To start, two distinct stories are going on in Eastern Exorcist. One follows an exorcist who caused his brothers to die because of a poor decision he made, and after getting thrown out of his temple, he is returning the ashes of his fallen brothers to their homes. This story I did not make it too far in, so know I am reviewing this game based on finishing a third of this story and completing the second.
The second story, which I did complete, follows a brother and sister half-demon. Not fully accepted by either humans or demons, they attempt to steal the Jade Dragon to become fully demon. It doesn't work, however, and the brother is instead poisoned by the Jade Dragon. Having his spirit bound to his sister, she sets off to find a healer capable of healing the poison in her brother's body. What I can say is the stories are pretty simple from that point on. Each chapter is its own short story, and for what they are I enjoyed them. After a total playtime of a little over seven hours I finished all three short stories, played a little into new game plus, and am near the end of the first chapter (And having completed the prologue) of the other character, these stories are not given the time to come to life. But for such a short game, they do a good job of keeping you invested. The brother acts pretty aloof and uncaring, which works as this odd voice in the sister's head contrasting her desire to help those around her. Paired with some decent short stories and short-term characters you end up with a pretty satisfying conclusion.
The game play offers a decent amount of variety as well. You gather resources that can be used to level up to increase your strength and HP, learn some passive abilities and such, as well as leveling up your equipable skills. I'll focus on my favorite skill, lightning blade because describing it will also let me describe a lot of game mechanics. Performing a slash, a follow-up attack to either a combo, charged attack, or down-slash from the air, builds a lightning charge. Three charges make your next attack a lightning strike. As you invest points into Lightning Slash, you can start gaining charges from performing a perfect dodge (Which is just a dodge that avoids an attack just before it hits) or successfully parrying an attack (which allows for a follow-up slash, which has its passive bonuses you can gain). Each skill also has mana that can be used and built up in different ways, Lightning Blade allowing you to spend 100 mana, a full charge, to gain nine charges of lightning, or if you have a lower amount of mana you can drop a lightning orb that will soon detonate to hurt nearby enemies. You can select up to four skills to change between in a fight, with seven different skills to pick between, each one functioning noticeably different than the one I described.
As you progress farther in the story, you can equip more items (Up the three on one play-through, six on the second), which can also be upgraded. This game only runs eighteen dollars, and taking that into consideration there are a lot of things going for this game just in terms of options for how you customize your character. Furthermore, both characters don't get the same abilities. I noticed early two different ones the Exorcist gets, though they both share the Water Dragon Chant which allows for some odd teleportation type of abilities. The game offers plenty of variety in that regard.
The actual gameplay is great as well. I mentioned a lot of the different aspects of it above in describing Lighting Blade, but there are other options like dashing through the air with the dodge function and a double jump. The enemy variety can get a bit stale about two-thirds of the way through a stage, but each stage shakes it back up with a new set of enemies. Optional challenges can also be taken on at shrines to fight powered-up versions of any of the bosses which are a lot of fun to tackle as well. I don't think there was a boss fight that wasn't fun to play through, and an appropriately challenging final boss (I played through on Normal difficulty, the game does offer an easy and hard mode as well).
That said, the actual maps were pretty boring. It has an almost Metroidvania-style layout, but all you are doing is going from one screen to the next to fight enemies. There are a few areas with a lot of layers and barriers to make the fights more interesting, but by and large, you're really just going from fight to fight and a little more.
The same can be applied to the game's art style. The characters all look amazing, enemy designs are great, the game just looks fantastic. But by about two-thirds of the way through a chapter, you start getting tired of the enemy designs, at least until the bosses or next chapter. These are both honestly pretty minor complaints and don't do much to take away from the overall game.
Eastern Exorcist is just an absolutely fantastic game for its price point, and one of the more enjoyable games I've played this year. It has a great look, decent story, plenty of options, and solid gameplay. Definitely worth your time if you're at all a fan of side-scrolling action games.
You should try Ender Lilies, it's a similar game that you might like. I for one have to try this game as it looks quite interesting and the art it has looks really good.
This actually does look really good. I'm going to see what else I have to make it through right now, but it's definitely on my list to get now.
This actually does look really good. I'm going to see what else I have to make it through right now, but it's definitely on my list to get now.
I'm drawn to the art style and story telling, looks like a button smashing game? Probably not something I would pick up if that's how the plot goes and the redeeming quality is the battle mechanics.
Wow, I didn't know this game. For being so recent and being a 2-D game it looks amazing, I like the style it has, as you say, the game looks fantastic, but I think they abused a little bit with the same style for everything, maybe they could have made some small variations and we didn't get tired of the same thing every time.
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