Lost Universe

I'm a huge platformer/shmup nut, so when I saw screenshots of Lost Universe: I was interested. The game is based off some obscure anime that reminds me of Tenchi Muyo or something. I haven't paid any attention to the story or plot so I can't fill you in there (I skipped all of it, I'm a contra kind of person, less talk, more shooting).

The game has several different characters, the sword dude, the gun chick, and the swordbreaker.. thing which is a ship. The first two characters are featured in the sidescroller type stages and the swordbreaker is featured in the 'blow shit up in space' type stage. These stage types alternate, resulting the game to be a sort of multi-genre kind of thing.

In the platformer stages you play both characters, the sword dude (Kane? I think) and that gun chick. You can switch between both of them but they are located in seperate stages. It's hard to explain, but basically you need to switch between them in order to get past doors and such. Both of these are slightly different, the sword guy is basically a melee character while the gun chick is a ranged character. What I find confusing is how the keys are mapped between them, to attack with the sword guy is both Z and X, to attack with the gun chick its just Z. Now the sword guy has Z for horizontal slash and X for vertical slash, to me the vertical slash is better since it has a bigger range (i dont even know why there is a horizontal slash, I think it has to do with combos, but i didn't bother reading anything). So when switching characters I have to switch from x to z for attacking, I got used to it after awhile but I rather have keys more simplified (Attack and Jump).

The enemies consist mostly of robots who shoot random stuff at you. What I like is how theres a bar above the enemy that shows when it's about to attack. Then again I have to wonder why isn't there just some pre-attack animation to make it more built in, but I assume it'd just take a lot more work to implement. It doesn't focus too much on dodging the attacks, but rather blocking. You press down to block instead of the usual duck. Though the thing that urks me is that blocking doesn't completely stop the attack, it just chops the damage in half. Not to mention you still get pushed back much like you would if you weren't blocking. This is annoying especially if you're the melee character. I ended up just slashing my way through rather than blocking. Suffice to say I wish the combat had more ommph to it, like adding strong sound effects whenever you get hit or jump. The combat is very clunky and just doesn't have a solid feel like megaman or contra does. Sometimes a crapload of enemies will just horde the screen and all you do is just hack and slash dynasty warriors style getting knocked backwards a bunch of times.

The game is very generous, as it has checkpoints (and when I mean checkpoints, I mean checkpoints that you come straight back to even after exiting the game). There is no gameover screen, and you have a health bar rather than the 'hit once, you lose a life' deal. As a person who loves challenge I have to say it's not too bad, because the platform moments where you just fall off and have to climb up again add to some frustration. Also keep in mind that when you die it goes towards your score, so there's still some room for the pros to live up to.

The levels are somewhat confusing as they tend to loop a lot meaning you could climb up to a spot, fall down, and realize that you're back where you started. There's also the lack of consistency with some objects like the doors. In the very first level, the openable doors are green, the desert one, they're gray. Very confusing as I thought the gray doors were special doors that you had to open in some other way. Not to mention, the switches for these doors look almost exactly like the checkpoints. Also whenever I encounter a door I assume that I have to switch to the other character to open, but then I realize the switches are actually located where the same character was. I wish the levels were more linear and the objects of function being different from each other.

Now the shooting stages. There is not much to say, you control a big ship, blow up shit. You have a bomb key which doesn't really work well, it just sends a small purple ball and explodes on impact. I like how the regular bullets are streamed and if you control it right you can end up with your bullets on the opposite side of the screen as you. There's not a whole lot of depth and since you have a large health bar, it's not very hard either.

As for the sound, I found most of the music repetitive. Some of the songs had voices in them which really felt strange. I don't mind voiced songs in an intro or something, but it really breaks the gameplay sometimes.

Overall I think this is a decent fan-game and if any fan of the anime were to find this, s/he'd enjoy it. There are a lot of problems that keep from being a solid good game though. The combat was rather clunky but I liked the platforming parts despite how annoying they were. I think some explanation on the advanced mechanics could be more explained in a show not tell thing, much like a lot of japanese arcade games tend to do by showing pictures of the buttons being pressed and what they do. Because I really didn't get the combo/skill thing and didn't bother reading up on it. I really liked the 2.5D graphics and it really combines the best of both worlds in the world of visual appeal. The 3D looks amatuer but they have a certain PS1 charm to it that I can't shake off. To conclude, I have to say its nice to play a game that isn't made in RM, let alone an action game. I'd like to see more games from Anaryu made in Game Maker (I didn't like Skye).