Folklore - Review

Folklore. Ugh. If you followed my updates on Twitter about Folklore it must have been an interesting roller coaster ride. Straight up to only go straight down farther and farther.

Every single list of must play Playstation 3 exclusive games includes Folklore. I don't know how many people I had tell me that I should play Folklore because it's an amazing game. And on the surface it does sound amazing, I had it described to me as a mix between Silent Hill, Pokemon and an RPG. Sounds like it could pretty damn awesome. So finally I put it on my Gamefly queue and eagerly awaited it.

My first three to four hours of Folklore were awesome. There's two main characters, Ellen and Keats. Ellen is lured to the Irish village of Doolin through a letter sent by her supposedly dead mother telling her to meet her at the Cliff of Sidhe. Keats is a writer for an occult magazine, he receives a telephone call from a mysterious woman who sounds like she's in trouble, she tells him to meet her at the Cliff of Sidhe. So both of our characters show up at the Cliff of Sidhe at the same time, only to find that the woman isn't Ellen's mom and that she's been murdered. So it's up to you solve the murder as well as three other murders that happened 17 years ago and the mystery surrounding them. You do this by entering the Netherworld, which is the realm of the dead.

It started it so well.

Once you're in the Netherworld you fight creatures, and take their souls (I don't remember what it was called in the game so we'll just go with souls). What this allows you to do is have this creature fight for you. You assign it to one of the buttons on the controller and hitting that button will call out this creature who will do it's attack move. There's tons of different creatures and all of them have different skills. You might need a fire creature to beat an ice creature, or you might need water creature to break a crystal that will get you to the screen. Each realm has different creatures, and each creature has a special attack which may help you against another creature or boss in one of the other realms.

I was still interested.

The game is broken up into chapters. There's seven chapters each for both Ellen and Keats. So after my first chapter with Ellen it asked me if I wanted to do Chapter 2 with Ellen or if I wanted to play Chapter 1 with Keats. I figured I'd play one chapter as Ellen and than one chapter as Keats and just keep switching back and forth. So I chose to do Chapter 1 as Keats.

That's kind of where it started to go downhill.

So it turns out that Chapter 1 as Keats is almost as exactly like Chapter 1 as Ellen. Sure, there's little difference. The creatures are the same except their skills are bit different. So if one creature was a water type with Ellen it might be an ice type with Keats. The story was a tad bit different, you might learn a something a bit different as Keats that you might not learn as Ellen, but not anything especially earth shattering. So I just kind of assumed that you were supposed to choose one or the other, Keats or Ellen. I assumed that it was meant to be a "Hey! You beat the game as Ellen, now try it as Keats so you get a bit different story." Which would have been interesting because down the line it adds a little bit of replay to the game.

Boy was I wrong.

So I continued the story as Ellen, but over time I started noticing more and more flaws in the game. Some were big and some were small, by about Chapter 5 my enthusiasm for the game had taken a drastic turn. There were just so many things that I didn't really care for.

1) The cut scenes
2) The save points
3) The respawning creatures
4) The map
5) The story

The cut scenes: For the most part there's very little voice acting, which is good... because when there was it was generally pretty bad. No, instead your treated to comic book like cut scenes (you can see what I mean here), which at first I thought were kind of interesting, but towards the end of the game I disliked them and thought that they felt out of place.

The save points: I dislike save points in games. I understand why we had them back in the day, but I don't understand why we still have them. The only real arguments I've heard for save points is that they're for nostalgia sakes and that they make the game more difficult. You know what else makes me nostalgic? 8-bit graphics, but games still don't have those. And as for adding difficulty I've never understood that, it just means if you die you have to replay something you've already played. That's not difficulty, that's annoying. By the same logic rubberband AI makes games more difficult, let's bring that back. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here... for the most part the save points in Folklore weren't too horrible, but there were times that I would go 30-45 minutes where I wasn't able to save. If I die I don't want to have to replay 45 minutes of game. Some of the save point placements in this game were just unforgivable.

The respawning creatures: Ugh. Okay, I understand that there were certain creatures that if you accidentally killed them without taking their soul you would be screwed because you need that particular creature for a boss fight. But EVERY creature respawns every time you leave that screen, including the mini-bosses. So you fight 15 creatures on one screen and then leave and come back? Those 15 creatures are back. For the most part you can just run past them instead of fighting, but it's still very annoying.

The map: The map in this game is fairly useless. Every time you enter a screen that part of the map is now shown. So you have to visit every screen to have a complete map. Okay, it was kind of annoying but that's not a deal breaker. Later on in the game I wasn't sure which door I needed to go through so I pulled up my map so I could see which door I was standing in front of... that's when I noticed it. There's no marker on your map telling you where you are in that room. It's not a huge problem but occasionally it was annoying. It's like if you were at a mall looking at a map and instead of arrow saying "You are here" the map just said "You're in a mall". Not too helpful.

The story: The farther I got into the story the more I realized that it wasn't very good. Every plot twist they had in the game I easily guessed. A lot of the characters weren't fleshed out very well either. Overall it just felt kind of lacking. It wasn't an awful story, but it also wasn't very good. Especially for a game that had RPG elements.

And then the thing that I hated the most. Remember how I was just playing as Ellen? Well at Chapter 6 the game informed me that I needed Keats to help me. Now I assumed I would just be able to control Keats for this chapter. Nope. Keats ALSO needed to be at Chapter 6 before I could continue. Apparently the developers thought that I needed to play both of these characters to understand the story. I got to Chapter 6 just playing Ellen and not once did I not udnerstand the story because I also wasn't playing Keats, the story just isn't that good and certainly isn't that intricate. So those five chapters I had just beat as Ellen, well now I had to replay those as Keats. This was like playing Super Mario Brothers and getting to the fifth level and the game making you play those last four levels again but as Luigi. The story lines between Ellen and Keats just weren't different enough that I thought you should have to play as both of them. And if you're going to make me play as Keats at least give me different levels, mix it up a bit, have Keats go to different realms... but no, instead I have to play the same levels again but with very slight differences. Awesome.

I went from really enjoying this game to disliking it very quickly, and the worst part is that if they had made some minor changes I would be singing a completely different tune. I'm not sure why everyone but me seemed to enjoy this game, but I didn't. When you add up all the minor annoyances and the couple major annoyances... what's good in this game just isn't enough to overtake them.

That being said there are a ton of people out there that really enjoyed this game. I didn't. Give it a shot you may be one of the people that like it, but I would highly suggest renting it instead if buying it.

Squid.