Spriggan: Lunar Verse (1999)

Spriggan: Lunar Verse is based on the spriggan Manga, it follows an organization trying to stop some ancient evil foretold in some old prophecy.

Really the story isn't important at all, the games strongest points are the depth(for the time) of the combat and character building for an action game.

Your arsenal is compromised of knives, guns, and your fists, as well as after a few missions, your choice of one of 3 types of armor suits. These "AM suits" can be swapped out between missions although they do level so its a good idea to pick a favorite before too long.

The 3 suits are power, defense, and speed, and they give you stat boosts in the categories you would expect them to. More importantly they change your unarmed attacks and let you "burst" which strengthens your attacks even further and gives you access to charge attacks.

Unfortunately the combat and movement is quite clunky, you move and turn a bit slow and dodging enemy attack alot of times just isn't possible, so sometimes fights end up being you and the enemy standing face to face punching and slash and shooting each other until one falls down.

There are tons of boss fights in this game, often more than one per level, although they generally just feel like oversized enemies.

One last important point is that you are ranked on your missions and how well you do on time, enemies killed, and damage changes how many upgrade points you recieve.

Really between the mission ranking, between mission character upgrading, light/heavy attacks and mix of melee and gunplay this really feels like a proto Devil May Cry.

I would very highly recommend this to anyone interested in the history of action adventure/ character action games, even if it sometimes feels very old its just a fascinatingly game.

Note This game was only released in Japan and therefore is mostly in Japanese. The between mission menus are all in English though so the language barrier is pretty minimal.