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The Lowdown
Pros: Unique art style, cool characters, excellent voices
Cons: Illogical puzzles, short game length, waiting for "game time" to
pass
 Purchase
at Play-Asia
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Gregory Horror Show is more than a video game, it's a card game like
Pokemon or Yu Gi Oh in the UK. Instead of making a card based game
Capcom chose to make a survival horror game. You play a little boy
or girl who is trapped inside of Gregory's mansion. The self sacrificing
main character chose to stay in Gregory's mansion to free the lost souls
that the residents have collected. To free the lost souls you must
wander around the mansion to acquire them and return them to death.
When you first start Gregory Horror Show up you'll realize that it isn't
your average survival horror game. While the mechanics may be similar
the graphical style is completely different. Instead of flesh eating
zombies, you get cute cubodial mice. Don't expect Gregory Horror Show to
scare you with graphic violence, actually don't expect this game to
scare you at all. Before you knock the graphical style, it's actually
pretty cool. The "cube" drawing style is fresh and all of the characters
are highly detailed. Each of the characters have their own personality,
too. There's Gregory, the owner of the mansion, who is a mouse that
carries a little candle and hobbles around the mansion. Gregory has an
annoying son that literally pesters you by following you around. There
is the quiet Neko Zombie, a zombie cat who lives in a small padded
chamber. One of my favorite characters is Judgment Boy who wanders
around the mansion shouting "JUDGMEEEENT!" All of the characters, look
cool and the graphical style adds an element of humor to the game.
Besides the cool graphics, the characters are given more of a personality
due to some good voice acting. Gregory's son has a screechy and annoying
voice, something that you would imagine a bratty kid would have. Neko
Zombie has a raspy, slightly creepy voice and Judgment Boy has a loud
upbeat voice, which makes him funny. Death has a funny voice too, it's a
Rastafarian styled voice kind of like Grim's in the Grim Adventures of
Billy and Mandy. Besides the voices the background music is mellow. It
consists of atmospheric noise and background cartoon sounds.
While Gregory Horror Show has excellent presentation it fails, horribly, in
gameplay. The game is played in standard adventure style. Your character
runs around the mansion, trying to figure out how to get other residents
to drop souls. If a resident catches you, you're forced to watch a
"horror show", which takes away a little bit of life. Watching the
horror shows are entertaining for the first time, but if you get caught
repeated times you're forced to watch the same show. It's more of a
punishment to watch the animation again than losing life. Life can
easily be recovered by using green herbs (cough resident evil cough) or
reading books. You never really run out of life unless you're not paying
attention to the game at all since recovery items are scattered
throughout the mansion. Another problem with the game is solving
"puzzles" to get souls. A lot of the objectives require you to obtain a
random item, which is somewhere around the mansion. Finding the item can
be a tedious task, because the puzzles aren't solved with logic. Instead
of having an idea of what to use, you'll be spending a lot of time
running around randomly in search of the item. Speaking of wasting time
in the mansion, each of the characters have their own schedule on "game
time". If you're not at the right place at the right time you'll have to
wait for time to pass. Since there is no way to accelerate time, this
becomes a huge annoyance.
Besides having all of these gameplay issues Gregory Horror show is a short
game. You can beat it in one sitting if you have the patience for it.
There is a save/load feature so you can take breaks from the game, but
it's about five hours long. If you choose to save the game be prepared
to invest 750K (roughly 1/10th) of your memory card just for this game.
This seems rather silly that this game uses so much memory card data and
is almost unjustified since it can be beaten so quickly. Just a warning
so you wont erase your precious .hack or Final Fantasy saves you spent
1000 hours on.
Gregory Horror Show plays like a survivor horror game for kids, but even
kids will blaze through this game with ease. Even the unique
presentation of the game can't save it from such boring gameplay.
Import Friendly
Don't bother investing in the Japanese version (unless you speak
Japanese of course). The European (PAL) version comes with three
languages and a video selection mode so you can play it on your NTSC TV.
US Bound?
Gregory Horror Show: Soul Collector has a release date in February
in the US.
Overall
While the game has some unique characters and cool design
going for it, it fails so badly in gameplay. Even as a rental this game
is so easy to beat you'll feel like you wasted money.
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