El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron

EL SHADDAI: ASCENSION OF THE METATRON
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is a beautiful little art game with brawler mechanics.

It's ostensibly based on Abrahamic mythology filtered through trendy Japanese visual design, so it's built around the plot of the (pre-Flood) Book of Enoch, but the protagonist is wearing riveted jeans under his fancy celestial armor, and his best buddy, Lucifel, dresses like a yakuza and talks to God on a cellphone. Lucifel (an angel and God's right hand man) and Enoch (the only human to have been admitted into Heaven while alive) have been sent down to Earth to recapture the Watchers—fallen angels who've built a great tower and imprisoned many humans there, tricking the humans into worshiping them. If they fail, God will wipe out humanity with a flood. Gee, I wonder if Lucifel could be manipulating Enoch to his own ends.

Each Watcher has made a level of the tower into his or her own idea of paradise, and man, this game is so pretty. It's largely an excuse for the design team to go crazy with visuals. The graphics are not super-impressive from a technical perspective—it uses visual tricks I've seen elsewhere, as early as Rez—but it uses them very well, to create something that looks like… I dunno, an impressionist painting of Tron, let's say. If you're interested in games-as-visual-art, El Shaddai is worth playing based solely on that.

The gameplay has its virtues as well. It's a brawler/platformer of the old style, with simple foundations and more depth than is immediately apparent. Combat in particular only has four buttons—attack, jump, block, and… I'm gonna call it "weapon maintenance," which is used for stealing a weapon from an unconscious enemy or fixing up a weapon that's degraded from use. The game only has three weapons (fast/ranged/strong), with rock-paper-scissors primacy, so a long combat is, first, about actually blocking, dodging, and hitting; second it's about planning out which enemies to focus on in which order so you're always using a weapon that's strong against the next enemy you want to take down. Also, one of the weapons allows for slow falls by holding the jump button in the air, so you want to try to end combats with that one equipped so it can help you with the platforming. I always dig well-implemented logistics problems in these sorts of things.

Whether you like the platforming is going to depend on how good you are at jumping in 3D, because while some bits are 2D platforming sequences, the majority are not, and this game does not let you adjust the camera. Mostly it's well-done but there are a few bits I would describe as cheap bullshit.

If you're the sort of person who's going to quibble over stuff like "Wait, why is the Devil still in God's good graces—didn't he fall before the Garden of Eden, thus accounting for the snake?" then El Shaddai's take on deuterocanonical Judeo-Christian myth may bother you. But frankly, if you've been playing Japanese games for any length of time you're probably comfortable at this point with deeply heretical presentations of this material already (JRPGs love to make a tyrannical God the Father a final boss and let you kill him). El Shaddai is actually more faithful (har har, "faithful") than most, considering the difference between the Old and New Testament's take on the Adversary. I roll my eyes at the cute mascot Nephilim, though.

So, summary: The fighting mechanics are both accessible and deep, the graphic design is inspired, the story is no more nonsense than usual. This is by no means a crap game. Check it out.

Previously - Amnesia: The Dark Descent