(the pricing has since been revised and the game is no longer as expensive as communicated in the trailer above)
Steam
Last edited:
-
Welcome to Talking Time's third iteration! If you would like to register for an account, or have already registered but have not yet been confirmed, please read the following:
- The CAPTCHA key's answer is "Percy"
- Once you've completed the registration process please email us from the email you used for registration at percyreghelper@gmail.com and include the username you used for registration
Once you have completed these steps, Moderation Staff will be able to get your account approved.
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is back
- Thread starter Peklo
- Start date
(the pricing has since been revised and the game is no longer as expensive as communicated in the trailer above)
Steam
I absolutely adored the visuals of El Shaddai, and I was/am all about the general plot/setting. That said, dang... You know how some people talk about "Avatar Syndrome", wherein they were obsessed with the blue cats-based Avatar movie for a time, but now they think back, and they can't remember a dang thing about the plot? It's like that. The whole thing seemed very... slippery, and I don't even think it is because I didn't like it. It just didn't stick. And that's weird, right? I think my most significant thought on the game in my head right now, ten years later, is "I cannot remember if that one guy ever actually put on a shirt." It is almost remarkable that my thoughts on it are so lacking, as I played the thing through, and I am the kind of guy that could write a thousand word essay about, like, NES Bible Adventures right now.
Anyway, glad its back, but I feel like I won't play it until it somehow migrates to a console and is then discounted by like 50%. There are a number of games I am anxious to reexperience, but this one feels like a skip.
... But don't let me disparage anyone from playing it. It is really pretty to look at! I... think!
Anyway, glad its back, but I feel like I won't play it until it somehow migrates to a console and is then discounted by like 50%. There are a number of games I am anxious to reexperience, but this one feels like a skip.
... But don't let me disparage anyone from playing it. It is really pretty to look at! I... think!
I don't think that's weird at all. It's easy to subscribe to a mentality, especially in the age of ridiculously long independent grassroots treatises on media, that the sheer mass of words a work inspires in its audience is directly causal to the merits of said subject matter. For myself, at this point I've basically ritualized the exhaling process of writing up a storm about whatever's captured my interest for the past while as a capstone on that experience, and while that remains personally enjoyable there's also the feeling under the surface that you have to "pay forward" especially positive experiences in such a way within one's means. There's still plenty of stuff I interact with that I think highly of and don't do the honours for in any particularly dedicated way, but I don't think that reflects badly on the work itself or renders it uninspiring--it just means I don't have much to say about it in my own context. El Shaddai for me has existed in that kind of "of course I like this" space because its appeals are, in the best of ways, so surface, so it's really easy to make a qualitative judgment about right away. Sometimes it's nice to have a breezy, uncomplicated relationship with a piece of media like that, and it doesn't really even have to last--it can just be a singular experience that occasionally pops back up in one's memory.
Some advice for those jumping into this: leave multisampling off in advanced settings in the launcher, as it is by default. If enabled, a lot of the game's visual effects break and do not render at all, including item pick-ups, the mechanically-relevant colour of Enoch's weapons, and enemy projectiles. It's kind of important!
Becksworth
Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
I probably won’t get around to playing this until I get my Steam Deck, but the deluxe edition being nearly half off right now is really tempting…
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
El Shaddai is a very special game to me and I hope more people get to experience it. That said, the gameplay is kind of shit and those people are going to need adjust their expectations on what an “action” game is.
No one really makes this kind of game anymore either, so the work itself has been rendered apocryphal for how valued it is today; the only vestiges hanging on either have franchise or developer pedigree to fuel the odd exception for what the market allows. This was a fertile status quo for video games to be on a basic mechanically conceptual level, once, atop which any kind of thematics or aesthetics could be applied. It's an interesting and kind of sad thing to return to.
I think El Shaddai's main fault lies in its lack of enemy encounter variety. While the weapons are a blast to play with and build combos out of, and bosses are amazing, having essentially three enemy types throughout the whole game* prevents you from truly fleshing them out or experiment. The rock-paper-scissors approach is good on paper, but too limited in its execution, and could have perhaps benefited from allowing you to carry multiple weapons at a time and thus throwing much more varied enemies at you.
* Except for Azazel's floor. Holy shit Azazel's floor. More of that please.
That said, limited as it is, the total package is still a work of art. The music, the visuals, the moment-to-moment combat, and even the downtime and the NPC interactions are suffused with an ethereal, dreamlike quality that you just want to capture and frame. I love that the experience feels like a brief window into the... life? existence? of Enoch and Lucifel, where much came before and much will follow, and there's enough atmosphere to fill a whole franchise. The entire "alternate history" take on the Apocrypha and whole OT events also make me giddy with all the possibilities, even if they were only teased at and didn't lead to multiple sequels (though I understand there's a manga somewhere?) The narrative style that drives this history also makes me very happy.
I would also prefer this to be rereleased on consoles. I was on the verge of buying an X1 just because El Shaddai is still for sale on the Xbox store, and was only stopped by discovering it's not actually compatible. (Boo.) But better to have it on Steam than locked in old-gen consoles that nothing else is backwards-compatible with.
ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
It's that crap gameplay that turned me off almost immediately. There's a dearth of variety and a lack of engagement that lost me almost as soon as I started. Why would you play this when there are so many other action titles that are more urgent and addictive? For me, the What Dreams May Come playfields (full of... nothing) and a Satan who sounds like George Clooney (good casting!) wasn't enough of a hook. Bayonetta, God of War, No More Heroes, the PSP version of Kingdom Hearts, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, even Dante's Inferno and the old as the hills Rygar remake... they're all more appealing than this.
Why? Theme, I guess. Theme, characters, and music make me very forgiving of mediocre or even substandard play. I'm also intensely drawn to angelic imagery and lore, so a surreal game about Biblical apocrypha with breathtaking music is essentially tailor-made for me. Meanwhile, the themes of GoW and NMH are deeply unappealing to me, however excellent their gameplay may be.
You could play it for the arresting audiovisuality, at the time and ten years later unlike anything the medium's seen. You could play it for its understanding of mythical storytelling, so rarely communicated this clearly or even attempted by others. You could play it for its playful sense of levity while respecting its subject matter, carefully balancing its tone in weaving modernity with antiquity, in ways its peers almost never succeeded at. You could play it for the emphasis on platforming, in either dimension that it employs. You could play it for the almost totally singular genre approach for an action game that casts very handsome men to interact between one another, sexualizes them instead of women, while also refusing to descend into the toxic gendered spaces all of its contemporaries would and always did. You could play it for the excellent voice cast composed of talent that have done consistently great, mostly unsung work in countless other niche productions, meeting the dryly humorous script exactly on its level. You could play it for the countless moments where it shifts its own mode of presentation or structure to catch the player off guard and hook them with something unforgettable they've never seen before and never will again. You could even play it for the nuances of its combat, often uncommunicated but present, highlighting that even the most contested aspect of the game has things to offer. You could then build an impression of the game as something very special for its context, in that using a combo action game's design language as a vehicle to accomplish its goals doesn't necessarily mean those elements have to be beholden to the letter according to player expectations, nor assembled to emphasize the aspects they're ostensibly there for. You could do all of these things, and have a pretty good time with El Shaddai, or ignore all of them and walk away, thinking there was nothing there.
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
This may be the only Japanese game I’ve seen that treats biblical material with any real nuance and respect. The surprising thing about the fallen angels is that they genuinely wanted to help humanity, and for a while, they did. The final stage opens with the lead angel telling Enoch they really tried to uplift humanity, but things went out of control almost from the first moment of their plan.
I do hope a lot of people play this.
I do hope a lot of people play this.
It's a wrap. Instead of being as good as you or I remember, I think El Shaddai is in reality far better. A really fantastic time with it now that it's removed from its original context and its exceptional qualities are all the more immediate to discern in hindsight. They never made one like this before or since. I took a bunch of screens but don't want to inundate overmuch, so here are just ten I like.
Just kidding, I'm not done talking about the game.
- I really have to stress how much of a platformer the game is. It's not how it's marketed, not how it's described in genre labels, nor how it's remembered when it is, but the reality of El Shaddai is that roughly half of its playtime is occupied by traversing its world and environments through the design language and verbiage of platforming in either the two or three dimensions. It's really important to the game's unique identity as part of the vague shared lineage of arena-centered combat games, as the common baselines explored in the field usually only go as far as the occasional hidden ledge or nook to hide a power-up in--that the relevant avatar can jump at all is rarely utilized outside of the action's combat applications. El Shaddai completely divests itself of combat for significant sections at a time and is only elevated for the restraint, not only because of novelty or the fighting being the game's most undercooked aspect (though both factor in), but because thematically or as atmospheric texture battles of blade and bruises aren't always the best way to go about telling the story it wants to tell.
- the chapter spent in Azazel's vision of human evolution unfettered of its natural course is hugely memorable for the aesthetic break it introduces in the game's arc, but also the pointed dialogue it's engaged in as self-critical genre commentary. The absolute excess of the motorcycle-fueled action choreography that relentlessly paces Enoch's wild drive down the highway, the sudden diversion into an arcade-minded romp, the ridiculous tonal fit of it all with rock music blaring all the while and delighting in exploding spectacle for its own sake... none of it fits what El Shaddai is, and that's the entire point in the game allowing itself to reach knowingly into the bag of tricks its peers often have, many times in this specific context, even. It underlines the fundamental absurdity of the competition and the parodic intent of the sequence, especially the lingered on shot at the end with Enoch slowly, laboriously walking nonchalantly out of the fires of an explosion he just caused for no particular reason. It does all of this quickly, in a mode of play that allows one to just focus on whatever takeaway there is to be gleaned from it all, wherein that freedom to come to one's own conclusions is what sells the riffing quality of it if one decides to read such in. Similar attempts at genre parody have been made by developers like Taro or Suda, wherein their mistake is always overestimation and preoccupation with their own cleverness instead of allowing jokes to simply sit and speak for themselves.
- everything about Nanna and Ishtar is the coolest. You're dealing with parallel figures in the game's own narrative with different circumstances about them--with one being strictly dead to start off with--but as the game goes on those existences converge and one becomes the other, returning to the role she already had in the game's backstory, before her death. It's cyclical in its treatment of reincarnation as a thing that has no clear beginning or end in the reality as depicted by the game, and highly informed by the historical Inanna and Ishtar, their worship and eventual syncretization into a figure whose individual origins could no longer be clearly differentiated.
- Lucifel is such a satisfying character to feature so heavily in the narrative. His bearing and easily offered casual camaraderie suggest a kind of comforting jocularity in his role as Enoch's closest ally and the one who offers shelter along the long road as the functional save point, but there's also a kind of disquieting quality to him as everything appears as a smug diversion to the point of constant nonchalance in the rhetoric he offers, however ostensibly helpfully. The business-like pretense and artifice extends to his constant rapport with God, in conversations that are amazingly evocatively written for how little of substance is ever said in them; they're officially mandated progress reports from a boss one is on casually friendly terms with about a job that is getting done but not without amicable nudging of the ribs along the way. Lucifel does what's expected of him, but he takes great delight in the absurdity of the responsibility being his to begin with, and as such has no investment in anything that occurs beyond base amusement. That's why the omniscience of his role of observer and recorder turns a touch unsettling, from how involved he is in all facets of Enoch's journey--even recovery from falling into pits is facilitated by the snap of his fingers--and how little he seems to care or allow himself to be guided by concepts like empathy. There is no grand or even smaller betrayal by Lucifel through his actions the game contrives, but all his interactions with a character like Armaros, a genuine and caring person, and all his manipulations in tugging those strings for his own ends and the indifference toward the ultimate fate thus engineered really aptly illustrate that while he's very literally on the side of the angels, this is one mean streak bubbling just beneath the accommodating surface.
- I consider the game something of a narrative miracle, and certainly an anomaly in its wider context. If we're to understand El Shaddai as part of a lineage codified most iconically by Devil May Cry, then we're talking about a genre that's been paved with misogyny from its inception--at "best" the instances have been such where women are sacrificed or merely ignored for the emotional dignity and personhood afforded to the men present, but those are the rare cases--patriarchy swallows all unconditionally, just chews them up leaving different lasting marks. The aforementioned DMC, Ninja Gaiden, God of War, Bayonetta... these are franchised leaders of the pack either commercially or critically beloved in what enthusiasts term "character action" if no other term suffices, but they're distinguishable at a glance for the pervasive attitudes infesting all of them, in the ritualized hatred and exploitation of women featured or participating in them, making all the devil's bargains along the way to make the experience palatable or just tenable. If this is what defines the sub-genre, it's really no wonder to see the trickle-down effect in action for what kinds of works permeated the market in El Shaddai's timeframe. Games like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, the series's second foray into dead-wife thematics where the woman is no one except the loss of what a man once possessed. Games like Lollipop Chainsaw, ostensibly framed in a women-doing-things-yeah hopeful feminist bent but in reality best characterized by enemies and bosses who incessantly hightlight the player character's gender through weaponized insults and slurs not because of any critique of the act being offered but because there are irreverent jokes to be made at her expense and the possibility of violent player-directed retribution justifies all abuse so delivered. Games like the Splatterhouse reboot, which took the archaically charming genre homages of the original games and "updated" them in refusing to critically examine them at all, inventing a crass meanness which previously could only be inferred, and sexualizing the perennial distress of the protagonist's girlfriend as erotic pictorial collectibles hidden around the game to motivate the player further in caring about a woman in the only way the developers conceived how. More examples exist then and now, but there is no significant deviation from the patterns so established, enduringly tying the performatively awesome and violence-defined genre to expressions of equally as violent and destructive masculinity in misogyny.
The above is necessary to my own understanding and appreciation of where El Shaddai breaks from convention in ways almost nothing else ever has, to a degree that feels singular not only for its representative genre but the wider medium. The most direct way to get at the game's exceptionalism is to identify and interrogate the roles of women in it; who are they and what do they get to do? There are only four, but each of them provides a window into the game's disinterest in wallowing in exploitative portrayals. Nanna and Ishtar feature the most centrally, and I've described why I love their narrative roles; Ishtar as the revolutionary figure and prophet of legend both in the past and the present work so well with the game's dramatic, mythic arc, acting in parallel to Enoch's journey to the extent she'd easily be considered a deuteragonist were she ever directly playable. Gabriel is only visually represented by her mural, her avatar as the swan accompanying Enoch at times with her fellow archangels, and her guiding voice--this kind of supplementary role would be typically gendered were she the only one tasked so, but the three masculine archangels are also always there, providing the same verbal guidance as she is, providing parity. For the last, there's Ezekiel of the fallen angels, a tremendously rare portrayal of an old woman in video games: unglamourized, uncaricaturized, and treated as the same physical confrontation and threat as the other adversaries are. Ezekiel's role is prominent and intertwined with Ishtar's, as their martial sparring takes center stage in the game's climax, accompanied by the more important battle of values and wills that occurs in the midst of it. Enoch is in no way participant to their interaction, as he only witnesses it from afar, yet it's framed as integral to the game's dramatic culmination as anything the player directly does as him.
As mentioned, misogyny doesn't only affect its direct targets, but also restricts and reduces the kinds of behaviour and social roles men are allowed to have and express. The wider subject of video game violence and the attitudes of its perpetrators and avatars informs all of this, as El Shaddai patterns itself after its sick-nasty, bro genre familiars and carries with it those trappings and expectations. Yet it is so uncommonly kind to its cast and characters, so invested in their emotional realities that even with most of the actors on stage being men, it cannot diminish them willingly to posturing machismo and possessive vindictiveness in accordance with how this kind of conflict ought to play out like as gender essentialism would have it. It's a game about love through and through; nothing else motivates the characters and the brave and cowardly, altruistic and selfish things they do through the course of it. No one in it desires the flooding of the earth that may come to pass, and no one makes excuses for their choices in the clash of ideologies the conflict turns to; they simply live according to what they genuinely think is the best for the people they see themselves responsible for. All the antagonists go out this way when overcome, not cursing Enoch for foiling them, but regretting no longer being there for others and partaking in that reciprocal love. Armaros among their number is the clearest line to the game's essence, as he loved humans from the stories Enoch told so much that he descended to Earth and internalized and adopted their culture, becoming a performing artist and at peace with himself to the extent that his offspring is the only one among the human and angelborne nephilim whose existence is not gripped by constant agony. Armaros and Enoch's friendship is put to the fore in the chapter where Armaros takes on the playable role for the sole instance of the perspective shifting away from Enoch's, in a choice that's important to underline the unconditional affection between the two despite their organizational opposition, dismantling any notions of aggressive antagonism. The very last thing Enoch and the player do in the game as an active participant is overcome Armaros's fallen form and set him free in a final gesture of friendship, and of love. El Shaddai goes so far beyond the gender politics normalized by the rest of its rotten compatriots that it cannot even be seen to operate on the same wavelength--it completely rejects the premise of violent modes of play only being used to tell stories of equally as violent and dehumanizing content, twisting the expectations from biblical exploitation to the mythically humane.
~~~
Like I said earlier, this is a game I always liked and one which I think was better in the now than in my memory. That lingering affection likely was influenced by the things I see in it now, but who knows if I had the capability to recognize or verbalize them before. It pays to reassess, even when you think you know your own thoughts.
Yeah, this is all based on the new release. It crashed once, in the final chapters. The only time it dropped a few frames through the entire thing was also then; otherwise a stable 60 with no screentearing which is of course a big difference from PS3. The launcher config it gives you is really, really archaic and has options that are vague for a layperson and shouldn't be touched since messing with MSAA for example breaks many of the game's visual effects in the state the game is now. In absence of a working anti-aliasing option, I enabled the dynamic super resolution feature that NVIDIA cards have to downsample to 1080p from a bit higher of a resolution (I'm not running hugely current hardware or anything), which smoothed out the harsher edges considerably--those screens above past the first two are the internal resolution I had on. It's still a clearer picture compared to PS3 no matter what you do, though, or don't touch at all--it just didn't give me any other trouble other than what's affecting all players.
May be a fool's hope at this point. Per GSK and the recent interview with the game's director Sawaki Takeyasu they summarized, the Steam port was basically all hard-fought passion, both for him to negotiate and secure the rights from presumably Disney--who absorbed and liquidated Ignition soon after El Shaddai's original release--and one of the game's original programmers leading the porting process. They're depending on sales of the game now to point toward any kind of potential future it may have, but it may be a hard sell with how the initially high pricing since remedied, the focus on the game's technical performance and where it lacks, and as ever the incredibly niche appeal of it all combine into largely indifferent buzz from what it seems like to me. I'm glad it got this far at all, and hope it does better than I assume.
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
I’ve been debating buying The Lost Child for several years now, since it’s faintly connected to El Shaddai. From what I could tell, it looked to be a derivative dungeon crawler with none of the aesthetic or emotional DNA of El Shaddai, at least on the surface. Has anyone here played it?
Same, I've only heard TLC is somehow tied to it (though I don't know how), and it has been endorsed by SMT's very own Kaneko, but every time I look at screenshots I see a Megami Tensei (without the Shin) with atrocious demon designs and I remember why I've never bought it.
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
The Lost Child is ten dollars on PSN, yet every atom in my body is telling me to still not buy it. I know I’ll hate it, but I’m still curious.