When Okami came out for the Nintendo Wii, I immediately went out to find a copy to play. Between the art style and the story, I couldn’t put the game disc in the Wii fast enough. 30 minutes later, I was cursing how bad the motion controls were. Now, Sumioni: Demon Arts for the PS Vita gives me that same feeling with its implementation of the controls. What you think is going to be a side-scrolling action platformer ends up being a “how fast can you use the touch screens on the Vita while dodging every second” experience.
The story of Sumioni: Demon Arts is best explained as this:
The world of Sumioni: Demon Arts is one of melancholy and anguish. Years prior to the game’s opening, two evil men named Seimei and Fukujou successfully conspired to overthrow the Chancellor of Japan, Michisada, and his loyal aide, Tengan. But after this successful coup, Fukujou betrayed Seimei, attempting to steal all the glory for himself. Furious, Seimei invoked a forbidden incantation to unleash an ancient demonic energy, which he then used to do away with the traitor Fukujou and rule the land through intimidation, violence and fear. He kidnapped Michisada and his daughter to use in his twisted rituals, and threw the aide Tengan in prison on false charges. It seemed as if no one could stand in his way.
As time went on the land was driven further into despair by Seimei’s relentless oppression. Tengan, now old and frail, decided something needed to be done. Having heard rumors of an ancient Inkdemon named Agura sealed away within the borders of his prison long ago, Tengan began to toy with the idea of releasing this creature into the world and sending it off to put an end to Seimei’s tyranny. Despite the objections of his Inkgod companion, Shidou, Tengan gave his life to do this very thing, awakening a very confused and irritated Agura.
After a bit of coaxing, Agura finally agreed to help their cause and, along with another phoenix-like Inkgod named Yomihi, these unlikely heroes took off towards the capital to stop Seimei and the growing evil presence he had summoned years before.
In Sumioni: Demon Arts, players are given control of Agura on his quest to destroy Seimei and save Japan.
The reason I cut/pasted this excerpt from a press release instead of using my own words is how the story is conveyed to the player. Telling the story with a lot of scrolling text over static images proved too much for me to handle. I tend to read fast so not being able to control the speed of the text left me frustrated while staring at the screen waiting for the next line to appear. Eventually, I got too frustrated with the amount of text that I would just skip it. I’m sure some voice over telling the story bits or making them a little shorter would have eased the pain I suffered just trying to read the wall of text Sumioni: Demon Arts presented to me. And this is before any game play!
With the first two levels of the game, Sumioni: Demon Arts gets the player familiar with all the controls and the powers you have at your disposal. The main powers are your ability to paint lines using the touch screen on the Vita to create platforms that while standing on, you receive a power boost to your attack power. Getting hit or falling off the platform (they will dissipate over a short period of time) resets that boost. You can also switch to water ink and erase lines you have drawn on the screen or if you tap near a projectile, erase them as well. I found this to be very useful in the later stages when it becomes a bullet hell.
Other powers include calling in a thunderbolt by holding down on the spot you want it to go and drawing lines of fire. I never found the thunderbolt helpful since it seemed that drawing lines of fire was just way more useful. The power to summon Inkgods is also at your fingertips. Yomihi (Phoenix Inkgod) and Shidou (Foo Dog Inkgod) are at your disposal and will recharge after each use. Think of them as extra helpers for a short period of time. The Inkgods don’t really attack more than two times before unleashing a power burst of energy at enemies. I found that their usefulness was always at the end of the stages or boss fights. Using all of these abilities will use up your ink meter pretty fast. Either finding ink bottles when destroying enemies or rubbing the rear touch screen is how you refill that bar, the later meaning you have to stay still and thus very vulnerable.
I love having options when it comes to abilities that I can use but when you have all of these abilities, your controls for them need to be fluid enough to make it easy for a player to seamlessly go from one to the next. Later stages start throwing so much at you that trying to use all of your abilities is just ostensibly clumsy. The issue becomes having to use the touch screen too much when so much is happening on screen that you lose control of the game and frustration sets in.
Stages are also setup in a way that if you don’t score a perfect 3 out of 3 stars on a certain stage, you will not advance to the lower stages on the map. This is not laid out clearly enough and as ashamed as I am about it, I had to look this information up. The game has several endings and the endings correspond to how far down the line on the map you get to. If you wanted to, you could be done with the very easy ending in under 30 minutes. While I don’t mind replaying a game over and over to get the other endings or more stages to play, not having variety in what you are doing will just turn players off from doing that.
The way the variety is handled is by throwing three different scenarios at you with a varying number of enemies. Make it to the end of the stage before a giant instantly kills you by touching you, survive waves of enemies until time is up, or get to the end of the stage and destroy a castle. Boss fights come at the end of the current line you are on. These fights end up being longer than they should since the bosses have insane amounts of health and how quickly you run out of ink. Good luck rubbing the back of the screen when bullet hell activates.
So in the end, what could have been a gorgeous action platformer just ends up being a case of “using all the tech the Vita has” like Uncharted: Golden Abyss did. Like Okami having a PS2 version for people not wanting to deal with the motion controls of the Wii, I wish Sumioni: Demon Arts was on the 3DS. My reasoning is that maybe Acquire would have had to make due with just one touch screen and the controls might have been a little less chaotic.