PXZ Impressions

Project X Zone. Silly Project X Zone. I buy you because I support weird crazy imports that by all logic shouldn't happen but do, I have respect for the character pedigree, and because you had cool stuff that came with the first edition print. Silly me, buying you over SMT4, the next mainline entry in my favorite series of straight-up JRPGs. This isn't a full review, obviously, because I simply couldn't bring myself to finish the game. So, we go on forward, discussing what made this game such a sorrowful failure.

First off, the narrative. I don't expect most crossovers to have a good story. I love crossovers, but they're usually made up of pretty weak stories just created to get two characters in a room together. Unfortunately, this game decided to act like it's narrative was actually something special, and shove in mountains of text to compliment a barely coherent mess. I can't even really summarize the nonsensical plot beyond Namco, SEGA, and Capcom characters get together and fight bad dudes.

Next up, the gameplay. Holy moly the gameplay. On its surface, the game is a turn-based strategy RPG with light action elements to the combat, but this game is so bland it can hardly be called strategic. The entire game is composed of "Go to enemy. Attack enemy. Mash 'A' and the d-pad to kill it. Rinse and repeat." This may have been acceptable if the game was shorter, but no, the game is content to go on for forty chapters, each of them between 30 minutes and an hour and a half. The game also just dribbles out new, identical, characters incredibly slowly, making the best part of the game a suffering to wait for.

Despite these massive, glaring flaws, I continued to play the game for about 20 hours, I having beaten the first 20 chapters of the game. Why? Because it was extraordinarily pretty. The sprite-based graphics are absolutely fantastic, the battle animations are some of my favorites in a JRPG since Persona 4 and everything just looks fantastic in 3D. The animations are so cool and true to the characters, they make you want to just keep playing. Of course, this goes back to the law of diminishing returns. I'm only impressed and enthralled by a beautiful attack animation so many times, and the game gets soul-crushingly boring because of it, as there is no depth or really anything to it besides the graphics. I got all the characters I truly cared about, saw all their attacks, and couldn't bear to sit through anymore.

Though there are a few redeeming factors to Project X Zone, I simply couldn't get though the flaws to finish this game. It isn't insultingly bad like FF13 or something, but everything in this game the doesn't involve graphics is incredibly mediocre. The gameplay's a chore, the narrative's a snooze and the music would have been better if they had just used music from the actual games, rather than the weird remixes. I support imports that are difficult and expensive for niche audiences, but don't make me buy this crap to try and show SEGA that there is interest in the West for weird games. 5 out of 10.