Game:

Inuyasha (2001)

Duration: 24:10

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InuYasha: Fūun Emaki is an adventure/action game based on Rumiko Takahashi's popular anime and manga of the same name, with dialogues and character interactions playing a heavy focus and action being a secondary element. The story takes place after InuYasha, Kagome, Sango, Miroku, and Shippo already meet and begins with the characters meeting Koga and his wolf tribe, and continues to gloss over the trials and tribulations the characters face as they grow closer as a team while collecting the Shikon Jewel Shards.

The game is very simple in design; characters investigate different areas like they would in the anime. You can either go where you're supposed to and speed up the pace of the game or go to other areas to fight enemies or find secrets; you have little to no control or ability to navigate during these segments barring some ocassional decision-making -- everything is linear and happens automatically. As such, you'll be doing a lot of reading.

Battles are fought in various locales and is the only time you have direct control over what your character(s) do, as you'll control them in battle like you would in an action game, which is meant to break up the mostly non-interactive segments. You will control InuYasha directly, but you can summon various other characters to issue special attacks or perform your own. Special attacks have their own hit percentage, priority, and range of effect. For example, Kagome's sacred arrow is weak, but hits all enemies on the screen, but has lower accuracy than Kirara's fire breath which hits a single target in a linear path.

InuYasha gains experience and can level up different parameters when he increases in levels to make future battles easier. Ordinarily, once you explore an area, you can't go back to it unless you do more story-related events, but you can fight as much as you want at red training spots on the map. This is cool if you like to grind, but it's not really necessary and battles get quite repetitive.

The main draw of the game is the "Multiple Perspective" system. At many points in the game, you'll be allowed to view a particular scene from various perspectives. For instance, if you want the Koga chapter to go by faster, you can view the events from Kagome's perspective (remember, at this point, she is mainly held captive and can't do much). However, you can view it from InuYasha's perspective as well as Miroku, Sango, and Shippo's too. Even if you're seeing the same scene, the nuances in the dialogue will differ depending on who takes charge of the scene, which is meant to entice hardcore fans of the anime and manga as well as generate replayability.

While all of this is fine and good and the game looks and sounds pretty nice for a SC/WSC game, it's frankly a little... boring. Most fights can be won with some well-placed button mashing and the game still has all the "KAGOME!!!" and "INUYASHA!!!" back and forth screaming you've come to know and love (or hate) with a fairly slow-progressing story. As such, it's true to the source material and a decent game, but is recomended for fans of the franchise; I don't see it pulling you in if you aren't already a fan.

This is a video of some of the game. Enjoy.