El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (PS3)
Myths are common sources of inspiration in video games, especially when it comes to the more well known ones like Egyptian and Greek myth. However, despite having abundant potential, Christian and Jewish myth haven’t often been tapped for the unique game experiences they could provide. Part of this might be that they are tied to widely believed religions still, but El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron decided to still design its experience around the apocryphal Book of Enoch… although that may be a little unfair to game director Sawaki Takeyasu’s amazingly creative vision that pretty much does whatever it feels like for the sake of visual spectacle.
Really, only a small bit of framework seems directly inspired by the Book of Enoch. Enoch himself is the main character, the scribe called down from his work in heaven to track down seven fallen angels who are sharing heaven’s knowledge with the humans of Earth. Things start off appropriately angelic and rooted in divine imagery, but very quickly you might notice that beneath the holy armor Enoch wears is a pair of jeans, and things only continue to spin off into their own wild mix of designs from there. Joining Enoch on his quest is Lucifel, an angel who dresses in completely casual modern clothes and routinely checks in with God on his cell phone despite this being clearly set far back in the past. This intrusion of modern objects can seem out of place at first, but as the player heads to the Tower of Babel to face the seven angels, quickly it becomes clear that the game is pretty much indulging in every art style it can cook up. Things begin in an almost blurry painted colorscape, but then you move to a stunning mix of red and black as the entrance of the Tower of Babel takes place over a city that is launching fireworks and singing the praises of the angels. Within the tower things hardly attempt to adhere to logic still, new environments taking you to places like what almost seems like a toy land for the goofy noodly Nephilim, an area that seems ripped straight from a science fiction utopia right down to the fact you fight on a motorcycle during that chapter, and even a place that seems inspired by the Japanese woodblock art of ukiyo-e. Not every location embraces creative visual styles so fully, sometimes only taking half-steps into a new look with something more angular or focused on a certain color palette instead, but the game has such an impressive level of variety throughout that the progression through it is almost worth it to see the wonderful experiments of the art team.
The plot can almost be incoherent at times as it happily flits from idea to idea, rarely taking the time to explain certain aspects of the heavenly order of things. However, there are still plenty of interesting turns taken, especially as the game embraces its same creativity in giving boss characters unique personalities and battle styles. One boss fight has the angel dancing to cover the screen as you slay his background dancers and another involves taking on a positively enormous fire Nephilim that actually manages to make their silly designs somewhat menacing. Unfortunately, there is one flaw to the angels you face. Despite having incredibly interesting domains with diverse art styles that the PS3 can make positively gorgeous to behold… the angel battles take you to often plain environments and their base designs are rather boring black cycloptic armors. Over the course of the game you’ll have many of these similar angel battles that can interrupt at odd points during exploration. The rules of these almost random encounters are strange as well, as they can end the moment you get hit or might be lengthy enough for you to win the exchange, the final battle with that particular angel made easier if you can win the abrupt skirmishes with them. Thankfully, despite every angel having similar starting battle phases, once you’ve torn away that armor they will take on new forms that make for both more interesting character designs and more unique boss battles, because before, even with each armored angel packing a few unique skills, they were mostly identical in approach on your part, further making them annoying to encounter.
Despite the flaw in the angels’ first forms, the more unique bosses and the second forms of the angels do make these some of the more interesting moments of play, but that’s mostly because El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron has a clear priority towards its marvelous visual design. The gameplay has some decent concepts and isn’t grating by any means, but it settles into its design early on and doesn’t really iterate on it enough to keep the play fresh. There is a creative intersection of style and gameplay in the way your health is displayed though, Enoch’s armor breaking away to represent his deteriorating condition, although it is a bit funny that being near death has him shirtless and down to just his denim jeans. Recovery is often handled by finding certain pick-ups, but you do have the means to dodge attacks well if you can anticipate the timing correctly, meaning that low health isn’t ever a death sentence.
Most of the combat occurs in a 3D space where Enoch will be locked into a circular area with his foes. Basic enemy design tends to follow the same formulas as the game progresses, the same batch of three foes getting upgraded to be smarter and tougher and the breaks away from those designs being either too small to really notice or ending up being area specific foes who won’t crop up enough. This does mean the game tries to keep its enemies competent though, so the fights do require you to remain attentive and involved, especially since your own weapons come from your foes. There are three different weapons Enoch can wield on his journey, each one having a distinctly different feel to them. The Arch is the fastest and most reliable, it being a blade shaped almost like a large curved hack saw. Joining it are The Gale, a projectile focused weapon that can be fired rapidly but needs time to pulls back its pieces after firing, and The Veil, a shield-like weapon that delivers slow heavy strikes. There is only one attack button to worry about, but the way you time its presses and mix in jumps can determine which attacks are executed. It’s a limited system that can be intuitively learned despite its lack of breadth, but it mostly comes up short because of how the game handles your weapon choices.
Every enemy and boss has a specific weakness to one weapon, that weakness sometimes shifting around during the fight. There’s a rare power-up that lets you see weaknesses, but otherwise you’re left to guess and since there are no health bars, the feedback for picking the right weapon for a situation is just a shorter fight. You can beat many foes with a weapon that isn’t super effective, although a few bosses outright deflect the wrong ones, but you still can’t just switch between your three options as you please. The most common way to get them is to knock an enemy into a vulnerable state where you can steal their weapon, but you can also get them from special orbs that do appear for the fights that are more reliant on weaknesses to overcome. Your weapon can get destroyed though, as well as needing periodic purifying to clear away the taint it gets from hitting your unholy enemies, but purification is a single button press that doesn’t require any strategy. Other than a hyper mode to up your damage and more obvious options like guarding, your battles will mostly involve just whaling away with your current weapon in basic combos, purifying as necessary and dodging when a foe winds up an attack. It works as an unobtrusive hack-and-slash design that’s easy enough to engage with, but it does leave something to be desired since it seems stagnant compared to the constantly changing visual styles and environments.
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron doesn’t wholly rely on the combat though to carry the gameplay. There are plenty of areas where platforming can be just as important. Making progress through the main line of action will require some skillful platforming and minor problem solving, but going for optional collectibles and doing the bonus areas to find Ishtar’s Bones for a subplot require it to be done with more finesse and speed. The real areas that put them to the test are the 2D segments though, things locking into a side-scrolling perspective as Enoch now faces areas designed to not only look unique but also provide most of their challenge through timing jumps right or figuring out the way to move forward in a dangerous area. There are still enemies here, but they are often weak, more like hazards to jumping properly than foes you need to worry about fighting in a real battle. Some of these areas are more straightforward, meant to be looked at rather than having their unique platforms serve as challenging platforms, but it is an appreciated diversion that gets used to good effect at certain points along the way, helping to ease up some of the combat’s waning appeal. Other shifts in gameplay like the motorcycle section do the same, these distractions keeping things from growing truly dull so that you can better enjoy the cavalcade of bizarre and wondrous sights the journey has in store for you.
THE VERDICT: El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron may not play the best, but this surreal twist on the Book of Enoch certainly finds most of its enjoyment from seeing just how absurd and gorgeous the worlds and characters can get. While sometimes being so indulgent in its glorious embrace of style that its plot can become hard to follow, its strangeness is only fed by the weird reinterpretation of Judaic myth. It’s certainly a game to be played for the sights rather than the action though, the hack and slash combat gradually losing its luster despite the platforming segments that break it up with their decently challenging designs. Appreciated as art it might be one of the best looking games on PS3 for its many style deviations, but the gameplay surrounding those visuals struggles to carry its weight enough to make it the great game it deserves to be.
And so, I give El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron could have been much better if it had been simply a tour of some amazing and creative designs, the art team certainly putting in a fantastic level of work to make this game really serve as a showcase of artistic variety. However, the gameplay that is meant to carry you from one area to another is much simpler by comparison, very little thought put into it save for some of the boss battles, and even those can get repetitive or seem plain next to the world they inhabit that is constantly shifting things up to inspire awe. Much of the play is simply serviceable, and too much serviceable play soon begins to stale. The aesthetic continues to breathe life into the experiences as the game goes on though, but it also leads to some styles lasting too long, the player wanting to see something new but still having to push through familiar foes for too long to let style completely carry the experience.
At the expense of the experience’s quality, El Shaddai: Ascension of Metatron ensures its appearance and concepts are top notch. There are so many interesting locations to look at with art styles that could carry entire games if embraced fully, but here they are just part of a gorgeous tapestry of shifting visuals. The way one experiences art can be just as important as the design of it though, and while you can push through it all to have an overall positive experience, it is still held back by the basic combat design that is only barely kept from ruining things further by the excursions into different play styles. There are some games I’d recommend watching over playing, but really, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron would need to be cut down even then due to the abundance of gameplay moments between the spectacle, but at least it never dips into anything outright obnoxious that would prevent the work of Sawaki Takeyasu’s creative team from shining.