Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Genji: Days of the Blade Review / Preview for PlayStation 3

Genji: Days of the Blade Review / Preview for PlayStation 3

I could have sworn I read about a giant demon crab in ninth-grade History class.

When you play a game like Genji: Days of the Blade, a next-generation title published by Sony itself, you look at it almost in disbelief. Everyone has seen the E3 videos, including the poor showing during the Sony Press conference on the big stage, and all of the laughable gameplay and camera problems we saw then are still present now. Giant crab jokes aside, Genji plays like a first-generation Playstation 2 game instead of a next-gen title, which will upset anyone who was unfortunate enough to plunk down sixty large on this sad piece of software.

Genji: Days of the Blade screenshot

It seems that feudal Japan is yet again the site of an evil presence brewing up and it’s up to the player to stop it. The war that took place in the PS2 original has ended and the “evil” Heishi clan is on the retreat. Yoshitsune and Benkei from the original are joined by Shizuka and Lord Buson to continue the fight, each with their own abilities and strengths/weaknesses. The storyline that unfolds is both predictable and utterly worthless, through it’s nice to know that historical battles in Japan included psycho women that transformed into butterfly demons and other outrageous encounters.

Those strengths and weaknesses that I mentioned earlier keep things interesting for about three hours, but you’ll soon realize that this gameplay mechanic is a decade old and you could be playing something else. Sure, Yoshitsune is agile and can both attack and block with quickness, while Benkei is a lumbering giant of a man with a tree-trunk staff as a weapon, but do we really care? The game forces you to switch between the different characters when they throw obstacles at you, but it’s all very by-the-numbers. Shizuka has weapons that she throws like a yo-yo and can use them to cross gaps you say? Awesome. Benkei breaks things and can take a lot of punishment too? Whoopee! Where did I leave my copy of Resistance….

Genji: Days of the Blade screenshot

Ahem, struggling to stay on task now. Ok, Genji would have benefited from a great number of gameplay improvements over it’s PS2 brother, but the game plays almost exactly like it did before. Enemies jump on screen, you kill them. Slash, slash, slash, block, slash, move on to the next room. It’s all very painful to sit through and play quite honestly. Genji does sport a decent selection of weapons that have various effects and provide a tiny bit of variety throughout the game, but after ten minutes with any one weapon you’ll be bored with it for good.

    To top