It's pronounced "Project Cross Zone", which is slightly more sensible than "Guilty Gear Exard Revelator"
When I first heard about Project X Zone, I was immediately enchanted. A tactical RPG? With anime style visuals?? With the greatest heroes from Namco, Capcom, and Sega as protagonists??? With little damage numbers racking up while Ryu does tatsus and 150 hit combos???? It sounded like Marvel v. Capcom mixed with Super Smash Bros. mixed with Final Fantasy Tactics. After smashing the order button on Amazon and calmly changing my shorts, I dove in head first to a two month long slog.
All of that is to say that Project X Zone had everything I should want in a game, so I anticipated needing to make a ton of apologies for fawning over it in my review. So how did this video game wet dream pan out?
The game features a huge cast of characters from the three stables, including most of the characters whom I would consider to be essential. These characters are divided into duos that you can't switch up, but you can pair them with a single support character. Usually these supports are derived from lesser known franchises, franchises with only one notable character, or to add a third character from a franchise. So, for example, Ryu and Ken serve as a duo, but they can pair with supports as diverse as Tron Bonne from the Mega Man universe, Heihachi Mishima from Tekken, or fellow Street Fighter pal Juri. The cast is titanic and certainly aimed towards the Japanese audience, and draws heavily from the RPG and fighting game franchises run by each company, which skews the choices in a weird but defensible way. I'm sure they chose this because it's much easier to imagine fighting moves for a character like Kos-Mos from Xenosaga than it is for, say, Sonic the Hedgehog. But speaking of Sonic, they really dropped the ball by omitting a number of truly iconic characters featured. Off the top of my head (and I'm sure I'm missing some), not having Sonic in the game is pretty indefensible. If you can put him in Super Smash Bros., you can put him in here. Other notable omissions include the utterly rage inducing absence of Pac-Man (this would be like making a Super Smash Bros. game and leaving out Mario), and a range of important Mega Man characters which should have come before Tron Bonne, including Dr. Wiley, any of the Robot Masters from Mega Man, and Proto Man. But you absolutely needed a Sonic and Tails team (with Knuckles support), and a Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man team to give this credibility. There's no way that these characters are less vital to the modern vision of Sega and Namco than, say, Akira and Pai from Virtua Fighter or Kos-Mos and T-Elos from Xenosaga.
The visuals in battle are really good, though, and really capture the heart of all of the characters from their various video game franchises. Each character unleashes some variety of signature move from their franchises, and piece them together in fun little combos that don't ever lose their visual appeal. There's some pretty over the top fan service put in as well, so if that bothers you stay away, but it may be a selling point for some. Outside of battle, though, the visuals suffer. All of the character models look pretty wooden and boring, and the camera angles for the map make it tricky to see characters' health, whose turn it is next, and certain important features of the map.
The music is one of the highest points of the game, featuring a lot of nice cuts from the various franchises, along with a few strong original tracks. The sound is also pretty good, especially for Japanophiles, as they've maintained all of the original Japanese voice actors, and have some nice voice work thrown in which will make you smile.
The combat is really fun, at first. Each character has access to five basic combos, and fills up a meter by hitting attacks or being attacked. After each combo, the enemy will be flung into the air or bounced off the walls, and return to you. If you trigger your next combo at the right time, you'll get a critical hit, or at least keep your combo going higher and higher. You can also call nearby units to help, as well as the support you have equipped, making 100+ hit combos a regularity. Once the meter hits over 100%, you can unleash a super attack, typically laden with fan service for some of the more over the top female characters. Timing everything correctly is rewarding, as chaining together bigger combos, getting critical hits, and finishing off enemies with your super attack all yield more experience for your characters. The incentive, thus, is to use your meter as often as possible, making the game more fun and over the top, rather than incentivizing hording your meter for big fights, especially as your meter will fill up roughly every other battle. The timing was also fun, as each character duo has a completely different required timing to hit critical hits, necessitating a lot of experimentation to figure out the optimal strategy with each team.
It can't all be nice, though. The single biggest weakness of this game is its length. I was enjoying it at a more than average rate through about 15 stages (took me about 15 hours), and was expecting it to finish up around 20-25 stages. The game is an abysmally miserable 41 STAGES, and took me over 55 hours to complete. The older I get, the more I abhor long games, especially when they get as dull as this one does. If you're looking for a quick spin with some familiar characters, go play Marvel v. Capcom 2 or Super Smash Bros. This one isn't for you, and it wasn't for me, either.
While I'd gladly have played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Super Mario World for 55 hours, and have certainly done that with the latter, Project X Zone was inanely repetitive and dull, making that 55 hours and two months I spent on this game feel more like 100 hours and four months. There are about 12 bosses in the game, and they just rotate and reappear each level. There's no charm to these levels, just fighting your way through a "surprisingly" small amount of bad guys, having dozens of new bad guys show up with a new boss half way through the level, having to fight through the new guys, killing the bosses, and finishing. There are no wrinkles or changes between levels, so the surprise reinforcements just become anticipated. What's more, there's no real challenge in this game, as you get healing items in every fight you do, enabling you to keep your force at full health throughout each and every level. I never even came close to running out of items, which dragged the contested feel of the game play more a matter of you against time rather than you against your enemies.
Unlike brilliant tactical RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics or the Fire Emblem series, there's essentially no tactics to any given battle, thus missing out on a huge amount of the draw of a genre that features the word "tactic" in its name. Final Fantasy Tactics lets you engage tactically by choosing between a huge number of jobs for your characters, having them take the role of glass cannons, tanks, or supports. Balancing the right number of each kind of character can be critical to success, and misreading the balance of your opponent's team can prove fatal. Fire Emblem uses the weapon triangle to make it so that engaging in battle with the wrong character with the wrong weapon can result in instant death, whereas choosing your targets wisely is the difference between breaking the enemy's lines and having them permanently kill your characters. Project X Zone, on the other hand, allows every character to heal anyone with items and gives roughly the same damage output and defense to all characters, essentially erasing any difference between characters other than the timing of their attacks and their animations.
The writing and story was impenetrable unless you knew the backstories of all of the characters. There was the occasional funny moment, such as when Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins "sacrificed" himself to save his team, only to show up a few moments later in his boxer shorts, but a lot of this felt like really inside baseball. And if you'd never played Ghosts 'n Goblins, you wouldn't even get that. Especially for the American player, who has likely never played series like Sakura Wars, the Shining games, or .hack, there's a lot here you won't guess unless you're a huge fan of import or more obscure JRPGs. There was way too much text between battles, but this is likely due to the fact that there's about 60 characters, and they all need a chance to say something. If you're likely me and are interested in characters from the most popular franchises in America (Street Fighter, Tekken, Mega Man, Resident Evil, and Devil May Cry), prepare to weed through a whole lot of dialogue from characters about whom you know nothing.
I'm the very person to whom Project X Zone ought to appeal, and darn it if they didn't get my money. But more importantly, I really regret losing my time to this monstrosity, and have committed a rare good move by striking Project X Zone 2 from my list of games to acquire. There are better crossovers and better tactical RPGs on which I should have spent my time, and I can't recommend this to hardly anyone, unless you plan on enjoying the fun combat until the sheer dull nature of grinding you through the campaign drains your soul, and you wisely abandon it before completion. I'll give it a 5.0/10.
Up next is a game I expect to have some actual fun with, and maybe finish in a week or so! I'm swearing off RPGs for a while here. I'm completely burned out by these 20+ hour epics, and I'm way behind on my 50 new games goal for the year. I've only finished 6 games in 2 months, meaning I still need to finish 44 in 10 months, which requires me knocking out a few 5 or 6 game months here in the next few months. Here's a quick and obvious teaser for what I'm tackling next on the handheld, and hopefully more joyous front.
-TRO
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