Otogi: Myth of Demons Review

This is the studio at its most visually extravagant, which is not a sentence anyone uses about it now. Raikoh moves through floating temples and burning bamboo with a weightless glide, and almost everything he passes can be broken, so a fight in a shrine ends with the shrine in pieces and lanterns and petals still hanging in the air. On 2002 hardware it was genuinely startling, and the muted colour palette and the wind sound design give it an atmosphere much closer to the studio's later work than the combat suggests.

The combat itself is shallower than it looks. Attacks are simple, the magic is spectacle rather than strategy, and the depth comes mostly from managing a life bar that drains constantly whether or not you are being hit, which is a clever pressure valve that starts to feel like a timer. Missions are short and structurally identical, and the plot is delivered in fragments that never assemble.