NanoBreaker (PS2)

NanoBreaker, or possibly Nano Breaker depending on which source you ask, is an unusual blend. On the one hand we have Koji Igarashi as producer, the man who helped mold Castlevania: Symphony of the Night into a masterpiece seemingly a safe bet for a game that will play excellently. On the other hand, the story of NanoBreaker almost feels like a dry run for many of the ideas that would be featured in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and while that’s not the top example of a quality Metal Gear story, it is part of a Konami series beloved for its complex plots. A game pretty much needs to succeed either with gameplay or story to be good, and on its surface, it sounds like this could have been a case where both halves had a good chance of success, and yet NanoBreaker doesn’t feel thought out enough to deliver on such lofty expectations.

 

Taking a look at the story, the topics it covers are pretty similar to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance despite that game coming out eight years after this one. NanoBreaker involves the military use of cybernetically enhanced humans as weapons, the main character Jake known as a Genocide Hero for wiping out so much of the opposition. A more despicable cyborg of similar make, a bald man known as Keith who looks a bit like Revengeance’s Sundowner, ends up being Jake’s rival, the player facing him multiple times during the main story. The evolution of nanotechnology in the world of NanoBreaker has lead to it being used in most facets of every day life, but after being integrated into human biology, beings called Orgamechs form from human bodies, seemingly taking on any shape they wish from humanoid fighters to bug-like giants as they seize control of the island and intend to take their conquest global.

 

Examining concepts like humans as weapons and the evolution of nanotechnology is attempted but done rather poorly. Jake and Keith have no real reason to value human life differently from each other and are never really tempted by the other’s point of view, meaning they are mostly just living weapons who chose to be bad or good. Nanotechnology growing out of control can be said to at least be on display as you fight many monstrous machines bent on wiping out humanity, but besides the knowing exploitation of the nanomachine revolution by the bad guys and the good guys realizing they should not have pushed technology so far, it again feels like a surface level attempt to examine morality through science fiction concepts. The generally small amount of story is partly why it never digs in deep enough to do more than serve as the backbone for the adventure, but while it may be hard to get invested in this uninspired execution of its ideas, the concepts and plot beats are sound enough to string together the 3D hack and slash action that makes up most of the game.

Jake’s weapon of choice in NanoBreaker is the Plasma Blade, a weapon whose energy blade can shift into different shapes depending on how you string together your two attack options. Triangle is best thought of as the vertical strike and square for the horizontal slash, some enemies especially vulnerable to proper use of the right swing type. Chaining these together in different ways will lead to unique attacks, the blade able to change into things like a spear, scythe, and axe to gain range or power advantages. Across the game you get different level chips to unlock longer combos, and by holding R1 you can activate shift moves that further expand your combo options. The Capture maneuver allows you to pull enemies in close with the circle button, and you can build up energy in a fight to use Boosters that can provide bonuses like a guaranteed chance of an instant bloody kill after a capture attack, greater speed or defense, and special abilities like an area of effect explosion and attack orbs that rotate around your character. It’s definitely clear they wanted their combat system to have depth and succeeding in regular combat is much easier if you learn some of the simple combos, but most of its robust options feel wasted when you can fall back on the same combo strings to overcome most foes.

 

This is made all the more disappointing because of how much enemy variety there is in game. The nanomachines definitely got creative for choosing the forms they intend to kill humanity with. Some are humanoid with bladed limbs, others are dog-like and do high-speed charges. Others look mechanical like the droids that shoot from afar, but many are buglike such as the giant worms that block passages and the moths who lay explosive eggs. Some tougher foes get weirder with their designs like a large creature that can be split into hovering arms and scrambling legs, but they don’t demand much more of you than other enemies save running around more to avoid trouble. Your jump attacks are all shallow and don’t play into the combat system, guarding involves standing still and can leave you vulnerable instead, and dodge rolls must be executed from a standing position, so save for specific boss enemies or scenarios, running around and striking with short combos is often the better option. If you’re smart about it you can at least switch it up and use the simple attack options like full 360 degree slash to push enemies back or a stunning strike to the head to incapacitate a foe briefly, but complex maneuvers aren’t really worth the effort put into them most of the time. Your vertical attacks do seem to be the stronger of the two attack options though, so while you’re mowing through enemies who mostly go down with just a bit of consistent aggression, you at least should try and pick whether you think you can land a bunch of quick but weak horizontal slashes or you might have a chance the land the hard hitting vertical ones.

Regular enemies are a bit of a threat though, healing not too easy to come by. Save points are spaced enough that dying is just scary enough that you don’t get sloppy, and there are often checkpoints without saving before tougher boss fights. Outside of finding life boosters or entering a new area though, healing is mostly achieved by the game’s strange leveling up system, the player rewarded for how many gallons of blood they’ve drawn from the Orgamechs by unlocking upgrades at certain amounts. Some bosses can manage to be tense because healing isn’t so easy to come by and you can sometimes end up in one after enemies had a chance to chip away at your health bar, but the boss design isn’t too hot either. Again, concepts are all over the map from a reasonable design like spinning snail shells or a gorilla-like robot to strange ideas like a tentacled giant humanoid thing by the pier. Sadly, quite a few can be brute forced as long as you don’t give them a chance to strike, and others can be fairly easy once you realize the pattern of easy attacks and dodges you need to overcome their defenses. A few have fun ideas like the large flat tank that you need to climb aboard and avoid the onboard weapons as you gradually break them all off, and near the end of the game, the last few bosses are proper tests of avoiding damage, figuring out weaknesses, and responding to attacks properly. They’re a bit too late to bump up the general quality rating of the game’s boss fights, especially since your rival Keith never really feels as hard as he should be since he’s so easy to walk around. He is given a nearly guaranteed instant kill move in the final battle, but with the orbiting Booster activated you can disable that move and he’s back to being at about the same difficulty level as his previous skirmishes.

 

The fact shifting up your moves does have some value at least makes the plentiful fights a bit less dull than they could have been, but there definitely should have been more value to doing more complex combos or enemy types could have been mixed around more to make you consider how to approach the battle. However, the one place the game definitely outright fails are the platforming moments. Your jump is already rather awkward to control and yet it has moments where you need to make leaps over instant death drops or you need to jump properly at a specific time. The limitations of jumping and moving about work fine in the combat since it keeps you somewhat engaged in ground-level fighting, but the clunky jumping means you can sometimes barely undershoot or overshoot a platform, and having something like acid heavily drain your health because you were a little off feels like an unnecessary punishment. Retreading old areas at parts of the story can already be a touch confusing and facing similar enemies as before makes it less than exciting, but adding in some jumping challenges that fall short make it harder to appreciate the potential for the raw satisfaction of cutting a swathe through enemies who coat the walls with buckets of blood. Even if you can get into the violent empowerment of carving through Orgamechs despite its dull design, the breaks away from the basics are done too poorly to hold up their side of the experience.

THE VERDICT: NanoBreaker has quite a few ideas on what it wants to be but can’t figure out how to execute them. Its nanotechnology-focused plot says little and lacks emotional resonance while the hack and slash combat has a surprising amount of depth that isn’t very practical to integrate into battles that are either too straightforward or often rely on specific approaches with no room for such complex combos. Platforming is bothersome whenever it rears its clumsy head, but the main problem with NanoBreaker is it feels both the story and the combat are utilitarian, needing the other to carry the weight because they can’t pull off what the were aspiring to be. Some boss designs have their moments and the basic fights aren’t intolerable, but NanoBreaker still feels like a hodgepodge of half-formed ideas that can’t adequately support this forgettable experience.

 

And so, I give NanoBreaker for PlayStation 2…

A BAD rating. Even if you didn’t know about the pedigree of the game’s producer or didn’t have the better execution of its concepts embodied by Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, NanoBreaker still feels like a game that can’t quite execute its ideas. The living weapon angle for the hero and his rival feels like it wants to be important but it only touches on the most basic ideas about it, and the lack of a true emotional core or interesting characters makes the scenes hard to get invested in until the sudden and strange tone shift in the finale. The finale actually feels like it might have been thought up first as it has the best boss fights in terms of strategy and difficulty, but it also has enemy gauntlets and platforming challenges that stretch out that portion of the game instead of letting it revel in its successes. There are a few regular enemies who require different approaches to properly damage or more easily kill and this design approach could have lead to more interesting battles between the fights that exist just for visceral empowerment, but NanoBreaker seems to cook up a lot of forms for Orgamechs that all seem to die to the same few effective combos. Only the stiffness of the platforming and unearned punishment for failing during jumping challenges feels like it was a complete failure conceptually though, as everything else is mostly just dull because the inspiration went into the wrong parts of the game design.

 

NanoBreaker can’t be said to have an identity crisis because it clearly has ideas of what it wants to be, it just doesn’t deliver on them. It wants a sci-fi morality plot to back the action and it wants that action to have long flashy strings where the weapon keeps changing shape, but it doesn’t have the support in game to execute those artistic directions. Repetitive gameplay and a bland plot make NanoBreaker uninteresting to play even though its concepts rarely make the game an outright chore to play, but its stumbling points do come across more strongly because most of it blends together into an unfulfilling action game filled made up of half-baked ideas.