Review: Otomedius Excellent
By: Jeff Rivera
Otomedius Excellent is the first Otomedius title to officially hit American shores, and it's an exclusive title for the Xbox 360. Drawing deeply on Gradius gameplay conventions, Otomedius Excellent is an odd mashup of anime girls and sidescrolling shoot 'em up action. For us shooter fans, it's hard not to get excited each time a game in the genre sees a Western release, so I've kept a close eye on this one over the past few months. After some hands on time with the title at E3 I felt that the game was brimming with potential and I had high hopes for it. So does the finished product manage to meet my high expectations, or does it fall short of its potential?
From the moment you drop Otomedius Excellent into your disc drive, you're bombarded with the anime-inspired presentation. While not new for the Otomedius series, it can be jarring for those not expecting it if they aren't fans of the anime aesthetic or get turned off by the girly characters and their jiggly breasts and revealing outfits. Personally, the anime style is not my cup of tea, but as with any shooter, I can look beyond art direction and design and focus fully on the gameplay offered.
Otomedius Excellent does some nice things in regards to gameplay and replayability, but it often stumbles over design. Before starting, you choose the character you want to use and which your powerups you'll have available to you. At this point it's pretty standard fare as far as Gradius games go. You have a primary attack which can be upgraded, a special attack which damages everything on screen, and the possibility to spawn one or more orbiting familiars via upgrades.
If you're unfamiliar how upgrades work in Gradius games, it's what really sets them apart from other shooter series. Killing certain enemies or sequences of enemies causes them to drop an upgrade token. You can spend the token immediately to boost your ship's speed, or you can save them up to spend on other upgrades. Say you want to change your primary weapon to lasers and it costs four tokens, you'll need to bypass the first, second, and third upgrades to enable lasers. You can even upgrade your upgrades by choosing them more than once. It's a simple concept, but it works quite well in practice. Otomedius Excellent doesn't deviate from the standard Gradius upgrade system, and all the upgrades are the same we've seen from previous Otomedius or Gradius games. It would have been nice to see new upgrades here.
There's not a big difference between the different characters in the game aside from their appearance, but their default upgrades are different. Even the story plays out the same with each character, even though the story is nothing worth fussing over either way. Given how lean the game is, it would have been nice to see some more noticeable variety offered by choosing different main characters.
While most shooters don't get much in regards to localization when they come over, Otomedius Excellent offers the bare minimum. All spoken dialog is in Japanese, and you'll get some scrolling text to act as a translation. Due to the frantic nature of the game, however, reading those translations is nearly impossible. There's also some other weird quirks that point to the lack of localization effort, such as the right stick being used to control the game's pointer, rather than the left stick. Not a big deal, but it's a deviation from established standards here in the West.
As for the gameplay itself, it's rather uninspired. The enemies are seriously lacking in variety, there's not enough mini-bosses, and the main stage bosses are forgettable. The game has a steep difficulty to it, which is actually a positive when it comes to shooters, but the inclusion of unlimited continues allows you to mindlessly plow through it if you're not hung up on high scores and stage completion grades. Limited continues, or continues based on point thresholds would have been much better than unlimited credits. Enemies are easy to lose track of as well with the overly complicated backgrounds, causing deaths that often feel cheap. The game has all the elements it needs with its Gradius backbone to be great, but the levels and enemy patterns are just not up to par.
The game's graphics would barely be considered passable for a PS2-era title, and in this generation they're well behind the curve. Enemy models are extremely basic and there's a lack of anti-aliasing to smooth out the edges on the models used in the game. Backgrounds are overcomplicated scenes that often make it difficult to see your enemies or their projectiles. It can also get confusing knowing what is a background object you can safely fly in front of, and what is in the foreground and will cause a collision. Combine that with the fact that most of the backgrounds are just flat out ugly, and you'll find the backgrounds more of a nuisance than an asset to the game's design.
Not everything in Otomedius Excellent is disappointing. There is a persistent experience system that is a great idea, and I'd love to see it incorporated into other shooters. As you play and use certain power ups, they'll level up. At the end of each play session, you'll see your experience applied and know that as each power up is leveled up it will be more powerful the next time you play. As nice as this idea is, and as much as it strengthens the game's overall replay value, the uninspired levels really drag the concept down.
In the end, Otomedius Excellent feels like it was thrown together a bit lazily. With some better level design and some inventive drive from the developers, Otomedius Excellent could have been a fine title. As it stands, there is a game here that has some good concepts brought down by sub par levels. In a genre where replaying the game repeatedly for higher scores and better grades, the game is only as good as the levels you play through. It's unfortunate, but Otomedius Excellent is going to struggle to impress even the most dedicated shooter fans out there.
2 Stars out of 5
