I honestly find it hard to start this review, frankly because I don’t know where to start.  Do I start with the over-sexualized, scantily-clad, smack-talking heroine?  Or do I start things off by talking about the awkward, too-sensitive, mind-of-its-own camera?  How about the boring, repetitive combat?

I have this thing that I do with all my reviews – I try to find at least one thing that this game does well.  I did find that – the artwork and environments are eye candy, on a visual level.  I enjoy the fact that you can tear apart parts of the environment and there aren’t many invisible walls in the games different “combat zones”.  Ayumi, our heroine in this tale, is nicely designed, but a bit over-the-top.  It is nice to see an anime-inspired action game, which is the whole reason I rented this game to play in the first place.  See, I’m trying to be positive!

The issue is, there’s so much that is negative about this game that it snuffs out the few glimmers of light.  The story is overly cliché and not explained very well, although I was impressed with the few stylized cut scenes that were scattered throughout the game.  I was disappointed there weren’t more of them – after every couple “combat zones” I expected to see one, shining new light on some little nuance of the story, yet I was disappointed nearly every time.  The battling felt so monotonous and long-winded that it would have done well for the game to flesh out the story by adding more cut scenes.  But, I digress.  Its likely the audience the developers were searching for would disagree with my RPG-minded brain chemistry.

The controls themselves were fine, and fairly standard for a title like this.  My problem was with the camera.  I seriously felt like pelting my 360 controller through my TV every time the camera would either whip around Ayumi on its own when I was trying to look somewhere else or when it wouldn’t move at all when I wanted it to.  Sometimes it was way too responsive, other times it wasn’t responsive enough – if at all.  This complicated battle sections that were already too long.  Maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe not.  It seems a bit long-winded to have to sit there hacking and slashing for 20 minutes before you clear one battle area.  That’s called artificially inflating the length of the game.

As far as the game mechanics themselves, things were sound, although it didn’t seem like the basic tutorials were enough to really let the player understand how things work.  The new spells and abilities – both “light”- and “dark”-based – were fun to use, when they worked.  Again we have the same problem that we had with the camera, it seemed that spells like the “fireball” often would not even cast when I tried, even when the cool-down was up.

Unfortunately, the armor-less eye candy that is Ayumi couldn’t keep me focused.  The camera needs to be tighter, the story more engrossing and the game mechanics easier to grasp.  I applaud the efforts of the developers to attempt to introduce an anime-inspired hack-and-slash action title to the North American minds infatuated with God of War, but in the end it was likely more of a detriment than a benefit to the genre.

Score: 3.0 (out of 10)