El Shaddai: Ascension Of The Metatron

For decades videogames have relied on graphical fidelity as a selling point. As technology improved, fans gushing “it looks just like the arcade version” gave way to bolder claims of “it looks real”.

But a funny thing happened on the path to the future: videogames became preoccupied with realism at the expense of fantasy. Modern consoles can produce a million times more colours then they could in the Eighties, yet major studio releases seem to be increasingly narrow in their colour palettes.

People crack jokes about brown-and-grey shooters while E3 presentations offer exactly that, over and over, with no sense of irony. El Shaddai: Ascension Of The Metatron, however, represents what all games could potentially look like if the Japanese-dominated gaming industry had continued unchecked to this day.

It eschews realistic graphics and backgrounds for the fantastic. Unfortunately, it also clings to old-fashioned design elements that would best be left behind.

Based on a millennia-old text called The Book Of Enoch, El Shaddai tells the story of Enoch’s mission from God to find fallen angels on Earth. After searching for hundreds of years (all in the first chapter) he finds them hiding in a large tower where each floor has been created by the angels themselves.

Enoch must fight his way through the tower to confront and purify the fallen angels before God sends a flood to wipe them and all of humanity off the face of the planet.

El Shaddai’s most striking feature is, as we mentioned, its amazing aesthetic design. Each floor of the tower is an impossibly large space with its own unique look.

From an abstract watercolour world of bright whites, to a blazing red city, to a sci-fihighway bathed in blue, each new chapter of El Shaddai’s world is as surprising as it is breathtakingly beautiful.

Better still, the game uses no heads-up display that might spoil the scenery – instead of a life bar, Enoch sheds his armour as he takes damage.

Combat in El Shaddai is incredibly simple – so simple, in fact, that there is only one attack button. The strategy lies in timing your blows and in choosing which weapon to use. The three weapons are the bladed Arch, the shield-like Veil and the projectile Gale.

The rhythmic combat is a neat idea, yet problems persist.

Like scissors, paper, stone, these three form a circle of dominance: Arch beats Veil, Veil beats Gale and Gale beats Arch. It’s possible to use the ‘wrong’ weapon in battle and still succeed, but the fight will be much more difficult.

Things get more complicated during El Shaddai’s frequent boss battles, which aren’t reserved solely for the end of chapters. From time to time the fallen angels will suddenly materialise and challenge you.

These surprise battles are unusual in that, win or lose, the story proceeds. Indeed, the very first battle cannot be won; it’s there to demonstrate the challenges you face ahead, but also teach you that when you are defeated you may mash buttons to revive yourself.

The problem with combat in El Shaddai, particularly against bosses, is that it’s difficult to tell when you’ve got it right. The game does a poor job of communicating the aforementioned weapon dominance, something we only knew about from pre-release chatter; the information never appears to be imparted in the actual game. With bosses, there’s a subtle colour cue to indicate if you’re using the right weapon, but it’s not always present.

But regardless of what weapon you use, enemies are hard to read. Far too often we thought we were tearing opponents apart with a long combo only to eat a counterattack followed by an entire sequence of punishing blows.

The larger the enemy, the harder it is to understand their body language when under attack – and the more drastic their reprisal. Make one mistake against a boss and you could easily lose more than half of your armour.

The platform sections throw up some truly wonderful sights.

When you’re not fighting enemies in El Shaddai you’re engaged in a different sort of battle against the game’s total lack of camera control. This omission makes judging the gap between platforms in the 3D environments needlessly tricky.

Sometimes the camera swings on its own as you approach an edge – imagine jumping puzzles in the original Resident Evil if you want to get a sense of how awkward this is. The good news is that there’s a lenient checkpoint system: the game tends to put you back right where you fell. Still, if you fail too many times you’ll have to go back to your last save point.

El Shaddai’s brilliant visuals go a long way towards making up for such periodic irritations, but it remains a shame the artistic vision isn’t matched by the gameplay.

As stunning as El Shaddai looks, the heart of the game is undeniably repetitive and frustrating.