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.

Beat this game and I gotta say I don't feel right rating a game that's only in Japanese (mostly since I didn't understand the plot and am pretty sure I missed some very important mechanics or things along the way) so I'll give summa dem THOUGHTS

Overall as a precursor to character action games in general this made a valiant effort! It feels original and has a lot of stages. They look varied and the creatures range from robots to fantasy demons to security guards. The gun was a bit wonky for aiming since there's no reticle and you have to aim the camera via L2/R2 which is pretty janky. Combat is OK if you're fighting regular enemies and have equipment/stats to boot but an absolute nightmare when you actually need to fight. Mobility is poor with punches/combos and I was slipping around enemies and breakdancing when I wanted to punch toward an enemy.

Luckily the game has stats to upgrade with ability points you can find and you can equip guns, knives, and special AM suits so if you also find the combat to be terrible to work with, you can jack those stats up and tank with the Defense AM. I was worried I'd run out of items since in most boss fights you throw yourself at a boss and chew rations like nobody's business. There's also psychic attacks that require an EP meter which I figure was zero bursting (R1+L1) for crowd control along with a charged psych that wasn't important in the long run to me.

Platforming was a helluva time when you can slip off ledges and die real easy with your attacks and grabbing onto ledges isn't the most exact science. Definitely ran into an issue where (main character dude??) climbed on a platform and the platform was moving so it left him climbing up onto an empty space to die. That didn't happen frequently, thankfully. Also timed segments gave me enough heart attacks so combined with ledge grabbing I was definitely low-key dying inside.

Uhhhh that's it I guess - if there's anything I'm missing and you Spriggan experts got stuff to add, feel free to let me know! Or whatever the story was. I'm sure everyone was very cool in it but I killed them.