Inuyasha Game

A review by Tom

InuYasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale for the Playstation 1 (compatible with Playstation 2) by Bandai retail $ 19.99 - 24.99 rated T-teen for violence and suggestive themes.

All in all this is a decent game. It is not the best fighting game ever created, but it is far from the worst. The game allows you to do battle in four different modes. Feudal Fairy Tale mode in which you start off with two characters, Inuyasha and Kagome. You choose a character and begin the journey. Basically your character is placed on a map and you get to decide which way you want to go. Depending on the direction you choose, you will encounter obstacles. Most are characters in the game that you have to fight. Others are mini games that you must accomplish. The main goal is to defeat your enemies and recover shards of the Shikon no Tama. Once you defeat all the minor characters you can face Naraku in his castle. After defeating him a screen will pop up describing your accomplishments (how fast you beat the game, how many shards you collected etc.). Also upon completing the game you will receive a new character that you can use in this mode.

Vs Fairy Tale mode: In this mode you choose your character and whether you want to fight a friend or the computer. You battle until the other persons life gauge is depleted.

Dream Fairy Tale mode: It is like the previous mode except this time you get to choose a partner to battle with you. It is a tag-team battle and you can pick anyone to battle with you.

Myoga's training mode: In this mode you get to practice you skills.

There is an options mode named Shippo's Seven Changes. Here you can change the difficulty level and the sound level etc. all the normal things you would find in an options screen. Also there is a backpack mode which can only be accessed once you complete certain conditions within the game (collecting jewel shards, unlocking characters etc.). In the "Backpack" you can view photo albums of characters, play all the mini games that are in the game, listen to music from the game and the characters lines, and a voice edit function that allows you to change the voices of playable characters in the Feudal Fairy Tale mode.

The game has 10 playable characters (Inuyasha, Kagome, Miroku, Sango, Shippo, Koga, Sesshomaru, Kikyo, Kagura and Naraku). Also there are two hidden characters (Demon Inuyasha and Totosai).

The actual game play is fun and easy. All the characters have their own trade mark move and special moves taken right from the actual series. All the special moves are easy to do and only require two or three button presses to pull them off. The super special attack is accompanied by a movie clip of the character performing that move. All the characters have unique voice interaction with each other, meaning they will say something depending on who they are fighting. The only draw back is that the voices are in Japanese (no subtitles) during the battle sequences. The chit chat that occurs before and after the battles are also in Japanese but these have subtitles. The best feature about the voices is that they are the original Japanese voice actors from the tv series. No cheesy game voices.

So in conclusion, if you are a fan of InuYasha this game is a definite buy. If you like fighting games a buy. If you are still worried about spending twenty dollars my suggestion is to wait and see if it is available for rent (at Blockbuster etc.) and try it out. Have fun.