You Were Supposed to be the Chosen One!

I have to come out and make a confession here and now: I did not complete Soul Sacrifice. I did not make it through the whole plot and meet with the evil sorcerer. I did not play four player co op with my friends via PSN like I should have, and the reason for that is wholly why I found I personally could not stand Soul Sacrifice. I'm okay with a grindtastic game - some of my favorite games require hours of work beating the snot out of legions of hapless, randomly generated enemies - but Soul Sacrifice takes tedium to a whole new level, not to mention I've never seen a game so well written be equally so unengaging.

Despite the writing team giving the world a distinctly unique feel, linking believable and shameful plots to each and every one of the boss creatures, the rest of the game just couldn't keep up, and after fighting the 200th enemy using the exact same formula, I just couldn't do it anymore. I just didn't care enough about what was going on to force myself to slog through it, and that's why this, which was initially written an a review, is actually an article. Due to my lack of completion and incomplete experience, we did not feel it was right to consider this a review, but I still felt my experience needed to be told.

Soul Sacrifice drops you right into the cage of a powerful and evil sorcerer named Magusar who has become corrupted by his own power, and it's your job to stop him. The problem is, you're naked, mostly dead, and your only companion is a talking necronomicon-like tome that goes by the name of Librom and cries tears of lacrima. On the positive side, however, this book also has the ability to tell you stories so vibrant that you actually relive them, slowly gaining the powers of the sorcerer in the tales. It's the same basic idea as the Animus in Assassin's Creed, but I'm okay with that; Assassin's Creed is one of my favorite series. While travelling through the life history of the sorcerer that is the protagonist in Librom's story, you are given the option to create your own character, since (as Librom explains) this sorcerer is unimportant in the flow of history.

As this sorcerer, you are sent on assassin missions to kill various monsters using a limited repertoire of spells that must be managed properly if you are to succeed. You start off with your partner, Sortiara, as she explains how the sacrifice mechanic works and why you need to do it. As it turns out, these sorcerers are sent on missions to end the lives of past sorcerers who have, like Magusar, grown evil and twisted by overusing their powers. They must be shown no mercy because....? Well, just because. Apparently she's bloodthirsty, and her thirst is given to you early in the story.

While the plot demands you sacrifice each and every enemy, the gameplay offers you the choice to save or sacrifice. Saving an enemy's soul gives them redemption and boosts your health and defense, while sacrificing them makes your magic power grow. I felt that, while the idea of saving or sacrificing could very well have been a grand idea in the plot (since some bosses react differently based on your save/sacrifice history), it was a horribly underutilized mechanic throughout the game, and basically just means you have to alternate between saving and sacrificing in order to make sure your levels remained balanced.

The disconnect between plot and gameplay is a hit and miss affair. On one hand, there's the above story of an illusion of choice, but on the other hand the story writers have put a tonne of effort into the back-stories and plot of each and every enemy. While the visual design can be seen as 'generic grotesqueries' upon first glance, the rationale behind why a given boss is made of guts and gold is explained in a lengthy short story that you can read in Librom's lore chapters. The stories really make you feel for the bosses, perhaps pitying them for their poor choices and descent into madness, but having to read a novel in-game to understand 90% of the story wasn't okay in Final Fantasy XIII and it isn't fun here, either. This complete disconnect between gameplay and story is one of the major problems with Soul Sacrifice, since almost none of the plot is explained in cutscenes or through gameplay. Instead, you choose the mission you want to go on from a list, and are put through expository narration by Librom; the rest can be perused in the in-game encyclopedia. Frankly, the videogame medium is unique in that a story can be told interactively, which is part of the reason we play them.

Once you have managed to make it through the hilariously poor voice work (something you'll hear ad nauseum, since you have to listen to it before each mission, even missions you're repeating for the dozenth time to get that rare drop you need), you're given the option to modify your character's build, spells, sigils, and other buffs before being dropped directly into a battle with whatever collection of enemies you've been sent to kill. There's no exploration, no build up, just selecting a mission from a menu and being taken to the climax. There's nothing engaging about a game that's all grind, exposition, and climax. A good storyteller knows there has to be peaks and valleys in a story, with slight lulls in the action and appropriate build-up capped off with a series of climaxes meant to make the player satisfied. There's none of that here. There is some exploring to be had in the form of item drops on the battlefield, but when you're trying to juggle enemies and manage your spells and sacrifices, it's not all that fun to explore knowing an enemy can knock you over at any time because it takes what feels like an eternity to pick up a leaf.

Now, the next main issue I have with Soul Sacrifice is related to its combat. Upon first glance I was actually happy to see it was fast paced and seems to have a combo system in place for each spell type. I was wrong. Those details are made to look deep and engaging, but are in actual fact about as interesting as working in a factory on a production line. You can map spells to your Square, Triangle, and Circle buttons, and each spell has a limited amount of uses before it is spent and you lose it, meaning you must grind to find multiples of each spell in order to stack them and level them up.

There are a few different spell types, and each one has a slightly different button combo. If you equip a weapon spell to Square, then you press Square to summon said weapon via a frustratingly long animation (in which you can be knocked over on a whim). Once the weapon is summoned, you can either mash the Square button to perform a combo, periodically pressing X to dodge roll out of the way since you apparently can't jump, or you can hold the Square button to perform a power attack that ends the spell with a bang, ending the weapon summon even if you have 30 seconds left on the clock. When it comes to projectiles, you simply press the button once and then again to shoot. Underground spells you hold, then release. And for shields you press the button once and then again to shield bash. That's all there is to it.

There are different elements for different spell types, such as fire, frost, earth, poison, and neutral, but the spells are all the same. Either it's a weapon, a projectile, an underground vein attack, or a shield, and that's basically the whole of it. There are healing spells, but they're mostly useless, since the game's mechanics revolve around the idea of partner sacrifice. Before going on a hunting mission, be it a story or side mission, you can sort through your inventory of spells and stack or combine them to make them more powerful. Taking two healing seeds blends them to a 1-star healing seed. This can be stacked up to multiple stars, increasing the base seed requirements by powers of two, meaning the entire game is almost entirely composed of button mashing and periodic dodge rolls in the never-ending quest to get more items to summon for spells. There are also sigils and other buffs to make your attacks and defenses in certain elements or styles more effective.

As you play, you unlock more room on your arm to equip stat bonuses like “Increases earth element defense by 20%”. Pretty basic stuff, but it's the sacrifice options that are interesting. Some spells are single-use only, and actively end your character's life or sacrifice an important part of their body for a super powerful spell, greatly aiding your teammates at the cost of your own life. You get a different set of loot drops if you help your allies out in this manner, so it encourages you to both save and sacrifice for the greater good. Sadly, this is really the only interesting mechanic in the game.

I played Soul Sacrifice for over 20 hours and aside from the enemies gaining slightly different attack patterns, it's the same thing on repeat for dozens – no, hundreds – of missions. I played, and replayed, and stacked my spells until I had an entire repertoire of what I assume was max-level spells, but the game continued to play the same. The same combos, the same spells, and the same strategies but with a different color. You think Mass Effect fans had it bad? Well, Soul Sacrifice players deal with 'same spell, different color' as a gameplay mechanic! At some point, late in the game, I got so bored and annoyed at the saddening repetition, grinding, and shallow combat, that I finally decided to man up and join in on a team with my friends, only to find that my online activation code didn't work. And that's when I gave up.

There really was no reason to continue. I'd already played for about two dozen hours, and it wasn't getting better. The graphics remained disappointing, barely a notch above a mid-range PSP game; the score was good but hidden underneath a blanket of cat-wailing and some of the most annoying battle cries I've ever heard in a game; the combat was shallow and repetitive and, despite its many spell options, completely lacks depth and creativity; and the whole game is designed around the idea of many, quick, short bursts of gameplay but focuses far too much on grinding. There's really nothing here to recommend, to be honest. It could have been fun, matching my wits against the harder bosses with my friends, but evidently I was unable to do so, and no amount of 'it gets better' assurances would make me deal with another game that angers me so.

In total, I've played Soul Sacrifice longer than Gravity Rush, but it felt like I'd only played ten minutes of material on repeat, and every time I picked up my Vita it made me hate the game just that little bit more. Soul Sacrifice was the game that was supposed to put the Vita on the map; it was an original idea brought forth by a team spearheaded by Japanese legend Keiji Inafune, with a team of outstanding writers and some sound gameplay ideas. Sadly, it's the most redundant, boring game I've played in years. There are a lot of great ideas on display in Soul Sacrifice, and if this same game was made by an adept team of developers then it would be a much better experience. As it stands, I've never seen a game with such a great pedigree be so absolutely unengaging, and not since Final Fantasy XIII have I been so disappointed with something I thought was made for me.

This editorial was initially conceptualized as a review, but as gamrReview has a strict policy on game completion and adequate feature sampling, we agreed I did not have the experience to properly review Soul Sacrifice and this is a decision I hope we can all agree is a good middleground. This is why I deliberately waited past the 30 day limit to post said opinion on the game, in case anyone else on the team wanted to review it properly.