Folklore (2007)

ACTION-ADVENTURE - Ellen and Keates arrive at Doolin Village to try and uncover its dark secrets.

PROS:

++ Interesting plot. The murder mystery is quite interesting and the plot took a few twists and turns. It also had quite an interesting ending in which it was implied that Keates was created by how Ellen perceived Herve to be if he was all grown-up.

++ Art style & visuals. The game was incredibly colorful and pretty to look at. And all the Folks had good designs. I also thought that the CGI cutscenes were great, and the comic-style cutscenes to be quite stylish.

++ Combat. Though the combat can be quite shallow and grows repetitive near the end-game, I still really liked the main gameplay loop. Defeating enemies and then capturing their ids results in the player being able to utilize that creature's power. Essentially like Pokemon. It was always quite interesting what a newly captured creature can do. And there was a great variety to choose from! You were also forced to switch the creatures out constantly since each are strong against certain types of folks, but are weak against others.

++ Sixaxis integration. This is quite divisive, but I still really enjoyed how the Sixaxis was needed in order to capture the ids of Folks and Folklores. I looked goofy doing it, and I understand that it's gimmicky, but it added a lot of charm to my experience!

++ Keates. I found Ellen's story to be interesting, but her personality bland. But I really liked Keats' personality and character design. Out of the two protagonists, I much preferred playing as him.

CONS:

-- Repetitive. The prologue and the first 5 chapters must be played through twice. Once as Ellen, and once with Keates. I don't get why they chose to do this. Yes, there are slight differences in events and folks that can be captured, but I think this design decision was quite detrimental to the game's pacing, and also made the game feel quite repetitive & monotonous by the end.

-- Frequent loading screens.

-- Camera & lock-on. Turning the camera manually was quite slow, so I resorted to using the lock-on to quickly snap the camera towards the enemies. This worked most of the time, but it also struggled many times to properly lock-on to the enemy I'm trying to target.

-- Performance. FPS dips quite often. And when changing your Folk loadout, the screen always momentarily freezes.

Maaaaaan I feel like I would almost really like this game. Though it's very clearly low-budget, the story seems promising, and the world/art/music are cool. Combat's at least acceptable.

The part that's mainly ruining it for me is that getting abilities and XP for the abilities requires you to do a little motion controlled gesture or minigame with the PlayStation controller to absorb the enemies when they're about to die... It's even worse than it sounds IMO, just way overused and feels awkward and uncomfortable.

Also don't like that they have you run through the same levels with two different characters. I get some people like that sort of thing, but I never have.

Maybe I'll hold out for the tiny chance this gets ported and has that motion control stuff stripped out. I'm sure many don't mind it, but it's just hard for me to look past how annoying that is.