Tsukiyo no Saraba (PlayStation 2) review "I remember walking out of the theatre after watching the original Matrix movie, totally blown away at all the fresh ideas it had brought to the table, and completely stunned at how insanely cool Bullet-time was. Then a year or so later the movie Kung Pow (possibly the single worst movie ever made) featured a horrible CG cow doing kung-fu in bullet time, and the special effect had officially worn out it's welcome. "

I remember walking out of the theatre after watching the original Matrix movie, totally blown away at all the fresh ideas it had brought to the table, and completely stunned at how insanely cool Bullet-time was. Then a year or so later the movie Kung Pow (possibly the single worst movie ever made) featured a horrible CG cow doing kung-fu in bullet time, and the special effect had officially worn out it's welcome.

Move forward to 2005 and apparently whoever made Tsukiyo no Saraba just saw the Matrix a few months ago and decided to make a game based completely around the "revolutionary" bullet-time gimmick. Not content with just completely and totally ripping the Matrix off in one way, the designer even has the characters doing impossible moves like running down buildings, packing ridiculous amounts of firearms, and basically just looking really faggy like Keanu Reeves.

Honestly, words can't describe how hackneyed this game is. Not only is it a blatant rip off of ideas that were stale 5 years ago, the gameplay is like an amalgamation of every tired, cliched third person action game in existence. It's as if the designers set out to make a poor man's Gungrave, only minus the cool characters, awesome combo system, and destructable environments. What you're left with is level after level of locking on to enemy after enemy in slow motion, trying to keep your weak little combos going so they refill your bullet-time gauge. Then a boss.

Bullet-time is so poorly executed in this game you'll quickly get your ass handed to you if you don't abuse it to a point that it's just plain boring seeing everything in slow motion. I found myself purposely not using the gimmick just so I could get a little fast action going on screen to pump myself up, but even that gets old after a little while since there's basically nothing to do other than just hold the lock on button and mash sqaure. And I'm a man who LOVES games that make you mash sqaure endlessly (Chaos Legion, Drakengard, etc) so you know this game is fucking boring if even I can't stand it.

That's it, nothing in the environment to destroy, no cool huge bosses, no cool characters, nothing to hold your attention other than some really basic levelling up of a few character attributes and some static anime images where you have to talk to people at different locations on a city map to uncover the next stage. You can't even run down buildings and defy logic and gravity like your character does in the intro, what a gip!

To say this game is a huge waste of time would be generous. This game should have been aborted in it's planning stage, how it got released I'll never understand. Hell, even if you've somehow managed to miss all the moronic Matrix rip-offs and parodies in the last 6 years, you'll still hate this game for it's shallow, repetitive gameplay and budget-title graphics.

On a side note, apparently this game was designed by the guy who ruined the Suikoden series, so that explains quite a bit. Here's hoping he does the honorable thing and commits seppuku after this failure!

Community review by guts (April 20, 2005) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.