Namco Bandai "Proud" of Enslaved, Considering Franchise Potential

[justnotcricket]

I have a very awkward relationship with this game.

On the one had, I agree with Susan Arendt's comments on it being nice to see a lush, beautiful 'wasteland' as opposed to the usual brown desert (*glares at Fallout*), and I agree that the voice acting was pretty good, but...

I just feel like they made one...let's call it 'arena', with one set of enemies and one plotted platforming route (slightly gluey)...and then copy-pasted it across the whole game. After you've played one chapter, I found that the refreshingly pwetty trees and the vague hope that the story would actually, you know, *happen* at some point were what was keeping me going.

I mean, on the one hand, the platforming controls are gummy and frustrating, but as Yahtzee pointed out, on the other, you can pretty much mash jump and randomly flail the analogue stick and Monkey will automatically leap to the next (brightly glowing, no less) ledge, without fail.

If the developer can iron out some of these creases, then I'll give the next game a try, but it won't be without a healthy dose of skepticism, I'm afraid. I wanted to love Enslaved, I really did. But it just kept throwing me out of the experience.

 

[nesto]

i dont even know what kind of gameplay some people are expecting more from Enslaved anyway. Stop lying, and admit you didnt even complete chapter 2 of Bayonetta.

 

[jackanderson]

Oh, dear. This thread's gone a bit downhill hasn't it?

OT: Anyways, I'm one of the few people who actually paid money for Enslaved and bought it new (the collector's edition with the soundtrack and The Tesseract by Alex Garland was going for roughly the price of a stand alone game). Finished it in about three sessions over 5 days and I still love it. Sure it's flawed (the platforming is on rails, the combat is far too simplistic and the collectables break the cardinal sins of collectables) but I think that it's the perfect game for the argument "Does a fantastic story make up for merely decent gameplay?" And, with Enslaved, I think so.

No other game has made me care more about the characters than this one. No other game has told such a simple story as brilliantly as this one. And no other game's ending has literally made me think and question as much as this one. I love Enslaved's story, its voice acting (in a different universe compared to the standard fare for gaming nowadays) and its supremely detailed faces. Also, a game with colours other than gun metal grey and dog shit brown? I have to love it on principle!

That being said, I don't want a sequel. Not only would it cheapen the ending by having to give us an answer (in the same way that Christopher Nolan explainig the ending of Inception would cheapen the film, somewhat) but it would undermine Enslaved's best quality, the originalness of the experience. By which I refer to the story telling aspect, obviously.

Plus, this being a sequel, they'd probably shoehorn in a Trip and Monkey romance plot. Something that the first game did perfectly fine not having!

/rant.