Death Jr. (PSP)
Sometimes when playing a video game you can’t help but wonder if the creative team would have rather been working in a different industry. Looking at the characters in Death Jr. and the brief glimmers of personality given to them in the opening cutscene, it seems like they were creating a world more appropriate for a T.V. movie or cartoon series. Death Jr. is about a group of unusual grade-schoolers on a fateful school trip, each one looking like they’re meant to evoke the style of Psychonauts or something from Tim Burton’s catalogue. In my opinion, they feel a bit more like characters from the cartoon Casper’s Scare School if they had a bit more room to be gross.
They aren’t really a bad bunch even though they’re given hardly anything to do, with characters like Stigmartha (a girl with holes in her hands) and Dead Guppy (an actual dead guppy that everyone treats as if it has a personality) moving the game away from the usual “take horror movie monsters and turn them into kids” approach you might have expected. The inciting incident that pulls us away from the only real moment these characters interact is when Death Jr. slices open a Pandora’s Box… or, well, a box that your friend Pandora wanted open, and unleashes a group of demons that kidnap all of Death Jr.’s pals save the conjoined genius twins Smith and Weston. Using your scythe and the guns provided by the twins, you take off to try and claim the scattered minds of your friends by going through areas that seem nominally connected to them but in the loosest ways. Sure, the neighborhood where they live and the school they go to are connected to whichever friend you’re trying to help in those stages, but it feels like a wasted opportunity. Even Dead Guppy’s favorite theme park Meat World, despite one of the more interesting level themes, is only loosely tied to him. Basing the stages around the mindset and concept of the characters you’re saving would certainly give us more imaginative and unique levels to explore. Every level is corrupted by the demonic forces of Moloch though, so things aren’t just straightforward despite being set in mostly pedestrian locations.
Death Jr., given the fairly cute nickname DJ for short, mostly remains quiet through the course of the game, but there are voiceless thoughts from the son of Death that appear on the top of the screen to give him a bit more personality. It’s mostly there to give you hints about where to go or what’s going on, but it was a better touch than just leaving him completely silent. The game is an action-platformer, and while the platforming is certainly the secondary aspect to it, it still feels important to mention due to how it comes up during gameplay. DJ is mostly equipped to deal with what is before him, perhaps overly so at times, but the game will put out little jumping challenges every now and then that show that despite seeming to be competently designed at first, most of the game’s important mechanics are just the slightest bit too sloppy to be fully enjoyed. Jumping, despite not being the most important skill, has a few quirks that crop up at unexpected times to drag down the experience. The first issue with it has to be that unless you’re starting from a complete standstill, every jump has some built in momentum to force the jump forward a set amount, making precise landings a bit annoying to execute. Death Jr. also has a few special jumps like a backflip for extra height and the ability to hook his scythe on a ledge to leap up onto it, and while these work fine most the time, there will be certain moments where it just seems to refuse to cooperate. Since the game likes putting damaging floors beneath its platforming challenges, you can be punished for the moments that the platforming suddenly starts failing you, meaning these occasional failures stand out despite not being quite as common as they could have been.
The camera also contributes to the platforming issues, mostly because its just a slight bit too rigid, especially if you have your guns out. A brief wrestle with the camera is all it takes to get things back to normal, but it happens more than the platforming issues and bogs down some otherwise decent shooting. While you might think the scythe is the son of Death’s most important tool, DJ’s weapon of choice would have to be the dual pistols he starts off with, two infinite ammo guns of surprising effectiveness. Most any enemy in the game can be taken down with a bit of persistence with the pistols, but there are a few more options added to your arsenal as the game progresses. Most of these (save, surprisingly, the shotgun) will make short work of any foe and thus have their ammo limited, but they work well if you are dealing with large or pesky demons. A bit of time spent spraying your foes with a full ammo flamethrower or electric coil will guarantee you victory, and DJ usually does a good job aiming at things that can be shot. The game even introduces a cute twist on your typical grenade, DJ unleashing hamsters with C4 strapped to them to run towards enemies before exploding. A lock-on exists if you want to hit a specific target, but both automatic aiming and locking on seem to struggle with bats and crowds and the camera can sometimes get out of your control, making the third-person shooting a bit weaker than it should have been. If things do get in too close, that’s when you use your scythe, but you also have a back-up in the form of an attack that will slowdown time and damage every enemy around you.
All in all, the basic elements elements in Death Jr. are a bit sloppy but not terrible by any means, but the execution hurts them a little bit. While the combat is serviceable, too much emphasis is placed on it, with giant gates preventing your progress until you’ve collected the souls of enough enemies. Most challenges are just arrangements of enemies for you to shoot down which, while varied, just can’t sustain how much the game uses them. The bosses, what could have been the game’s chance to explore more interesting approaches to battle, mostly just drag on, their gimmicks quick to figure out but with the execution and damage-dealing taking too long in most cases. You won’t have to worry about death too much at least so repeating levels isn’t likely, with DJ starting off with four lives per stage, able to collect more along the way, and having a health bar that the game is happy to refill with common health pick-ups and an easily unlockable shield skill. One of the weirder things about this game though is that there is a post-level grading system that wants you to not only kill everything for a perfect grade, but also destroy a bunch of objects in the environment while keeping a combo going. Since there is usually over a hundred objects and bad guys per stage, it would require special attention to have a hope of pleasing the report card. The game already scattered upgrades for your abilities around to make exploring interesting, but trying to destroy all objects and kill all monsters while also maintaining a combo streak would make the game incredibly slow and tedious, so it’s best for your mental health that you just ignore that report card after beating a level.
THE VERDICT: Even though my suspicion that the creators would rather make a show came from the beginning cutscene of Death Jr., the game itself certainly feels like it wasted the cute concepts behind the cast. A short animated series could put these characters in their proper element, but here, they feel stuck with a functional but flawed third person shooter. Most things in this game are decent enough until the execution abruptly fails, with the platforming, camera, and shooting all having moments where they just don’t seem to want to cooperate.
And so, I give Death Jr. for the PSP…
A BAD rating. Death Jr. is a ride on a bumpy road. Things can go smoothly for most of it, but the abrupt bumps hurt the experience so much that you wouldn’t want to go down that road again. Minor annoyances crop up too often in Death Jr., and the overly common but okay combat mixed with a nice but underutilized style certainly won’t be rescuing it from its spot below mediocrity. If it had embraced the creative spark found in its characters with more interesting level design and enemy challenges, Death Jr. would at least have the style needed to sustain its slower moments, but polishing the platforming and camera would also be a necessity to make it an enjoyable experience overall.
Death Jr. is a surprisingly unrefined experience for a game that was pushed as the PSP’s first big title. Apparently the game went on to have a well-loved graphic novel series, so the one promising part of this game might have been done better in print media. However, with unrealized style and subpar substance, Death Jr.’s game is best put to rest.