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| Source // PlayStation |
Are you a fan of God of War? Would you prefer Kratos to be a slim woman, with lots more hair? Are you desperate for a motion-controlled game of twing-twang?
No, I don't know what that is either, but I know all this can be found in Heavenly Sword, the action-adventure hack and slash title for the PlayStation 3 that showed what a mix of Hollywood and video games could result in - mixed reactions, obviously.
Clear your afternoon, because Nariko is about the clean house.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Fond Memories
Who remembers demos? Demos were great. Demo discs were the best part about demos, but when the PlayStation 3 came out, discs were only for video content, and you'd instead have to navigate the PlayStation Store to see what you could eventually play, once you recouped the money you'd spent on the console itself. I say again, demos were great.
I wonder how many people played the demo for Heavenly Sword. It seems an awful lot of people did, perhaps because there wasn't anything else to play. I don't know why I played the demo. Curiosity, I suppose. I wasn't high on the idea of Heavenly Sword when I first heard about it, and no amount of 'but, but, we've got Andy Serkis to direct the motion capture' was enough to convince me it was worth a purchase.
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| Source // MobyGames |
But I played the demo. All five minutes of it. It's made up of some cutscenes, some combat, and that's about it. As far as demos go, the bare minimum. An absolute tease, except that it starts with an immortal line that I'm sure more people remember about Heavenly Sword than the rest of the game itself, and it ruins many peoples perception of the game: "We may need you to play twing-twang."
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // PlayStation |
Fun Times
Cut to some ten years later, and I'm using a trial of PlayStation Now to play Heavenly Sword for the first time. To set the scene, PS Now had just launched, and it's a rental service where a bunch of PlayStations spin up an iteration of a game and stream it to your PS4, with your inputs beamed all the way back to the server farm to update the game and stream the next frame.
It was, so far as I remember, quite good. The experience of PS Now, I mean. The game, we'll get to. Playing it for the first time this way, not bad.
Now, this was a few years ago, so all I've got to go on are badly written notes and fuzzy memory, loosely connected to screenshots gobbled up from the Internet, but that hasn't stopped me before and won't stop me again.
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| Source // MobyGames |
It's currently under the protection of Nariko's clan, but events have gone tits up, and long story short, Nariko is now swinging the heavenly sword, standing up for what she believes in, knowing it will kill her eventually.
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| Source // PlayStation |
The bulk of the game, when it isn't showing off motion-captured cutscenes, is bashing square and triangle, eventually in combination with L1 or R1, to modify the dazzling array of attacks that Nariko is capable of with the Heavenly Sword, which the eagle-eyed amongst you will note is often split into two swords.
A cutscene will make way for an arena full of guys - and I mean full of them - for you to hack and slash your way through. Brutal kill animations will make themselves known from time to time to give your fight a more cinematic flair, but more often than not, you're just bashing the buttons to bash your opponents, with the occasional flick of the right stick to dodge out of the way. It's really hard to not compare the gameplay to God of War.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
Frustrations
I've written down that it is repetitive and generic, but I must remember that by the time I wrote that, there was another decade of repetitive and generic games on both the PS3 and PS4 that I would be familiar with. Was it repetitive and generic at the time?
Arguing the case that it wasn't are a bunch of boss fights with some strange, grotesque figures, including Whiptail, a woman crossed with an angry salamander, and the King's huge, lumbering, idiot of a son, Roach. I have absolutely no idea what their gimmicks were. I don't remember how the fights went, which is a good argument for them being generic. I haven't written down that I had a tough time with them, though, which is good.
Speaking of gimmicks, though, Heavenly Sword simply has to make use of motion controls. It comes from an age of the PlayStation 3 where it didn't have rumble, so you've got to make the controller do something, and that something is guiding arrows and discuses (disci?) towards their targets with subtle wobbles of the controller. A few games do such a thing now. I think even Assassin's Creed Origins has an aftertouch kinda thing with its bow and arrows. Anyway, again, I've not written down that it was a pain in the arse to use, so maybe it was alright.
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
When you're not fighting twenty fools in a small arena, you might be fighting two hundred in a large one. Sometimes you're on the ground, without seemingly thousands of enemies around you, Dynasty Warriors-style almost were it not for what I think is a bunch of invisible walls to give off the impression of fighting in a giant battle, rather than actually allowing you to do so. Let's chalk that one up to technical limitations.
If you're not on the floor, you're behind a cannon, launching and even steering cannonballs onto the hundreds of enemy combatants below. It's a break from the button mashing, but again, none of these sections - none of the game, really - has lodged themselves into my memory.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Final Word
But I essentially played it all the way through, so who's the sucker now? If you want something to rent that allows you to just smack some fools in the face again and again and again, and have something nice to look at while doing it, then Heavenly Sword isn't too bad.
It's just not too good either. You can easily make the argument that God of War is just as repetitive, but the story of God of War is so much more engaging than 'clans fighting for survival under a tyrannical King'. I feel nothing towards Nariko, a woman who is willing to sacrifice her life in the fight for peace.
I should be on board with that, but I'm not. I don't really care. I've seen it before. Not with Andy Serkis or a cat-child that plays twing-twang, but Heavenly Sword isn't covering ground that I've not already seen covered. It is generic. It is bland.
Bland with a nice coat of paint, I suppose. I don't know the history of motion-capture in gaming, but if you want to use Heavenly Sword as a milestone for games to start using it to tell their stories, I won't stop you. If you want to champion Heavenly Sword as better than God of War, well, no, we're going to have arguments there.
Play it if you like the sound of it, maybe even play it for nostalgia for early PlayStation 3 games, but it's not one to hunt down and cherish.
Fun Facts
Even characters in Heroes played the Heavenly Sword demo, though they never bothered to tell audiences what the game was called, which makes for some confusing product placement.
Heavenly Sword, developed by Ninja Theory, first released in 2007.
Version played: PlayStation 3, 2007, via PlayStation Now, PlayStation 4