Devil Kings - Azure Dragon Stage 1 | Artica Rebellion

Описание: I recorded three playthroughs of this game over a year ago and have been holding on to them until I came to a point where I was too busy with life and needed some videos in reserve to put up. So here's a few days of Devil Kings.

Devil Kings is the heavily localized English version of Sengoku Basara 1. They pretty much removed all references to the Sengoku period where all of these characters are (loosely) based off of. So instead you get some random/on the nose names. For example, Masamune Date is renamed to Azure Dragon. Why? Because he's dressed in blue and has a dragon motif going on. The names of places and other characters follow similarly random naming conventions.

Being the first of the Sengoku Basara series, it hasn't exactly aged well. In fact, I find this game a chore to play after seeing all the stages once, which is exactly why in over a year I've never gone back to finish it. Anyways, I started with Azure Dragon (Masamune) since it just felt appropriate. In the Devil Kings version of this game however, they try to make Devil King (Nobunaga) look like the main character, so you could actually play as him right away if you wanted.

Devil Kings plays similarly to later titles, but it has a weird and somewhat annoying mechanic that is part of the core gameplay.

First of all, there's the S-string. It's your basic somewhat long combo string and how you will deal damage for the most part. Just mash the Square button.

Then there's the T-string. It's the same length of combos as the S-string and is used to "Prime" enemies. You can tell if an enemy is primed by their health bar turning yellow. Primed enemies take additional damage and count as being hit multiple times, which increases your combo. The idea is to Prime enemies with any attack from the T-string and then wail on them with the S-string.

The S-string and T-strings are interchangeable for every part of the combo up until the last hit. By that I mean let's say you have 6 hits on both the T and S-strings. You can make any variation of combos such as

TTSSTT
TSTSTS
TTSSST
TTTSSS

Etc etc. The attacks are exactly the same and when you input them in a combo just changes which attack comes out at that time. It's kind of neat, but altogether means each character has little in the way of attacks beyond the two combos. And you really didn't need a full T-string since you're just going to use the T-string to Prime an enemy and then mash Square. The game designers must have realized this at some point because quite a number of characters don't get a full T-string and just get a single attack no matter where Triangle is pressed during the combo.

There are other attacks, which must be unlocked. These are done with the Shoulder buttons in conjunction with the face buttons. These attacks vary from character to character, but they generally deal more damage than the S-string, but are less spammable. At level 1 you have no choice but to stick to the S and T-strings however.

Finally, there's the Basara attack. It's been renamed to Fury in Devil Kings. It's basically your Musou attack, where you press Circle and unleash a powerful attack which you are invincible for. You can only gain Fury form item pick ups, being damaged, or attacking Primed enemies. Masamune's is a bit unorthodox in that it's not an attack, but actually a buff that increases his damage and range by having him wield all six of his swords at once.

Now you may have noticed I picked Easy difficulty at the beginning of this video. I did that because this game's difficulty is broken as hell. In the Japanese release, Easy difficulty was Normal. So playing Devil Kings on Normal is actually playing it on Hard. This isn't so bad early on, but in the final stages it can result in you getting all your HP drained in less than a second. And I REALLY do not want to have to redo these stages because frankly this game is kind of a slog to playthrough. What makes the difficult change really annoying is that the lower difficulty you play on, the less EXP you get. So in JP if you played on Hard, you would get additional EXP and better weapons to power you up. But in Devil Kings, since it counts as playing on Normal, you don't get those benefits. So Normal in Devil Kings is even HARDER than playing Hard in the JP version of the game. So yes, this game is an unbalanced mess and there is no shame in playing on a lower difficulty.

Pretty sure I'm running out of text space, so I'll wrap it up here for this video. Why does youtube STILL have a text limit to its descriptions!?