(on the back of the box)“If you loved Devil May Cry, you’ll love Chaos Legion.”
--PSM Magazine
Me: Oh boy! I loved Devil May Cry! This’ll be awesome! *animated blue birds sing and the sun smiles down upon me as I skip home from the game store.*
Two hours later…
Me: What… What is this?
It’s a third person swordplay game with RPG elements made by Capcom but that’s about where the similarities end.
The main selling point of the combat and I guess the game in general is the legions. (Hence the name.) Think of them as poke’mon on PCP. You summon them and they fight next to you . There are seven different ones you can get, all with different attacks and deadly sin sounding names like Arrogance and Blasphemy.
A legion’s lifebar is powered by souls which come from enemies when you beat them. Every hit the legion takes from an enemy removes a little from the lifebar. Of course, when the bar reaches zero the legion’s crest breaks, it disappears and you can’t summon it until you regain a certain amount of souls.
Legions don’t really last too long in battle on average, which is annoying. But it’s actually a lot more beneficial in most cases to just not summon them at all. For one, you can run when they aren’t on the screen. But the second you summon them you’re forced to walk at a leisure mosey. Now it takes forever to get anywhere and you basically become a sitting duck. Second, there’s not a whole lot of difference between a legion and an enemy. You might have as many as six of the same legion on screen at the same time and really what that translates to is chaos and visual pollution. You’re no longer in control of the fight. You can’t focus on anything. It’s like trying to orchestrate a bar fight or a soccer riot.
You’re already on average fighting like thirty giant fucking spiders at a time but at least when the legions aren’t there you know who the enemy is and when they’re going to attack you. When you have them out they inevitably end up blocking your view of some enemy somewhere and then you get hit because you either had no idea they were there or you were distracted by some other asshole in the faceless crowd.One nice thing though is that while the legions aren’t summoned you can use an assist attack which only summons the equipped legion for a couple of seconds to do a single attack at the cost of some souls.
Each legion is good for doing specific things. Some are better at fighting mechanical enemies or protecting you or shooting enemies from far away. Too bad there’s absolutely no way of knowing which ones you’ll need for a level until you play the level. You can only pick two legions to equip before the start of a level. If at some point during the level you discover that you picked the wrong two legions, well tough shit. You either have to restart the level and reselect the ones you actually need or just man up and slog through with your shitty choice, (if it’s even possible.)
The first legion you get is called Thanatos. He’s actually the strongest one of the seven, (nevermind that both it and you die constantly.) At the end of the first level it’s crest shatters into nine pieces which you can go collect if you want. And after that, the game actually asks you if you’d like to switch to easy mode to “just enjoy the story.” This struck me as funny because A: the story isn’t too compelling and B: I’m not a grandmother. Although it didn’t take me long to question my refusal to switch.
A couple of legions are pretty much useless. Arrogance is supposed to protect you but it’s nothing like what I had envisioned. Yeah, they’ll protect you if they happen to be between you and the enemy and I guess you could command them to stop and then hide behind them if you wanted to waste time but other than that, no. What they actually do is absorb attacks when they are hit, though it still does damage to them. The more hits they take, the more they charge their attack. You can command them to release their attack at any time and depending on how big of a beating they took they’ll shoot a beam that does proportional damage. There are of course several setbacks. Providing the legions survive long enough to even use their attack, their beams aren’t that long, their aim is horrible, they attack randomly if you forget to lock on something, they only travel for a short distance to get in range of the enemy and if it’s too far away they just give up and come back and the whole process of freezing the legions in place somewhere they can absorb attacks, keeping them alive, waiting for them to charge and actually getting them to successfully attack what you want them to attack is so arduous you just never want to use them. So they’re not good for protecting. They’re not good for attacking. What exactly ARE they good for?
Then there’s Blasphemy which takes the form of an orange bomb a little bigger than a soccer ball. Summoning it is about the worst thing you can do. All it does is waddle over to the enemy and explode on them. It really doesn’t do that much damage but every time it explodes it takes away from it’s life bar. So basically if you just want to waste all of your souls it’s great for that. The assist attack is decent though after a high enough level. You just throw it, (kick it,) like a grenade which seems much more effective for some reason. Still, I’m not going to ever equip this piece of shit because it doesn’t stack up to the other humanoid-shaped legions.
The attacks that your character actually gets are executed thusly; press the attack button. Press the attack button some more. Keep pressing the attack button. Swinging the sword is your one attack. As you gain experience and level up your legions, you can learn a few different moves through them. The problem with this is that you can only use the specific moves when you have the corresponding legion equipped. It really blows when you try to use a move, only to realize that you can’t because you don’t have that legion with you. Although after earning a ton of experience you can actually retain some of the moves without using the legions.
The first thing you notice when you start the game, (if you’re me anyway,) is that it’s kind of hard. In fact it’s REALLY fucking hard. Your measly life bar will sustain about three hits and then you‘re dead. The first level is an extremely boring and repetitive prologue. Everything looks the same. Actually the first five levels are all monochrome and interchangeable as far as their architecture and design. The prologue is supposed to be a learning experience but it’s way too long. I had the tutorial turned on, so every other thing you do brings up a tedious explanatory screen of text. Now that I think about it, this is the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen in a game. The explanations don’t explain anything. They’re worded badly and when they make reference to the button(s) you’re supposed to push, it says stuff like “press the assist attack button while in assault mode” or “use the shift button to switch legions.” Okay… That’s great. What the hell are you talking about? How am I supposed to know where those buttons are? You have to get out the manual to look up the function names and where the corresponding buttons are located. Now the reason I used tutorial mode in the first place was so I *wouldn’t* have to do that. If I wanted to read the stupid manual, I’d read the stupid manual. Why the hell couldn’t they just have a little picture or the default name of the button come up on the screen like every other game tutorial?
And another thing; why is the square button a confirm button? I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where square was confirm. It’s ALWAYS cancel. You really have to train yourself out of it quick too. Every time you go into the menu to use one soul or life recovery item you end up using two instead because you select it and press X to confirm and then square to leave but it’s not leave, it’s another confirm button.
Going back to the tiny life gage; there almost seems to be some kind of retarded bug with it. You rarely pick up healing potions and even when you do, you can only hold six small ones and two large ones. When you take damage and you’re about at half of your life, you wouldn’t think to use a potion because they don’t grow on trees and you still have half your life left. This is a 100% surefire way to get yourself killed. The next hit you take, no matter what monster it’s from, it WILL kill you. When you die you have to start back at the beginning or at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are usually pretty far apart, so you’ll be repeating shit a lot. Luckily the game gives you back any items you used before you died.
The whole time you’re playing, you feel drastically underlevelled because everything is so difficult. There will be parts with thirty-some enemies on screen shooting at you and ramming into you from behind. There are machines that make enemies respawn after you kill them. You can destroy the machines but the only problem is that they’re completely surrounded by the same enemies that they make respawn. How long can you last? A lot of times you find yourself pussyfooting around. You go up, hit the enemy and run away because you can’t afford to ever get hit. That’s not fun, it’s fucking stupid. You can go back and play levels you’ve already done to make yourself and your legions stronger but you only get the ability to replay levels when you’re mostly done with the game.
Just when you think you’ve figured out the game, they make you play as this gunslinging girl that kind of reminds me of Lady from DMC3, only less badass and holding Trish’s guns… If Trish’s guns looked like humongous derringers. This turns out to be a completely different ball of wax requiring a whole new set of shitty tutorials. Initially I was very annoyed but soon found that even though I had no idea what I was doing, I was still doing a lot better with her than the main character. Unfortunately you only get to do this for one level. Screw this legion crap. Why can’t I play as her?As you play through, you occasionally pick up level-up items. There are things that will increase your shitty life bar, things that increase attack and things that increase defense. When I first got one of these upgrades, I was totally mystified as to how to use it. It was in my inventory but it wouldn’t let me select it. Later I figured out that you don’t need to do anything. Just having it increases whatever stat. I have never heard of that before. Typically to raise a stat, you equip/wear an item or you use experience points. In the Diablo 2 expansion there were charms that you could keep in your inventory that did stuff if you wanted to be extra buff but in Chaos Legion it’s the primary level-up method. So every time you look in your inventory you see things like Defense Up X12 and Life Max Up X24. I’m not sure why but this bugs the hell out of me. It looks so sloppy. Why can’t I just use them to permanently add stat points and then they go away? Or at least put them on the stat screen so I don’t have to look at them.
At the end you have to fight the main antagonist who, for reasons unknown, is Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Okay, it’s not actually him but they literally copied him verbatim. They even used the same cinematography from Advent Children.
Continuing with the Final Fantasy theme, they rape you in the ass with three consecutive bosses. Just kidding… Final Fantasy would have at least four. Anyway, it’s bullshit and if you want my advice; go get Thanatos. Or don’t play at all.
