More Like Soul-less Sacrimony
I had to stoop pretty low to describe Soul Sacrifice: I needed to use a made-up word (“sacrimony“) in my title from Urban Dictionary. Yeah… Soul Sacrifice isn’t a great, good or bad game. It’s kind of in the middle. It’s just okay. That’s it, there’s my review. What surprises me most is that it has a sequel available on the PSN Store called Soul Sacrifice Delta. Does it improve the series? I don’t know and, frankly, don’t care.
I’m not interested in giving up anymore of my time to this world. It’s funny writing this because Soul Sacrifice starts off well. It sets up a dark and foreboding tone, descent voice acting — Librom, a talking and floating book, helps to boost this — and the short time spent with game play in the first few minutes of the game had you mixing and matching your abilities, which eventually becomes stale. One thing I didn’t list that Soul Sacrifice did in the early hours of the game was tell a gripping and touching story. Then, it took a huge nose dive into an abyss it couldn’t save itself from.
At the end of chapters, you unlock different attacks, defenses and debuffs. That’s another thing about Soul Sacrifice, it’s trying so hard to be an RPG. The abilities you unlock have a uses counter, and if you go past that you have to pay a fee to “renew” it called lacrima — Librom’s tears. Once this happened to me a few times, I decided to give up on renewing my abilities because none of the them made me feel at an advantage when I entered a fight. It also has character customization and your abilities can be upgraded and managed, but why would you want to when the character models, environments and abilities have no detail to appreciate?
The story…I can’t even explain it. The character you play as and every other character in the game is a damaged soul that either needs saving or sacrificing. There’s never back story that seems to matter. Soul Sacrifice gives you chapters to experience of upscaling difficulties, hence Librom, with a lackluster AI partner. When you play through the first few chapters, its fun and different from anything else you’ve probably played but it’s extremely repetitive. You “exterminate” X number of enemies to save or sacrifice to help level up your abilities. When you save enemies your health goes up and when you sacrifice your attack goes up, or so it says. Lather, rinse, repeat. Your doing of this is never explained and doesn’t feel rewarding. As for when you go up against mini-bosses, you have to sacrifice them otherwise you can’t progress in the game. Get it? Soul Sacrifice. It’s a way less epic version of “Hulk smash!”
Character creation and customization is good but could’ve been so much more.
If you’ve ever played a Monster Hunter game before, you’ll know how Soul Sacrifice plays. Be dropped into a linear map, fight said monsters and “quest complete.” It knows what it wants already: to sacrifice souls. I think mine was just taken playing it.