Slashing with the Wiimote.

This is a remake of a Japanese-only game called Kenshin Dragon Quest, circa 2003. Without going into great detail, I must at least convey that you played that game by swinging a cordless plastic sword. You'd hit enemies on the screen depending on the direction and position of the swing, and you could also block and perform combos. The raw freedom of this control scheme would cause you to earnestly break a sweat in a few minutes without even realizing it.

Naturally, when the Wii was introduced, first impressions dictated that that game could be played with the Wiimote, and therefore it must be brought to a broader audience. However, as with Samba de Amigo, the Wiimote ended up being more restricted than the original controller. This game requires you to hold the Wiimote level through all of your sword swings and keep it generally pointed towards the screen at all times. This is way less fun than thrashing about wildly with a plastic sword, holding it sideways to block, and (at your whim) spinning around as you deal the final blow. Now the whole game is confined to pretty much just your wrist. (They managed to make the game gay!) It's a desperate imitation of its predecessor. But, as with Samba de Amigo, they proceeded to publish the game anyway when it would have been better to wait for the next technology, such as the MotionPlus. Actually, now that I'm considering all of the other quality flaws in the game, I'm starting to seriously question whether they couldn't have done a better job designing or programming the input scheme in the first place. This might warrant some experimentation with Wiimote input data...

Jesus, shut up already so I can get to the action!

Anyway, despite that the sword handling feels inferior to the predecessor, I'm willing to overlook this. The main problem I have is that they added a whole second mode to the game besides the battle portion that I will henceforth refer to as Boring Mode. In Boring Mode, you must explore the castle and surrounding village that acts as your base in 3D first person, and it is here that you must listen to NPCs and buy equipment. Apparently this is supposed to be fun or something, but there's so little to interact with, and it takes so long just to walk around and listen to every un-memorable NPC that ultimately the experience is a waste of time. It doesn't sound so different from any JRPG, you say? Why is this such a big deal? Well, it took about 30 minutes just for me to get to the first battle sequence. It doesn't help that there's a loading delay every time you walk 50 feet or so. After a couple of rounds, I soon learned to minimize my time between battles in Boring Mode, but the question of whether to complete each obligatory Boring Mode sequence before or after saving for the night started to become such an important concern that I think now I'd rather shoot myself than load my game and risk discovering I will have to sacrifice another 15 minutes of my life just to get to the next battle sequence. Even saving the game requires that I walk all the way to a room that has its own loading delays and stupid dialogue. This might have been acceptable during the 80s, but today it's just annoying.

The original Kenshin Dragon Quest for comparison.

Then there are a number of inconsistencies in the game's quality. The predecessor used sprites throughout, occasionally with some scaling, but for the most part strictly 2D. This was acceptable because the art was bright and cartoony, in the style of Toriyama, so it's appealing as well as being deliberately reminiscent of Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior) 1. In this remake, everything is now 3D. You might think that 3D is always going to be "better" than 2D, but this game presents a classic example of how this is not always so. As is all too common in the translation from 2D sprites to 3D models, there is a loss of clarity, a loss of character, and subsequently a loss of appeal. The monsters are harder to perceive; the animations are more unnatural and robotic. Now when the stone golem boss pulls back to strike you, it's harder to recognize the movement for its intention, and when he speeds up in the desperate rage that all bosses experience when they're close to being defeated, the 3D animation just looks silly instead of formidable. This fault is shared by many, many 3D games, so it's nothing new here, but the loss is very distinct when comparing this game to the predecessor that it directly copies.

The characters' dialogue is sometimes voiced, but sometimes it's represented by a traditional repeating beeping noise. The disparity is quite notable, especially when they're beeping the exact same thing that was spoken a moment ago. You may find yourself guessing whether you will get a voice each time you're about to talk to someone. That it draws attention to itself makes the game feel cheaper and reveals poor planning. This is basically the same complaint I made for Beyond Good & Evil, but this time it's more glaring and less excusable.

A few sound effects are also notably wrong. For instance, the door to your home sounds like a huge gate creaking open. It's almost comical, and again this distracts from taking the game seriously.

I'm not sure how the Japanese feel about this, but my impression of Americans who really like Final Fantasy 7 is that they want to play a game with such advanced cinematics that they overshadow the actually interactive aspects of the game. Well, as I alluded to above, the cinematics in this game are pretty terrible. Or if I want to be mean, then I say those people want to play a game where you don't actually do anything (which, believe it or not, is a far more common wish than you may realize). If we take this into perspective (without necessarily criticizing that type of game), then mixing a bunch of scenes that you have to sit through with battles requiring significant physical action yields a combination that doesn't make sense for an audience fixated on distinguishing "genres". So it's really hard for me to tell why they added Boring Mode to what was a purely action-oriented game.

What... what kind of game am I playing?

I have to assume that these traits are far more acceptable to the Japanese. It's the only way I can rationalize it all. I might have said that the embarrassing dialogue and tediousness of Boring Mode might indicate that this game was intended for children, except that I don't believe in child abuse, and also some of the NPCs are sexual perverts. I suppose you could chalk that up as political progress, but I still wouldn't call it appropriate for kids, at least not in America. Actually, the way it's presented in this game is just an obnoxious distraction; there's nothing progressive about it. Again, since mixing perverts and kids is far more acceptable in Japan, it supports the plausible excuse that this game was designed more for the Japanese audience.

So eventually my desire to put the disc in again in hopes that maybe the game gets better if I give it another chance has been gradually replaced with dread. The thing is a chore to sit through, the swordfighting isn't as fun, and the graphics are worse. Just turning on Kenshin Dragon Quest again and entering battle immediately with no annoying, homo-erotic NPCs is contrastly refreshing and far more enjoyable. Maybe I've been spoiled, but really, I challenge you to seek out the original and discover a superior experience.