Killer7’s graphics and Samurai Champloo’s gameplay, my research was done. Blood+ was a must have.

 

But I think this time I may have just barely missed the bullet.

Purchase at Play-Asia

 

The story behind Blood+, and the 2000 animated film on which it is based, is a bit convoluted, but here’s a quick summary. Saya, the main character of the story, is one of the last remaining “originals,” and over the past 173 years of her life she has slain many chiroptera, which are bat-winged humanoid creatures. However, about a year ago she forgot everything about her past, including her deeds as a monster slayer and her origins. Now living with an adoptive family in present day Japan, she lived a normal life until she was forced to fight the chiroptera again, at which point she starts to slowly learn the terrible truth of her past. Along with her companion Haji, who also shares a long history with her, and the organization Red Shield, their ultimate goal is to destroy the chiropterans. While One Night Kiss is based on the events in the anime and features many of the same characters, this is a completely new story created just for the game, and includes a new main character, Aoyama, who appears to be a police investigator but likes to dress as a 1950s era yakuza gangster and has the mannerisms and hair style of a delinquent Japanese student, or yankee.

 

Now, before I dwell on the negative aspects of the game, I want to focus on the two things that Grasshopper seems to do consistently well in all of their games: graphic and sound design.

 

As I mentioned above, and is plainly obvious from the screenshots, the game lifts most of it’s visual style from Killer7. Killer7 was an amazing looking game when it was released, not because it pushed the most polygons or had high resolution textures, but because it used a graphic style that had never been attempted before in a video game, and Grasshopper pulled it off effortlessly. That said, there isn’t much to get excited about with the graphics in Blood+ since Grasshopper didn’t do anything new here, but the game is still a sight to behold, jaggies and all. More importantly, the way that Grasshopper integrated the cell phone as the option screen and as the visual design of the HUD and dialogue screens still impresses me to this moment. Pressing the select button opens your cell phone, which displays the latest messages, accesses the town map, shows which items are in your inventory, gives you hints, and lets you adjust the game settings, all while done in the style of simple, text based interface. And using the battery charge bar as your health meter? Very clever, and Grasshopper did a great job of integrating keitai (mobile phone) culture into the game.

 

The audio design is also worth a mention. Apparently the game uses the same voice cast as the anime, and while the dialogues that appear during gameplay are not voice acted, all of the CGI movies and real-time cut scenes are, and they sound as good as you would expect from a big-budget anime production. The music is excellent and as soundtrack worthy as previous Grasshopper games like Killer7 and Samurai Champloo. The sound effects are also top-notch, and quite quirky. One particular example is when the you move from one area to another and the game transitions to a picture of the moon while it is loading the next area. Sometimes you hear a dog barking, or a cat meowing but occasionally you’ll hear a horse, or a cow. It’s all very weird, but I wouldn’t expect less from Grasshopper, and with them also creating the music for the upcoming action game God Hand from Capcom, other companies are beginning to see the genius of Grasshoppers’ sound team.

 

At this point the review sounds like a glowing endorsement for the game. But there’s something more important than visual or audio design, and that’s gameplay, and in that department Blood+ falls a bit flat. Most of the screenshots released for the game were taken from the action sequences, which alternate between Saya’s hack-and-slash fights, similar to the gameplay in Samurai Champloo: Unleashed, and Aoyama’s levels which are simple run-and-gun battles against bosses.  These battles can be quite fun, but between these short bursts of action are sometimes long and tedious adventure sequences, which are less “adventure” and more “fetch quests.” Usually before any battle, Saya or Aoyama must run around a small portion of the city and talk to certain people or retrieve an item before they can move on to the action portion of the level. For example, in one of Saya’s early levels, she must find a classmate’s cell phone which is lost somewhere in the high school. This means asking every classmate and searching the entire campus until you find the phone, at which point the door to the boss battle will open. In Aoyama’s levels, he has to find a floppy disk which is hidden somewhere in the police station in one mission, and in another level he has to get a special canned drink from the local convenience store to give to a security guard so that he can enter the factory. These may sound fun, but they usually just involve running from one location on the map to another to retrieve the item, then running back just to get to the more exciting action sequences. And if you don’t have any understanding of Japanese, the adventure levels can get very irritating since you could spend tens of minutes just running around not accomplishing anything. Since this game currently doesn’t have much of a following, good luck trying to find a FAQ or translation on the net if you have a problem with any of these levels.

 

So once you get past the adventure parts, the action must be completely worth the trouble, right? Well, not entirely. Saya’s attacks using mainly the Square button for sword attacks and the Circle button for kicking attacks. By hitting the Square button multiple times and hitting different directions on the left analog stick, Saya can perform different combos, but most times the basic five-hit combo will do the job. You can also use the right analog stick to perform rolls to evade enemy attacks. Boss battles usually involves attacking the limbs first, which the game will automatically lock-on to and won’t move on to the next body part until you destroy it. Perform enough combos on the limb and Saya will go into a berserker rage, where rapidly tapping the Square button will cause massive damage to the enemy’s limbs until it’s destroyed. Once you destroy the limbs and get to the final blow, the screen will switch to a little mini-game where you must either rotate the analog sticks in a certain direction, tap the action buttons in a certain sequence, hold down certain buttons or perform challenges in a certain time limit to execute the final attack. While someone at Grasshopper thought this may have been fun, it brings the action down to a screeching halt and it usually tests your patience more than your skills, since if you fail entering in the correct controller commands you will have to attack the enemy again until you can execute the final attack and get it right. That is the only way to defeat the bosses, so if you don’t have quick reflexes you may find yourself getting easily flustered and wanting to throw your controller across the room. Aoyama’s battles are pretty similar, except his only attack is a shotgun blast that must be fired at a certain angle in order to register a hit, and the final blow requires no controller challenge, just a simple press of the Triangle button.

 

Version Covered: Japan

Release Date: 08.31.06

 

Import Friendly? Literacy Level: 3

More often than not, if you simply ask every NPC in a certain area and visit the places on the map that are marked, you will get past the adventure portion of the level and move on to the action. But sometimes even just a little knowledge of katakana can help you find a certain item, and the only way to really get the most out of the game’s story, which can have some pretty funny dialogue sometimes, is to have an understanding of the Japanese language.

 

US Bound?

Usually the only way an anime-based game is brought over to the West is if it is currently being aired on television or released on video over here. While Blood+ is licensed for international distribution, there is no knowing when the series will be released here, how popular the series will be, and if Bandai Namco (or any company) would be willing to bring this quirky title from Grasshopper over to America.

 

+ Pros: Engaging art style, excellent sound production, occasionally humorous dialogue and decent action sequences.

 

- Cons: Adventure portions of levels longer than action portion, Japanese comprehension needed to get most out of the story, and controller challenges at the end of Saya’s battles can get extremely annoying.

 

Overall: Despite my criticisms of Blood+, I still feel oddly compelled to play the game. Perhaps it is a testament to the “genius” of Suda 51 and Grasshopper Manufacture that even with games that almost seem to go out of their way to discourage or disappoint players, like Killer7 with it’s on-rails gameplay or Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked with its strict hack-and-slash roots, that people like me are still attracted to play them. While I would have enjoyed Blood+ One Night Kiss better if it would have been more action and less adventure, it’s still an experience I had the pleasure of playing. For Blood+ or Grasshopper Manufacturer fans only.

 

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