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Inuyasha: The Secret of the Cursed Mask

Well, if they take the extra time they have to make it better, then hopefully it will be a great next year release, then.

Console-style role-playing games have the tricky task of balancing encounters, be they random or otherwise, so that you level up your party at a decent rate without being constantly thrown into combat. The Cursed Mask has no concept of this kind of balance. You're jolted into battle ridiculously often, sometimes every few steps, while attempting to cross game environments littered with deceptive paths and dead ends. There are sometimes purple clouds onscreen that denote areas of heavy demon energy, where you're particularly likely to get into a fight, but you can also trigger battles simply by running around a bit.

Your party will trade actions with enemies according to character speed, but there's none of the tidy, swift menu-selection elements that you'll find in other games--the characters' battle options are slow to cycle through, slow to select, and slow to set into motion.

While turn-based battle systems don't let you directly control the action, they typically offset this by depicting impressive-looking sword strikes, magic attacks, and so on. Attacks in Inuyasha amount to a simple animation followed by a comic-book-like sound-effect graphic when you strike, like "thwack." It looks awful and destroys any sense of excitement you might have had about using your moves.

While the animated portraits of the game's characters received the full treatment from series artist Rumiko Takahashi, and therefore abound in personality and detail, the in-game models for the characters are chubby, superdeformed, and doll-like. They have gigantic eyes, a fixed expression, extremely simple animations, and a low level of detail, and they end up making the game look antiquated and cheaply produced.

There just isn't enough quality content to hold anyone's interest for long, and that includes the most stalwart fans of the anime and manga on which this game is based. If you enjoy Inuyasha, stick to the comic books, DVDs, and Cartoon Network reruns, and avoid this game.

Oh well . . . there's always Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monster Coliseum!