Titan Souls

I picked this up on PS Vita, after trying the demo but not being overly impressed. I suppose the "maybe this could somewhat be like Shadows of the Colossus" sucked me in. I was wrong, and it was painful to complete.

The game is punishing. There are checkpoints, but you feel the delay every time you die. 3 seconds of watching the boss continue to murder your already dead corpse, 10 seconds of literally fade to black, 2 seconds of respawn animation, and another 10-20 seconds getting back to the boss fight. This adds up when you die over 100 times in a game.

I completed the game in around 4 hours, plus some change on the last boss who happened after the timer stopped. It started okay, with bosses who were tough, but not unfair. I had a chance to learn their tells and patterns without insta-dying. I still died, but made progress every 5 minutes or so, killing a new titan. These were well designed fights. Later on, there are bosses who are just outright unfair -- 30+ minutes spent trying to get that perfectly aimed cross-room shot in the 2 frames of boss vulnerability.

They did their best to try to elude to how to beat a boss by subtle hints or limiting what you can do. For instance, the Yeti boss gives you zero time to react or plan for the next attack with a pull back shot, and nothing else to shoot. You just have to hit him in his 3 frame of vulnerability at the right time.

As I went to kill the harmless titan, there was a small glimmer of hope that I would get some exposition on why I'm killing these titans. Nope, nothing else is ever told. It's like an incomplete story. This was the big draw of Shadows of the Colossus. I understood that exploration was not going to happen in Titan Souls, but the complete lack of story is a gaping hole. Give me a story I can skip if I don't care, but don't leave it out completely.

Would I recommend playing this game? Not really. It was fun for what it was, but it was brutally difficult and I feel my time could have been better spent doing something else. Almost anything else.

The good things that came of this, was having a game to play on my PS Vita, and I got to update my blog.

Here's a good guide in case you get stuck. I tried not to use it, but eventually used it more and more as I didn't want to spend respawn time slowly figuring out tells, or if I was just barely missing the 2 frames of vulnerability on a boss.