Aragami Review

First 15

The game opens into a hazy cutscene showing me something I’m sure is important, but without any sort of context I can’t tell what it’s supposed to mean.

Now I’m into the normal game, and it looks absolutely beautiful. The environment, the main character, everything looks stylized and yet realistic at the same time.

The game drops me right into it and quickly walks through teaching me how to use my abilities. The game also teaches me about being in shadow and to avoid the light.

The way they shows me what buttons to use is really neat. There are giant tablets in the world that have the instructions written on them. Surprisingly, it feels quite natural.

The audio is interesting. The dialogue is in, I think, Japanese but it’s run through an audio filter so it sounds a little like characters are talking underwater. It reminds me of Okami. Of course there’s a lot about this game that reminds me of Okami, which I can only think is a good thing.

I finally got caught out, and discovered that not only do I die in a hit, but the soldiers with swords can use them to fire a wave of light to hit me from range.

After a little more trial and error, I found that once spotted I have a second or two to respond before an enemy either kills me or blows a horn to summon reinforcements.

Story

The character Aragami is a conjured shadow of vengence meant to exact death to the enemies of the princess and to free her from her confinement. One interesting thing about this setup is it completely bypasses the discussion about the morality of killing people. You were summoned to kill the Kaiho, the army of light, and so that is what you’re going to do. The story does go much deeper as you progress, but if I try to describe it then I’ll end up spoiling it.

The reversal of light and dark is also interesting since you are the creature of shadow and your enemies are the army of light. Even the gameplay supports this since shadows are good and light is bad.

Interface

Aragami is a beautiful game, and part of that is the lack of a UI for most of the game. Rather than have a HUD, the designers placed everything the player needs to know on Aragami’s cape, similar to Dead Space. For the most part this works well, though occasionally I had trouble seeing how many special ability charges I had whenever the cape got twisted up.

I wish the camera didn’t auto-rotate to point towards the objective when I push C to have Korasu show me the objectives. Often times I would bring up the indicators so that I could look for ability scrolls, which meant I first had to drag the camera away from the goal marker before I could look around me. They need to add the ability to toggle the auto-rotate off in the options menu.

I like that each of the special abilities has its own charges. This encourages players to make use of the more unique abilities since if they don’t then the charges will simply go to waste.

I found it strange that the game uses (at least on the computer) E for special and F for use. In most other games E is the use key and F is the special key (or melee key in most shooters). A number of times I found myself hitting E to use something, then had to take a moment to remember that F is use. Most of the time I had Kunai equipped so mistakenly hitting E didn’t cost me anything. But I could certainly see people wasting a special ability charge by mistake if they’re used to the keys being reversed. Unfortunately there’s no way to remap the controls.

I wish there was a way to know if I killed all of the guards in a level before I leave since that is one of the optional objectives. I ended one of the levels having missed two guards. I missed those last two guards not because I thought they would be too difficult, but simply because I didn’t know that I had passed by them.

Occasionally you’ll get a checkpoint right before a cutscene (instead of right after it), which is odd. But since you can skip cutscenes, it’s really just a minor annoyance.

Gameplay

Aragami is overpowered. The game goes out of its way to give you some insanely powerful abilities. Not only can you teleport around from shadow to shadow, but you can also create shadows almost anywhere and then teleport to that spot. And then there’s all of the other abilities like the kunai which is a ranged instant kill that never misses. Despite this, you are still going to get killed/spotted. The end result is that whenever you do fail, it absolutely feels like your own fault rather than the game doing something cheap. After all, with such powerful abilities, there should be no reason for you to fail. I feel like this is the real secret to the game that makes the gameplay feel so good.

My one big complaint with the game is that there’s aren’t enough checkpoints in the early levels. Each level is divided up into several areas. In a stealth game such as Aragami, each area is like a puzzle. You keep working at it, learning where enemies are, where they patrol, what areas you have access to, the best places to lure enemies to in order to take them out, until eventually you find the right combination of patience and action to solve the puzzle. The problem is, once you solve a puzzle, it becomes far less interesting having to solve it a second time. You would think that there would be a checkpoint after each area, but often you have to clear through two or even three areas before you reach a checkpoint. This can lead to a situation where you clear the first area, only to fail in the second area and thus have to re-clear the first area. Each time you have to re-clear an area, your enjoyment of that area goes down. The most times I had to clear an area was three times (meaning I died twice in the next area), but after the third time I honestly hated the first area since it took a while to clear and wasn’t interesting at all since I already knew exactly how to solve it. I would like to see the developers be a little more liberal with their checkpoints.

I feel like a lot of stealth games do this and yet every time I see it I cannot help but think it is a mistake. That is, they give the character the ability to go invisible. I feel like granting invisibility to players is a poor design decision because it allows them to go into a state where they no longer have to care about anything. The enemies stop being dangerous, players don’t care if they’re out in the open, and all around it undermines the very foundation of the game itself. Aragami is not the only game to fall into this trap. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided did the same thing, and that too I felt was a bad design decision. I tried out the stealth ability in Aragami and felt that it actually subtracted from the gameplay rather than enhanced it. After my test I decided to continue on as if the invisibility special ability didn’t exist, and I think I enjoyed the game more as a result. I personally would like to see this ability get removed completely. Though the designers would need to double check that each mission can be cleared without killing any enemies (one of the optional objectives) without the use of invisibility.

The ability to disappear corpses should be part of the base kit for Aragami. It’s one of those abilities that has such a massive impact on the game it seems like it’s too important to be considered optional. As for the ability itself, I do like that it doesn’t work on the corpses of enemies that die in direct light. It adds an extra bit of strategy to killing. Though once players gain access to the Shadow Kill special ability, they can use that instead since that ability does work in direct light.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you’re a fan of stealth games. The gameplay is solid, the levels are well laid out, and there’s a constant sense of danger as you go (so long as you play without using the invisibility special ability).

You will not like this game if you aren’t very patient and want a game with a lot of action. You spend a lot of time slinking around in the shadows, and if you get killed then you will have to repeat a bit to get back to where you were.

Aragami is an incredibly well made game. I know I’ve said this already but I can’t say enough about how beautiful the game is. The aesthetics make you want to explore the world, while the solid gameplay will make you truly feel like a master assassin. Aragami is one of those games that takes a core idea, stealth assassin, and successfully narrows down the mechanics to deliver a near perfect game.