Heavenly Sword

A Hack and Slash that came in 2007. A PS3 exclusive. I liked it but I don't know if I want to fight Bohan again.

It has two playable characters. Nariko and Kai. Nariko is the one who uses the sword that has the same name as the title. Kai is the one who uses the crossbow.

I would swear there was already a topic on the game, but I am wrong! That said it really is one of those games I kept trying to get into and always failed to do so. There's just something about it that feels off to me, might be the frame-rate and bloomy-graphical style.

It's a shame that those put you off. It was fine with me. One of the things I love about this game is that you can turn off motion controls. If it didn't have that feature, I would have never finished it.

I would swear there was already a topic on the game, but I am wrong!
We discussed it a little in another topic though I've forgotten which or what I said. Something about throwing stuff.

We talked about Heavenly Sword for a bit in the Introduction forum. Page 3.

Yeah that was it.

I want to give it another go to see if I'm remembering stuff correctly.

As I said in the other topic, the impact on hit feels weird, like it didn't connect. I do remember getting used to it though.

I wanted to do work with this game, but the input lag was highly concerning. Sampled the demo. Think you get the ability to control the slow-mo objects via the controller (rather than motion shit) after a patch (don't recall for sure). The color system wasn't exactly my favorite idea. Remember wishing it had gore/blood (like when chopping a guy's dick in half). Also, a bit lacking with collisions and environment (zero platforming felt a little odd *no jump if I'm not mistaken*).

I haven't played this in a long time but I am very sure that you can't jump in this game. Not by yourself at least. You can launch an enemy in the air and you go up with him. As for the slow-mo thing you said, I will quote from message 4 without quoting it:

"One of the things I love about this game is that you can turn off motion controls. If it didn't have that feature, I would have never finished it."

Would you like me to play this game tomorrow?

Yeah, you can't jump outside of some forced launcher follow-up.

Nads: >never finish it
I was able to help my eldest brother back when it was just motion controls. Don't think I ever had the privilege of playing with the other option (said to be much better).

>play it
To what end? Vanilla H (don't think it had a higher setting)? No Hit? Speedrun? Can't remember if it had upgrades (to avoid). Maybe try to avoid certain tiers of attacks?

Harvey: >forced launchers as only option to get in the air
Bleh. Think I recall Naruko having a giant swing though I can't recall if it collided with people while spinning (something Wolverine had that I just loved *even did bonus damage if colliding with terrain*).

I'm actually playing through this rn! It seems like a game felled by its own ambition more than anything. The environments are massive and detailed and there are tons of enemies that don't despawn when you kill them + havoc physics and breakable objects all over the place. The poor PS3 can't handle it, and it just CHUGs with a pitiful framerate and bad screentearing. If it had gotten a good PC release or a remaster I think people would have seen that it's one of the better God of War knockoffs out there, certainly one of the most original. The story is entertaining and more unique than what most of these games do and I really groove with the wuxia aesthetic. The facial animations still hold up too! The combat isn't DMC obviously, but the system there is rock-solid, with simple but effective parries and a good amount of utility and tradeoffs between styles

I think the game would really benefit from a re-release. With the PS5 apparently having some form of backwards compatability, would be interesting if this game would play at a stable 30 or 60 frames. Because that's mostly why I never bothered with it (and the excessive amounts of bloom haha).

The game is apparently available for emulation already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Beq5QNjTo8o

Looks pretty decent but still quite choppy.