Folklore for PS3

I played a demo for Folklore right after I got my PS3, and it was pretty fun. Walking around magical worlds, meeting wondrous creatures, sucking out their souls to use them as weapons...like I said, fun. Well, I saw it on sale at GameStop a few months ago, so I bought it.

There are a lot of good things to say about the game. There are two concurrent story lines in the game, one following Ellen and one following Keats. Ellen is a girl who received a mysterious letter from her dead mother asking her to go to a small village in Ireland called Doolin (also called, naturally, "The Village of the Dead"). Keats is a reporter for the obscure occult magazine "Unknown Realms," and he receives a call from a woman begging for him to save her from faeries. The game is broken up into chapters, and you are allowed to switch your character after each chapter. This allows for variety in gameplay since Ellen and Keats have different abilities and follow slightly different paths toward the goal. There are also opportunities for side quests, which break up the monotony of running through the same levels defeating the same enemies over and over again.

The artwork is beautiful and the music is nice and usually unobtrusive, but the story and the dialogue definitely leave something to be desired. I find myself berating the characters for their short-sightedness or sometimes utter stupidity. They exclaim in entirely abnormal ways at things that they should have expected, or at least accepted with more grace, considering that they have been jumping through magical portals into various netherworlds. The developers also chose to tell the story with a mix of "live-action" scenes and comic-book-esque montages with dramatic voice-overs and even more dramatic speech bubbles. But you can't fault the gameplay. It elegantly brings in the Sixaxis accelerometer, which you use when harvesting the souls of the creatures. The worlds are varied enough and the bosses challenging enough to make game exciting but not discouraging.

The movement controls are a little frustrating, since you can only explore those areas of the world that are pertinent to your quest. Invisible walls are everywhere. While I suppose that could be chalked up to the fact that you're in a magical place, it's not like they give a reason for it in the game. The characters move pretty slowly as well. I often find myself wishing for a bicycle.

By contrast, the battle controls are quite good. You assign one of the "ids" you have picked up along your way to each of the four PS controller buttons. Hitting the button releases the id as a weapon. Along with your health bar, there is an endurance (mana, focus, energy, call it what you will) bar. Each use of an id expends a portion of this bar, which regenerates over time. There are several creature types, and each type has strengths and weaknesses toward the other types. These two elements force you to strategize as to the best way to win a particular battle.

I'm about halfway through the game now, so I can't speak to how the rest of it plays out, but so far it's a very enjoyable game with some unique aspects that make it worth the playing time. At the very least it's worth giving the demo a go.