Personally, I recognized the entire Capcom cast, the Tekken characters, the Virtua Fighter characters, and Ulala. That’s it. If you’re a huge fan of .hack or Sakura Wars you’ll probably be very satisfied with the characters in this game and their depiction, but for anyone who hasn’t played these games you’ll likely be confused by all their interactions. That said, the interactions between the characters that you ARE familiar with are pretty cool: seeing Street Fighter’s Ryu, Tekken’s Jin, and Virtua Fighter’s Akira talk and fight together is pretty awesome. Still, the lineup of characters is just…strange. Namco and Sega’s heavy-hitters are mostly absent and even Capcom’s could be better: it’s strange they’d respond to all the fan-demand and add characters like Strider Hiryu and Phoenix Wright to Marvel vs. Capcom, but then completely forget about them for this game. A lot of popular characters who were in this game’s predecessor, Namco x Capcom, are also absent, such as Captain Commando, Mike Haggar, Klonoa, and even Dig Dug.
There are a few original characters as well, but not so many that it really becomes an issue. Almost everything is taken from the games that are represented. For example, the worlds you’re fighting in are from the games as well; you’ll be going around a graveyard from Ghosts ‘n Goblins, The World from .hack, and even Wilamette Mall from Dead Rising. Enemies are mostly minions from the games represented, such as Red Arremers and Q. Bee. You’ll also be fighting some awesome bosses, like Jedah from Darkstalkers, Seth from Street Fighter IV, and even Nemesis from Resident Evil. While not everything is super recognizable, it’s clear that the developers tried as hard as they could to bring in elements from the source material and it’s mostly for the best.
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Oh shit, it's Dante! And...um... |
The music is hit-or-miss. It’s mostly taken from the games represented, and it’s really cool that every character has their own theme. The problem is they’re very…video game-y. What I mean by that is that they mostly sound like they could be handled on the N64. While most of them are still catchy, the 3DS is definitely powerful enough to handle songs a heck of a lot more complex than what’s here. Otherwise awesome songs like Devils Never Cry and Frank West’s theme simply sound weird with this game’s instrumentation, and it makes me wonder why they went to the effort of recreating all the music in the first place when the 3DS can probably handle the original songs just fine and 9 times out of 10 they’re much better. The graphics are pretty impressive: everyone has 2D sprites that are very stylistic and well animated as well as some animated artwork during conversations and special attacks. The artstyle is, unsurprisingly, very Japanese, but everyone seems to fit in very well. Even the more Western characters like Frank West and the Resident Evil cast look spot-on.
You may be noticing a trend with what I’ve talked about so far; they definitely put a lot of effort into the game, but in very strange ways. They redid a bunch of songs only for them to sound worse. They were very faithful to the source material in terms of characters and other elements, but the material they decided was worthy of representing in the first place is questionable. Maybe I’m looking too much into these things over the gameplay, but I feel like in such a lengthy, text-based game, the plot and character interactions are two of the things that should make me most want to keep playing. These things aren’t really there in Project X Zone. The story is more-or-less a joke, people are just wandering around and teleporting into unfamiliar worlds then they meet up to fight a member of the random group of villains that have teamed up for no reason.
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Then again, maybe explaining THIS through a good plot is asking a little much. |
The game’s greatest downfall is that it’s too long for it’s own good. The combat is flashy and fun to watch at first, but becomes redundant. Every character has the same inputs and do the same thing; damage the opponent. In other RPGs you have characters that specialize in different areas; healing, magic, strength against certain enemies, etc. In this game every unit is just about interchangeable. Having Frank West and Hsien-Ko attack an enemy isn’t really any different than having Akira and Pai do it. The character-specific skills add a little bit of variety, but all of them do pretty similar things; extending range, boosting damage, etc. The chapters start off between 20-30 minutes in the beginning, but they gradually get longer to the point where every single chapter is over an hour long. The repetition started to become super noticeable around chapter 10, and by chapter 20 I assumed the game was almost over. I had most of the characters, the chapters were becoming unreasonably long, and the story was still going nowhere important. So I googled how long the game was.
40 chapters.
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Spamming Street Fighter moves on Zombies is only fun for so long. |
5/10
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