Project X Zone Review

by SaikyoBro on Jul 15th, 2013

Namco, Sega, and Capcom are undeniably 3 of the biggest names in gaming. They own some of the most beloved IPs of all time; Pac-Man, Mega Man, and Sonic the Hedgehog are 3 of the most popular and recognizable video game characters there are. In Project X Zone however, only one of these characters appears. Yes,  several of these companies’ most recognizable characters are absent. This game was definitely made with the Japanese audience in mind; outside of the Capcom side, very few members of the cast are from genres besides RPGs. In a fighting game or something the character choice isn’t as important, but this game is a tactical RPG. Story and characters are a huge part of this genre and this is a category that Project X Zone simply fails to deliver in.

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.

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.

The gameplay itself is similar to Fire Emblem or other Tactical RPGs, but with a bit more interactivity. Instead of picking a single attack to do on the opponent, you go into a combat screen that looks like a fighting game. You have several attacks to choose, and you can use all of them. Unlike other games however, your attacks are all huge combos. With the press of a button, your two characters will go crazy on the opponent and deal tons of damage. You can use several of these attacks every turn. You can assign an assist unit to any of your two characters, and some of them are really cool, like Ghosts ‘n Goblins’ Arthur and Space Channel 5’s Ulala. You can also have a nearby unit of 2 assist the current unit that’s fighting; for example, if you’re attacking an enemy as Ryu and Ken and Kite and BlackRose are standing nearby, you can call them in to help you. When you execute these combos is entirely up to you, so there’s a little bit of timing involved. You’ll get the most damage by spacing them out fairly, but if you’re too slow the enemy will begin to guard your attacks. Actually watching everything unfold is really fun at first; all the combos are very flashy and you can do them all every turn, and seeing your assist unit and a nearby unit of 2 both on-screen helping you out during them is truly a sight to see. After a while it loses its charm and becomes more time-consuming and annoying. You also have a meter that builds up as you attack which is really cool because you can use it in several ways. It can go up to 150%; at 100% you can use a devastating super attack, but you can use it in smaller increments to do things like defend yourself, counter, use character-specific skills, or completely negate any damage to your unit. It’s a fun mechanic that adds some depth.

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.

No. No thank you. I will openly admit that I only got to chapter 23 before giving up on this game and throwing it back on the shelf, probably forever unless I really get the urge to do something repetitive and mindless for another 30 hours. What could’ve been an awesome crossover driven by cool characters and a fun story is actually mind-numbing combat with nothing you do actually having any reason behind it. It offers some cool ideas and can be very fun to watch, but when every set of characters plays almost identically, I really could not care enough to make my way any further.

If you’re a diehard fan of Valkyria Chronicles or Resonance of Fate or any of the other series represented here, maybe you’ll see the fun character interactions as reason enough to play through the whole game. For me at least, despite being familiar with the entire Capcom side and a handful of others, I could not sit through the repetitve gameplay and completely pointless plot just to see Frank West take a million erotic pictures of  every female Namco character. The writing isn’t bad, but the fact that I’m so unfamiliar with a lot of these characters makes me not care about what they have to say to each other in the slightest. The game had a lot of effort put into it, that’s for sure, but almost entirely in the wrong areas. The combat quickly goes from being addicting to being a chore, and with such a lengthy game, I just can’t recommend it to anyone who’s anything less than a diehard fan of the series represented.

2.5/5

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