Shikigami no Shiro II: A Review
Also known as Castle Shikigami II for those of us who purchased the hilarious translated version.
I originally didn't plan to ever buy a Shikigami game but seeing this used at Gamestop for $7.99 changed my mind.
Story:
(From the manual of Castle Shikigami II)
A dark twisted castle appears in the sky.
A war has begun between humanity and the Demon Gods of Castle Shikigami in the skies of Tokyo.
In the recent past, a band of champions gathered to engage this threat. Using weapons forged by the great magicians and masters of arcane sciences, the heroes managed to banish the demons, quelling their thirst for conquest!
The time: 2006, the distant future. The Demon God's and their mystical castle have re-appeared above the skies of Tokyo City with the goal of continuing the domination and conquest of humanity. Can the heroes of recent legend return to defeat the nemesis of all mankind? The tools for defeating the gods are trapped within the very castle in which the demons reside. The hope of the world lies on the shoulders of these heroes, they must succeed or the world is no longer...
Castle Shikigami's story can be described in one word: Throwaway. It probably made sense in Japanese, but what I typed above is about as comprehensible or deep as it gets if you bought the english release.
Sound:
The music in Castle Shikigami II is actually pretty good. There is the original music and the remix soundtrack to blast demon ghosts to. It's just too bad that everything is forgettable.
The sound effects are generic and boring. Nothing stands out except the sound of hundreds of coins being collected at once. Which is awesome.
Graphics:
The visuals in Shikigami no Shiro II remind me of the look of Homura...but worse. Both graphically and artistically. The characters look like typical anime characters and the enemies are mostly what I imagine are phantoms or demons. Although all they manage to look like is that horrible clay figurine you made in 2nd grade. Abstract garbage.
The scrolling backgrounds are varied, ranging from city streets to waterways to dark corridors.
You can also unlock pictures in a gallery by meeting certain requirements. These pictures are much better looking then anything else in the game.
The bullets have 4 predominant colors: Yellow, Green, Purple, and Red. For the most part you won't have the 'invisible bullets' problem that so many people bitch about when discussing Battle Garegga.
Let's just finish up saying that you aren't going to be buying this game for the eye candy because the "candy" is like that Hershey Kiss from Halloween last year.
Gameplay:
Alright, gameplay-wise, Shiki II is leaps and bounds ahead of it's presentation. Scoring revolves around collecting coins and the "Tension Bonus System".
"Tension Bonus System" is a different way of saying "We want you to play with fire and if you don't get burned, you win!". It appeals to those of us who like to do really stupid things like juggling knives or eating funny looking berries that you find in the forest.
The way it works is when you kill an enemy it releases a base amount of coins. A multiplier will be applied to this base value if you are close to a bullet or an enemy when you kill the enemy. The closer you are to an enemy or an enemy bullet when the enemy dies, the bigger your multiplier, up to x8. The number of x8 actions will be kept track of and at the end of a level you get bonus points that correlate to how many x8 actions you had. Naturally, this means that you want to constantly be grazing bullets so that enemies are nice and generous about how many coins they drop and the size of your after level bonus is sizable.
x8 Action is important for more then just score however. If you are close enough to a bullet (close enough to get a x8 action) then when you fire your standard shot, it will be an uber-standard shot (a.k.a. Hi-Tension attack). So you can increase your firepower by doing something stupid like sitting in the middle of a bullet pattern.
The weapons at your disposal aside from that standard shot and the Hi-Tension attack are your Shikigami (Mobile Light Force in the English version) and a bomb.You use your shikigami like the laser in DoDonPachi. By holding the shoot button down you will slow down and your Shikigami will unleash itself. Characters have two Shikigami types each. Each character's shot, Shikigami, and bomb are unique to that character. This leads to a wide variety of attacks, but unfortunately a whole bunch of them are really dumb. An advantage to using a Shikigami is that, instead of the released coins falling down to the bottom of the screen, they are auto collected into your inventory. So the ideal position for scoring is to use your Shikigami while in a state of High Tension.
Levels come in sets of two, and each pair of levels shares a similar setting and enemies. The first sub-level's boss is a generic enemy blown up to several times it's size. The second sub-level's boss is a generic anime character that you talk to before you begin to brutally murder each other.
The game has a Practice Mode and a Boss Rush mode along with the two arcade modes (Normal and Extreme).
When you don't feel like beating up clay ghosts and the equivalent of playing with razor blades via the Tension Battle System, you can visit the Story Recollect Mode. Possibly the greatest part of this game, it does just what the name implies. It lets you re-watch any of the cutscenes (by cutscenes I mean boxes of text with stills of the characters) that you have seen before. This may seem boring until you realize just what you're getting into. This game gets "The Engrish Ever" award. The translation was so butchered that Jack the Ripper would blush. I'm talking laugh out loud horrible. And since there is a unique script for each of the characters and each of the character combinations (since you can play 2 player co-op) you have plenty of comedy material in that little disc in your Playstation 2.
Closing:
If you like bullet-scraping and using your secondary shot more then your primary one, then Shikigami no Shiro II will probably suit you fine. People who don't like to intentionally fly near lethal things for money would do better to play a different game.
Shiki II is the average-looking duckling that tries to teach you that doing dangerous things will make you a winner instead of believing that inner beauty will overshadow physical appearance.
I originally didn't plan to ever buy a Shikigami game but seeing this used at Gamestop for $7.99 changed my mind.
Story:
(From the manual of Castle Shikigami II)
A dark twisted castle appears in the sky.
A war has begun between humanity and the Demon Gods of Castle Shikigami in the skies of Tokyo.
In the recent past, a band of champions gathered to engage this threat. Using weapons forged by the great magicians and masters of arcane sciences, the heroes managed to banish the demons, quelling their thirst for conquest!
The time: 2006, the distant future. The Demon God's and their mystical castle have re-appeared above the skies of Tokyo City with the goal of continuing the domination and conquest of humanity. Can the heroes of recent legend return to defeat the nemesis of all mankind? The tools for defeating the gods are trapped within the very castle in which the demons reside. The hope of the world lies on the shoulders of these heroes, they must succeed or the world is no longer...
Castle Shikigami's story can be described in one word: Throwaway. It probably made sense in Japanese, but what I typed above is about as comprehensible or deep as it gets if you bought the english release.
Sound:
The music in Castle Shikigami II is actually pretty good. There is the original music and the remix soundtrack to blast demon ghosts to. It's just too bad that everything is forgettable.
The sound effects are generic and boring. Nothing stands out except the sound of hundreds of coins being collected at once. Which is awesome.
Graphics:
The visuals in Shikigami no Shiro II remind me of the look of Homura...but worse. Both graphically and artistically. The characters look like typical anime characters and the enemies are mostly what I imagine are phantoms or demons. Although all they manage to look like is that horrible clay figurine you made in 2nd grade. Abstract garbage.
The scrolling backgrounds are varied, ranging from city streets to waterways to dark corridors.
You can also unlock pictures in a gallery by meeting certain requirements. These pictures are much better looking then anything else in the game.
The bullets have 4 predominant colors: Yellow, Green, Purple, and Red. For the most part you won't have the 'invisible bullets' problem that so many people bitch about when discussing Battle Garegga.
Let's just finish up saying that you aren't going to be buying this game for the eye candy because the "candy" is like that Hershey Kiss from Halloween last year.
Gameplay:
Alright, gameplay-wise, Shiki II is leaps and bounds ahead of it's presentation. Scoring revolves around collecting coins and the "Tension Bonus System".
"Tension Bonus System" is a different way of saying "We want you to play with fire and if you don't get burned, you win!". It appeals to those of us who like to do really stupid things like juggling knives or eating funny looking berries that you find in the forest.
The way it works is when you kill an enemy it releases a base amount of coins. A multiplier will be applied to this base value if you are close to a bullet or an enemy when you kill the enemy. The closer you are to an enemy or an enemy bullet when the enemy dies, the bigger your multiplier, up to x8. The number of x8 actions will be kept track of and at the end of a level you get bonus points that correlate to how many x8 actions you had. Naturally, this means that you want to constantly be grazing bullets so that enemies are nice and generous about how many coins they drop and the size of your after level bonus is sizable.
x8 Action is important for more then just score however. If you are close enough to a bullet (close enough to get a x8 action) then when you fire your standard shot, it will be an uber-standard shot (a.k.a. Hi-Tension attack). So you can increase your firepower by doing something stupid like sitting in the middle of a bullet pattern.
The weapons at your disposal aside from that standard shot and the Hi-Tension attack are your Shikigami (Mobile Light Force in the English version) and a bomb.You use your shikigami like the laser in DoDonPachi. By holding the shoot button down you will slow down and your Shikigami will unleash itself. Characters have two Shikigami types each. Each character's shot, Shikigami, and bomb are unique to that character. This leads to a wide variety of attacks, but unfortunately a whole bunch of them are really dumb. An advantage to using a Shikigami is that, instead of the released coins falling down to the bottom of the screen, they are auto collected into your inventory. So the ideal position for scoring is to use your Shikigami while in a state of High Tension.
Levels come in sets of two, and each pair of levels shares a similar setting and enemies. The first sub-level's boss is a generic enemy blown up to several times it's size. The second sub-level's boss is a generic anime character that you talk to before you begin to brutally murder each other.
The game has a Practice Mode and a Boss Rush mode along with the two arcade modes (Normal and Extreme).
When you don't feel like beating up clay ghosts and the equivalent of playing with razor blades via the Tension Battle System, you can visit the Story Recollect Mode. Possibly the greatest part of this game, it does just what the name implies. It lets you re-watch any of the cutscenes (by cutscenes I mean boxes of text with stills of the characters) that you have seen before. This may seem boring until you realize just what you're getting into. This game gets "The Engrish Ever" award. The translation was so butchered that Jack the Ripper would blush. I'm talking laugh out loud horrible. And since there is a unique script for each of the characters and each of the character combinations (since you can play 2 player co-op) you have plenty of comedy material in that little disc in your Playstation 2.
Closing:
If you like bullet-scraping and using your secondary shot more then your primary one, then Shikigami no Shiro II will probably suit you fine. People who don't like to intentionally fly near lethal things for money would do better to play a different game.
Shiki II is the average-looking duckling that tries to teach you that doing dangerous things will make you a winner instead of believing that inner beauty will overshadow physical appearance.
posted by Pirate1019 at 6:45 AM
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