Blood Will Tell follows the story of a young warrior, whose name is Hyakkimaru. As a child, his father was a real meanie to him. Not like a normal father, making him play football on a December morning when it’s minus fifty outside, with grass harder than a diamond, then making him scrape the mud off of his football boots afterwards, oh no. To Hyakkimaru, minus fifty degree football is heaven. His Dad, in a mission to gain magical power, sold forty-eight of his son’s body parts off to demons in his land! This didn’t go terribly well, so Dad left his son for dead, and ran off into the moonlit night, never to be seen again.
Luckily for Hyakkimaru, an old inventor found him, and decided to help him out. He fitted a vast arsenal of weaponry to the boy, including big swords, knives, machine guns and cannons (no, really). In the meantime, the demons have built their own human, with the parts taken from Hyakkimaru. In a mission to rid the world of demons, and get his CD flicking fingers, knees, and eyes back, Hyakkimaru goes out to destroy the 48 fiends...
The game is set in a third-person perspective 3D world, and your character has many moves that he can perform, and can run jump and sidestep around enemies too. The first thing you come across in the game is a tutorial mode, which has you performing moves in your village, with the helpful inventor guiding you along, explaining everything to you. After a short time, you begin the game proper, and start hunting down your first enemy. It doesn’t take long before you’re killing many enemies that spawn in front of you, and you’ll eventually come across a boss character. Once you have beaten him, you obtain a new skill from the body part you acquire from the fallen beast. You are currently still blind, and as you are looking through your mind instead of your eyes, the whole world is viewed in black and white. The next boss you encounter is the guy you need, as you get your vision back after killing him, giving you a full colour view of the game world. You then continue on, meeting new characters and enemies along the way.
The control you have over the main character in the game is smooth enough, and press buttons on the controller always give you the result you want on screen. You can perform many different combos by using the different weapons available, and you also have special power moves too. The game’s camera system unfortunately doesn’t work so well; it never does quite what you want it to, and isn’t nearly as adjustable as it needs to be. It’s too close at times, and never positions itself well enough when in busy fighting sections. The Boss Camera is a neat idea, which locks onto the boss at all times during the battle, but occasionally that too gets a little confused and too close for comfort. This is a common problem with third person games, but some games handle it better. It’s a shame Blood Will Tell doesn’t make a better job of it, as it affected my enjoyment of the game quite a lot, making some sections tricky and frustrating. Another problem with the game is the constant loading. Every time you are about to reach a new area, boss, or cut scene, you get a loading screen. The cut scene or boss intro with end, and you’ll get another load screen. You kill the boss, then get yet another load screen. It’s rather annoying to be honest, and gets in the way of the action.
Graphically, Blood Will Tell is solid enough, with fairly detailed environments and characters. Enemies and bosses are nicely designed and are nicely varied. The game always stays smooth, even during attacks from many enemies. Sound is good, with decent music and samples, however the voice acting is very American, and it would have been nice to at least have the option to have Japanese voices. Ancient Japanese warriors with American accents don’t quite work for me I’m afraid.
Blood Will Tell doesn’t exactly set the world on fire with innovation or unique features, but on the other hand it doesn’t do anything particularly bad or wrong either (except the aforementioned camera and loading gripes). It’s a solid and thoroughly enjoyable action adventure game, and there is enough here to keep fans of the genre interested to the end.
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