Thursday, July 26, 2007

Sengoku Basara X Location Test Videos Part 3 and Impressions

More location test videos of Sengoku Basara X have been appearing on YouTube! This one is another one uploaded by mirafi, and is one of the better ones of the bunch. The location test formally ends today, so this is going to be one of the last looks we are going to be receiving of the beta until perhaps the JAMMA show or the Tokyo Game Show depending on how Capcom and Arc System Works feels.

While I am waiting for my sources to get back to me in regards to their impressions of the title, Insert Credit drew my attention to a post over on the Madman Cafe Forums by Maese Spt in regards to his opinion on how the testing went. I've copied and pasted a selection below, but you can find the full original post here:
As somebody pointed out before, it’s a bit too early to pass any serious judgment about gameplay, because most players were quite noobish. I only got two see two supers and one “Basara KO” on the whole time I spent there, and since the queue was quite long I didn’t even bother to try to play myself. I might have better luck today, tough.

The general looking, as expected, is quite GG-ish, but it seemed not so chaotic to me. It’s fast, yeah, but not vertiginous. That’s a good point in my book, actually.

The presented game was only a beta with 4 selectable characters and a few stages: Yukimura, Masamune (not a surprise, huh), Keiji and Kenshin. What’s worse, all the fangirls there kept selecting Yukimura and Masamune all time, so there was little chance to see other guys in action. I’m not an expert in other Arc System games, but the kind of combos and specials reminded me of the few times I had played GG X. Hmm, that’s quite obvious, I guess.

However, Yukimura and Masamune didn’t feel just like the Sengoku versions of Sol and Ky, respectively; they had quite different movesets and stuff. Generally speaking, specials and supers were not as flashy as I expected, tough. A bit disappointing, yeah, but maybe other characters would have cooler, more spectacular specials. Or maybe it’s just that noobish players could only pull out low level specials. We’ll see today. Not that I’m going to be able to pull out decent combos or whatever, tough!

The engun system is still a mistery to me. Yukimura and Keiji had indeed two supporting characters (they were not present from the start, it seems you have to fill a gauge or something to make them show up), while Masamune had only Kojuro to lend him a hand. It seems the main usage for the engun is to power up your supers and make some special combos, but probably there will be more than that.

Nobody was able to make use of Yukimura’s second engun, tough. Sasuke popped up on the melee every once in a while, but nobody could make Shingen participate, even tough he was present at the background along Sasuke. I think that has to do with the “level” you earn for your engun during the battle: the more level you get, the more (or more powerful) stuff he can do; maybe Shingen is a high level engun and would only show up with really huge gauge levels. Or maybe it’s just he was not yet fully implemented in the beta. Oh, yeah, and Kojuro’s aid seemed quite cheap to perform juggles and the like. I can see people bitching about that when game finally comes out.

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