Fausseté Amour

The Good
The game has a pretty epic opening, just asking you to get started. When you do, the intro sequence is not just graphical and narrated, but showing exactly what you'll be up against from stage to stage. Music is a mixed bag of jelly babies with heavy metal, pop, jazz and classical tunes, which is unusual but welcoming in a fantasy game. Graphics are rich and colourful enough to take in and there it comes as a surprise that the armour Koruku wears doesn't cover every inch of her body, nothing eyebrow raising, but it's there.

Gameplay is simple and straightforward. Koruku can do a lot in platforming, including multidirection attacks, swinging and latching on to platforms, spin attacks and flailing attacks with projectiles. You can't go wrong very easily. So many of those mechanics almost allude to other games such as the armour shedding being like Ghosts n' Goblins and the grappling chain akin to Bionic Commando. Difficulty is so fair, that even the bosses can be defeated in a short amount of time.

The Bad
While the cutscenes are somewhat entertaining to watch, they look a little rough and unrefined with a mixture of coloured outlines and black outlines, both inconsistent and making the game look a little unfinished, as if done in a hurry. Also the character faces have only a few frames of animation, but no variety of facial expressions. Not to mention that there is a lack of parallax background scrolling. This is the kind of pixely art style you would expect from the last decade on a PC-88 and not a CD-based game. And while audio is plentiful, there's no subtitles as an option, so you might miss what is being said if you're not fluent in Japanese.

The Bottom Line
The game is easy on players of all ages and great to play from start to end. However it doesn't really deliver enough to make it re-playworthy. There might enough content in this came to make it worth turning into an hour long anime film, but this game is too overlooked and obscured to get that kind of special attention. If you want to play something that is different from any franchise and series, this is an okay time killer, but as nothing new is going to come out of it I'd say that this title is only as good as it gets and not much better. Kudos to this one for what it brings on the table or should I say screen.