Chaos Legion is a third-person hack and slash RPG made by Capcom. It has occult themes and stars a cast of slightly over-the-top characters.
Full Review
Chaos Legion Review
By, Jason Ferguson
Backdrop
.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.
The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).
Gameplay
Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.
The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.
Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.
Combat
Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.
Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.
Fresh Features
Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.
To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)
Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.
Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.
Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.
Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.
Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.
In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.
Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.
Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.
Time for Completion
Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.
Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.
Shortcomings
While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.
From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.
The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.
The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.
Final Word
We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!
Final Grade: B
When I first heard of Chaos Legion, I was pretty hyped. Supposedly combining the nonstop action of Devil May Cry with strategy and RPG elements, the game had me sold instantly. Unfortunately, the game turned out a disappointment in most respects.
The game’s two main characters are Delacroix, a noble Lord, and Sieg, a knight with the ability to summon Legions. At one time they were both friends, but the tragic death of their friend Siela drove them apart. Corrupted by darkness, Delacroix begins a quest to capture the mysterious ancient glyphs, but for what purpose? Sieg is sent to investigate, and the former friends begin a battle that could decide the fate of mankind.
The story had its high and low points. The game was pretty short (you can beat it in less than 10 hours), so there wasn’t a lot of development with the story or characters. It seems to jump around a lot and reveals very little about what’s actually going on. Unfortunately, it starts out pretty slow, so playing through the beginning to get to the real meat of the game can be pretty painful. Once you start to progress, though, the story picks up and actually becomes pretty interesting. The characters, on the other hand, aren’t very interesting. Sieg seems absolutely emotionless, and Delacroix is cliché to the point of being a bad guy with silver hair and black clothes. Towards the end, when his wicked scheme was revealed, Delacroix’s character became significantly more interesting. He expressed a lot of emotion, and I found myself feeling sorry for him. On the other hand, Sieg is never more interesting than a block of wood. In the end, Chaos Legion has a fairly interesting story to offer, but it’s mauled by dull characters and poor pacing.
Anyone who’s played Devil May Cry will find gameplay in Chaos Legion pretty familiar. Equipped with his trusty sword, Sieg will hack and slash his way through armies of monsters in action packed combat. What sets Chaos Legion apart, though, is Sieg’s ability to call upon Legions (basically, he can summon monsters). There’s a variety of Legions that Sieg can summon, and you can equip up to two at a time. Not only can these Legion be called upon to help you in combat, but they’ll also teach Sieg useful skills.
When you find yourself outnumbered by dozens of monsters, you can summon a Legion to come in and fight alongside you, or you can use the Legion to do a quick attack and then leave. Each Legion has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, one Legion may have a much better attack range, or might be better against organic foes. There’s a decent amount of strategy involved in choosing which to use, but you can’t equip new Legions once a level starts, which takes away much of the strategy. Your Legion’s life is measured by your spirit bar, which is refilled by killing enemies. If your spirit bar runs out, your Legion dies and you can’t summon again until you’ve regained some spirit.
Aside from gaining spirit, killing enemies also gives your Legions experience points. Each Legion has several stats that you can distribute these points to, such as attack and defense, as well as their own unique attack abilities and some skills they’ll teach to Sieg. Much like Devil May Cry, slain enemies often drop items that will restore your HP, increase your max HP, or increase your max spirit. That’s pretty much the extent of Chaos Legion’s RPG elements. You kill enemies to power up your Legions, and on occasions, you’ll be able to increase Sieg’s stats. It’s not horribly deep, and the RPG elements that were promised proved a disappointment. Really, it’s not much deeper than simply powering up your weapons and learning skills in the Devil May Cry series. Still, however disappointing, summoning Legions is a nice twist and fans of hack and slash action should find it satisfying.
As Sieg fights the forces of evil, he’ll run into Arcia, whose family was slain by Delacroix. You’ll have the opportunity to play as Arcia through a stage, and she plays very differently. Whereas Sieg’s sword allows him to take out enemies close up and hit multiple foes at once, Arcia wields guns and is best suited for picking enemies off one at a time from a distance. Once you’ve played through the whole game you’ll unlock the ability to use Arcia as a fully playable character. Their fighting styles are pretty different, so it’s a nice addition to the game.
The levels in Chaos Legion are often short and very linear. You’ll move from screen to screen and each screen has a different objective you’ll need to complete to progress to the next screen. Although Chaos Legion constantly bombards you with entire armies of enemies, you rarely need to fight more than one or two. Often, the objective to get through a screen will simply be ‘kill target enemy’, so the other 20 enemies on the screen are there only for annoyance.
The enemy variety isn’t anything special either. You’ll see nearly every enemy the game has to offer within a few levels, and the bosses begin to repeat pretty quickly too. Speaking of bosses, the boss battles seem cool at first as you face off against massive, intimidating looking beasts, but they all have a pretty simple strategy to them. Once you’ve figured that strategy out, the boss fights are not only easy, but dull!
Chaos Legion has some impressive design with a very gothic feel. Aside from all the re-used enemies, the character designs, such as Siela, Sieg and Delacroix, are well done. The environments are true to the gothic feel, but they’re pretty repetitive and not exceptionally detailed. Despite the large number of enemies on screen, the frame rate remains constant. Not once while playing the game did I encounter slowdown of any sorts, which I’m glad to report. Like many action games, the camera in Chaos Legion can be problematic. Trying to keep track of all the enemies and everything else that’s going on can be pretty tough.
The music fits the game pretty well, but it isn’t exactly memorable. There’s a good deal of voice acting too, and it’s of fair quality. Aside from that, Chaos Legion offers the generic, but good quality, explosion and sword clashing sounds that you’ll hear in other action games.
Once you’ve played through Chaos Legion, there isn’t really much reason to go back, and since the game is so short, you’re not likely going to spend much time with it. Once you’ve played through, though, you can replay as Arcia for a taste of something different. There are also various levels of difficulty you can try your hand at. And since you can always continue from the beginning of the last screen you entered, playing the hard mode will be challenging without being overly frustrating. But, overall, Chaos Legion’s gameplay is dull and repetitive with little to offer.
As a pure action game, Chaos Legion is a decent, but flawed game. The biggest tragedy, though is that the promised strategy and RPG elements were so insignificant. Because you can beat it in a few days, Chaos Legion is a fairly solid rental, but I can’t suggest a purchase unless you like mindless hack and slash action.
Final Verdict: 68%
