KUON - Nitro Rad

[Music] i draw red [Music] the ps2 easily has one of the best libraries of horror games you really get a little bit of everything on this thing so many different flavors on that vast spectrum of the horror genre he got some of the best the more action-y side of it and the very best of the psychological side of it whether you're into japanese curses victorian castles cultist ghost towns or haunted moon colonies the playstation 2 was bound to have something up that spooky alley of yours it was a golden age for horror games everybody was making them konami koei tecmo capcom was making more than ever i mean hell nintendo even published a horror game around this time and by then fromsoft's been dabbling with spooky settings for a number of years now the haunting aesthetics they've conjured for the more well-known games like dark souls and bloodborne they trickle all the way back to from's early days on ps1 with games like kingsfield and shadow tower but most notably with the fantastic echo knight series okay well the first two are fantastic there's wicked puzzles decently scary moments and a charming cast of characters that'll have you feeling some fuzzy feelings the third game does a really good job of ramping up that sense of mystery and the heavy themes it explores does make it a genuinely meaningful experience but it's got so many daunting little problems that actually finishing it and getting said experience is such a pain in the ass but overall i'd say so far i've had a pretty cool experience exploring the world of fromsoft's old horror games and that may or may not be about to change because we have one more from soft ps2 horror game to take a look at and that is kuan a more traditional survival horror game that ditches the first person exploration in favor of the fixed angle style that was commonplace in many of its contemporaries this is actually kind of the end of a long journey for me so when i first started this channel i knew i wanted to talk about all the silent hills all the sirens every fatal frame and clock tower i wanted to talk about all the echo night games and haunting ground and eternal darkness and rule of rose and lastly kuan this was the big lineup of old school survival horror games that really grabbed me when i was first getting into the genre as a teenager with the silent hill series but unfortunately back then i only really got to briefly dip my toes in each of them once each but as time went on i remained curious i wanted to learn so much more about all of those games so i knew when i made this channel that would be one of the main goals of it was to track down all of those games and review everyone and we're finally at the end of it and i cannot believe that it boggles my mind knowing that i've been doing this long enough to have gone through every single one of these now and uh yeah i guess now we're facing the end of that tunnel with one last terrifying treat would you believe me if i told you it was from the same dude who made the adventures of cookies and cream had sushi taniguchi was the mastermind behind these games unlike the echo night series which were led by others tanaguchi began at fromsoft as a 3d modeler contributing to titles like evergrace the first armored core game and the before mentioned shadow tower but he would later rise to the role of producer with cookies and cream being his first major project i guess maybe he wanted to start with something silly fun and simple and uh yeah that's precisely what this is a silly and fun little platformer you control each character with each different side of the controller which is uh kind of cool it even has co-op options so you can team up with a friend and work together to complete each stage as fast as possible he would later go on to produce the lost kingdoms games this uh duology of rpgs for the gamecube you'd attack by summoning monsters using these spell cards i thought it was going to be something like bat and kayatos all like turn based and strategic and whatnot but no it's actually more of an action game you'll walk around freely and attack in real time and as for his next game well that takes us to kuan a japanese horror game that reviewed poorly sold poorly and like many of its ps2 horror cousins vanished into obscurity becoming incredibly rare and expensive as hell i am incredibly lucky to have a copy of this thing because it is one of the hardest to find and most outrageously overpriced games on the console yeah even more than rule of rose dude like this thing goes for a thousand canadian on ebay easy this isn't even the real case this is a reproduction a really nice one at that but i mean no manual either dude like i'm lucky enough just to have the disc i had this donated to me a couple years ago by a viewer named raven and uh the angry letter it came with uh terrified me as much as i found it funny oh no this isn't gonna be a repeat of echo night beyond is it or i don't know maybe it'll be a completely different kind of terrible well even if i do end up suffering through it i'm still incredibly thankful for the donation i mean you'll literally save me a thousand freaking dollars dude that's wicked awesome but uh yeah i'm also more interested in just breaking this thing down and learning about it than i am whether or not it's fun i guess so yeah let's shut the hell up and figure out what this freaking kuwan game is all about before we get to the title screen kuan first treats us to a cg introduction we follow a man searching the halls of a spooky manor but his investigation is soon cut short after he's murdered by a spooky lady with long black hair she drags his body all the way to this room where these two twin children are playing they then aid the woman and dumping his body into a chest before jumping on in herself well looks like we got another nefarious japanese ritual on her hands and title screen oh wow the artwork is gorgeous here oh she blinks too that's creepy one thing that's really cool about this title screen is that each time you come back to it it'll be a different picture there seems to be about three different poses they'll cycle through each time you load it again it's a really cool detail okay so after we begin uh why is it not loading hello okay we'll restart i guess oh no what do you mean no it's not booting anymore i mean i guess the disc is in kind of bad shape but no i literally just had it running one thousand dollar game and just like that stops working well that's what backups are for i wasn't taking any chances with this one dude i mean a video game preservation's a freaking joke right now the only legal way you can play a lot of games like this right now is by paying an absurd amount of money for a disc that lo and behold probably doesn't even freaking work anymore physical media ages slowly but it does age in 200 years every disc i own and every disc you own it won't work anymore so think about that if we don't want software like this to get lost to time backing it up when the publishers don't give us proper access to it is unfortunately kind of a necessity i also usually try to play the most authentic version of the game just for the video's sake but unfortunately this is one of those rare cases it is still running off a real ps2 though so i don't imagine i'll experience any foreign quirks or bugs or anything that wasn't present in the official version so we should be good okay let's start for real this time we're first asked to choose between one of two characters each one follows a unique story arc that'll intersect with the other one a couple of times as sort of like resident evil 2. here we have the yin phase and the yang phase for the in phase we play as utski a young woman who receives a letter from her father explaining that he was hired by the lord of the manor to cleanse the area of curses though her father believed him to be overreacting and decides to play along soon after utsuki goes to the manor to look for her father with her sister kureha do you really think father is here wait do they do their mouths just not move when they talk what happened you need to be careful yeah they really just don't move oh that's weird i guess a lot of front soft games have done this but it usually doesn't stick out this bad you know like i i could suspend my disbelief when i was talking like a dark souls nbc that sticks to like a wide camera angle but when you're going for this cinematic approach and you have all these angles that like really get in there and show off all the detail it it then just really feels like something's missing i'm sure it's just a budget thing it usually is so i'm not going to give them too much health for it but i'm just saying it does feel really weird pursuing this kind of direction with those compromises anyway after hesitating utski is egged on by kureha to explore the manner for their father they're soon separated and utsuki is left to fend for herself as she searches the manner for her family yang feis on the other hand follows sakuya one of the many exorcists utsuki's father brought along to help search and cleanse the manor including her older brother dorio and this guy guarding the rear would be too dangerous for you for me yeah all right as the two explore the manor they'll uncover an ancient ritual involving the manor's two mulberry trees the rebirthing process of the resident silkworms the chest filled with the silk litter the manor and a cliche pair of evil twins run around and sing their spooky songs you will die for that voice acting can be really cheesy in this game but overall it's usually competent enough what are you doing here i'm looking for my father the gameplay across these two characters is more or less identical and it is that old school survival horror goodness the fixed angles that clunky combat the gathering of supplies and key items and of course a droning atmosphere full of darkness and dread god i miss when horror games are like this i wish every single one these days didn't have to have the over-the-shoulder camera but i don't know i guess this style usually does come with a couple of fumbles that minor character jitter when the camera changes that's present in many of these types of games is obviously present here too with the standard keep going the way you're not holding anymore and then readjust method of mitigating it eternal darkness is pretty good for this since it had a camera system that focused more on movement and the hard cuts but i still think fatal frame is the series that has the best solution to it making the sprint button also a go forward button so you combine the more natural control scheme with that one element of tank controls that actually fix this thing kuwan unfortunately doesn't do either of those things you do have the option of tank controls though but as much as they do sort of fix this issue let's be real they're way too clunky to be worth putting up with just to solve something this minor and these ones don't have strafe buttons like the silent hill game so even as somebody who does sometimes like tan controls i think i'll be going without them here i am so in love with these angles though you really can paint some incredible scenes with this sort of system and it also gives you very deliberate timing and pacing over the scares too and that's something kuwan does do fairly decently sometimes you'll catch a brief glimpse of something right when the angle changes but for every time kuwan does this well it also has a time where it does it poorly sometimes the game will take control away from you to do it showing it during a cut scene instead of in real time and i just have such a hard time getting scared when i'm not in control like that you know because like when you're walking around and you just see it it feels present like it's there and so are you and there's a sense that this thing can interact with you because you're occupying the same space and time as it but when they script it like this it feels really removed from the actual gameplay as if it happened in a vacuum even if you are standing in the same room if that makes sense but man these angles are so consistently good i love when it's peeking out from behind something almost like somebody's watching you through the bars in the web or when it's peering over a hanging corpse swaying in the foreground as you comb a cavern for supplies so instead of finding bullets for your pistol or film for your camera the kuwan has us collecting these spell cards that we can use to cast projectiles and summon monsters with really glad i checked the lost kingdoms for this video because wow this is definitely an idea they're reusing from that one that's entirely how the combat works in those two games using the cards to summon monsters either for a quick attack or as a general aid though while lost kingdoms had like a whole deck system kuan simplifies it into functioning just like ammo and other survival horror games you pick up 10 fireball cards okay cool you got 10 ammo for your fireball you currently have five spider cards okay you can summon five more spiders and then you gotta find more it's really just different types of attacks each with their own set of ammunition and i think that's really cool functionally it's kind of like what you'd usually expect from survival horror games but they found a really cool way to work it into the game's setting and story i mean i guess walking around with a freaking pistol would probably be kind of weird in this game a lot of times it will just boil down to keeping your distance and spamming a projectile though yeah real cool and fun gameplay going on right now but some of the attacks are really cool like a barrage of frozen spikes or these traps you put down that have a bunch of hands coming out of the ground to pull your enemies in the summons can be really helpful too the spiders are great to fall back on to keep my distance if i was low on projectiles and the puppets were great for distracting enemies as i got in some attacks but as much as i do love this whole combat system there's kind of this one thing here that completely ruins it all so let me start by painting a picture of how this usually goes so you have limited ammo and limited health right so it becomes this balance of risk versus consumption use your ammo but only when you need it you're going to want to risk your health doing the melee to save it when you can and that creates tenseness it's challenging and it has you making decisions over which sort of resource you're going to risk slash use a really big part of the fun here comes from rationing your supplies to survive because you know that's the whole point of these games to survive it's survival horror now what if i told you that at any point in time whenever you want you could just hold down a button to heal default for free you know it doesn't use any supplies whatsoever you can do this an unlimited amount of times whenever you want you'd probably think wow that would like probably like defeat the entire point of the combat wouldn't it right like like wouldn't it right like wouldn't it like wouldn't that just defeat the entire [ __ ] point why can i do this why can i hold down the r1 button and heal back to full health at any time i want why can i do this all those healing items you've been picking up the whole game no you don't need those why would you use a limited consumable when you could just banish demons and all your [Music] full health wow all these spells i'm collecting i'm probably going to be debating which ones would be best in certain scenarios oh oh no actually i don't really have to do any of that as long as there's just one enemy i can just spam melee tank the hits and then heal after you can do this every single time there's one guy by himself and if there is more than one enemy a lot of the time you can just leave the room to heal and then throw yourself at them over and over until you eventually win and the odd time you can't do that whether it's a boss fight or maybe your sandwich between a bunch of enemies well you'll have so much ammo and healing items saved from doing this that you'll be well off for any of the harder encounters anytime you can't do the heel move well yeah just keep using all your healing items now and just be invincible it removes all tenseness the enemy encounters could possibly freaking have it's also weirdly impossible to tell how much health you have left it doesn't say anything about it on any of the menus and i don't think there's a single change to any of your character's animations at all instead the game just does a motion blur effect whenever you're about to die so instead of making any tense decisions about your supplies and how much health you have left and oh maybe i should use this one or that one or save this one no you're just gonna heal whenever you see the blur so you have this overpowered healing move all of these healing items that you'll never use unless you're comfortably brute forcing larger encounters or boss fights and you have this op visual cue that tells you the precise moment to heal i boiled this [ __ ] down to a science in the first two hours of playing this thing after that the entire game was laughably easy so much for survival horror oh my god what a mess dude like they almost had a really good system here too like that whole card thing has a lot of potential but it's just that healing move it trivializes the entire freaking game they should have either nerfed it like limiting it in some sort of way or they should have just gotten rid of it entirely and they also need a more nuanced way to tell you when your health is low not this like op visual cue that makes sure you make the 100 optimal health decision every single time you know they also try to make irration saving items just like resident evil games do with ink ribbons i hear you get these little vessels that you use for these cleansing rituals it's also really cool how you even get to see it floating downstream after you use one oh my god again just fromsoft knocked it out of the park of the aesthetics here but like everything else they really do a lousy job with the actual rationing they give you a lot more than you really need here i mean at certain points i had more than i knew what to frickin do with how much did you guys really expect me to save and even if my inventory wasn't overflowing with these freaking things the enemy encounters are still such little a threat that it never really felt like the stakes were all that high to begin with that's the finisher animation and i thought a turtle darkness had a weak looking finisher well i guess utski's is a lot better but asaku is the exorcist here you'd think it'd be the other way around huh not really a fan of how fast that blood metal shows up i mean blood puddles are the way to communicate that the enemy has been finished off but you gotta have some sense of is it dead you know what i mean like you gotta stare at the body you know long enough to notice that blood slowly trickling out okay now it's dead but when the visuals communicate all that this quickly and efficiently it's just kind of like okay you're dead you're dead you don't really get that sort of feeling so like this whole mechanic of having to finish them off or they might get up it's just not as effective here as in most other games but i think kuan's biggest offense to the horror genre is easily the absolute abundance of jump scares why are there so freaking many of these and dude they're the most low effort jump scares you're ever gonna see in real life they don't even show a spooky face or a monster or nothing like that no you're just walking around and randomly out of nowhere for no reason the screen will just yeah it just flashes white with a loud sound effect yeah that's it and it happens so much they do it over and over and over and over and over stop it happens so much the game calls them tempests and there's some there's some ghost excuse why it happens it even sometimes spawns in ghosts but it's painfully ineffective as a method of scaring the player it just comes off as annoying as hell i guess i did have this one kind of neat scare i paused the game for a really long time and after coming back i unpaused it and oh it's kind of cheap but it's at least a little creative and that got me curious i had to see if there is more of these so i tried again and oh the curse let's do one more oh it's like trying to like trick me to think of the tv shut off or something that's cool as hell i had no idea this game did that sort of thing it's like some eternal darkness [ __ ] kuan's pretty hit and miss with its horror but i think it misses more often than it hits the enemy designs for instance they're usually not all that interesting 90 of them are just generic gakki and yamabito zombies which are about as basic as you can get when it comes to japanese horror monsters i guess some of the enemies are kind of freaky though like these victims of these bizarre cocoon rituals emerging as half-baked undead dragging their shells of silk behind them as they crawl towards you moaning in pain and crying for the sweet release of death there you go yeah they're easy as [ __ ] so they're not that scary the game's horror is easily at its best when it's coming from the atmosphere i mean this is a from soft game after all and if there's one thing they've always done really well it's building incredible game worlds and that just might be kuan's greatest strength you might feel like you got the sort of fix from the fatal frame games already but i think fromsoft brings a special flavor of dread to these types of environments the way the short-range light from your lantern closely carves through that thick darkness as the haunting ambience starts to trickle through with all these angles that to really show off how gorgeous these environments really are there is something kind of cozy about just walking through all these areas and soaking it all in if there is one thing i really took from this game honestly it was just simply walking around and experiencing the game's incredible environments now i did find it a little annoying remembering where i have and haven't been and where i need to go the game's map only marks long doors and obstructed pathways it does not mark doors you've already been through like other games usually do so you see that yeah i've been in there and i've been in there and there but it doesn't look like i've been in any of those places so a lot of times throughout the first phase before i really had like a good handle on the map i often found myself wasting time revisiting rooms i've already cleared however i did find the areas themselves to be pretty easy to navigate through i found each area stood out really well the attention to detail in all these rooms is really good it's really easy to remember which room is which because of it and all those unique camera angles help a lot too by the time i was playing yang phase i wasn't opening that map nearly as much so i guess it kind of balances out in the end if you've played any other horror games from around this time then you'll pretty much know what to expect from the exploration you'll search each room for a series of key items that open more rooms and with the occasional puzzle for good measure though while more inventive games make these keys a series of totally random objects that you have to use in like a weird or interesting crafty way kuan just kind of sticks to like key ass keys you know what i mean the doors are all sealed by like a magic spell or something so you have to find the corresponding sacred cloth to remove all seals of that kind but you know while that is in tune with the setting of the game you're really just getting a key to a door you get key a you can open every door eh and i find that a lot less interesting than the weird and obtuse wage it had to progress in a lot of other horror games of the time and i feel like you very well could have done that with a setting here like what if you needed to collect the ingredients that you've read about in a paper to prepare a sacred cloth and then you had to like make the connection yourself to put them in the chest just like the curse in the notes then i would have at least felt some connection to the game's world i would have felt like the lore was relevant to me in some sense but simply meeting the fundamental criteria of theming and draping it over that same old mechanic it doesn't feel like a ritual or a cool magic thing i'm doing it just feels like a coat of paint on a key and a door you will sometimes have to use a key item on something specific and this much i do think was done a little better i like that you have to actually select the item from your inventory manually so you do have to make the connection yourself instead of the game just grabbing it from your inventory for you because you interacted with the right thing while holding the right thing though unfortunately even these aren't all that interesting you're just kind of matching objects to their obvious counterparts and across the two campaigns most of these puzzles are all identical you're really just exploring the same spot but in a slightly different order with only a few moments unique to each character i guess their melee weapons are also different utsuki has a knife and sakia wields a japanese folding fan and they also collect slightly different spell cards too but overall i was a little disappointed to see just how little these two phases deferred you can also find better weapons along the way but unlike other survival horrors where many of the weapons feel very different from one another the weapons here are just identical reskins that simply do more damage with maybe like a fire effect which was something i also found kind of disappointing man the two major puzzles in the manor are kind of dumb both for different reasons this one i didn't even need the clue to solve it look it is so obvious what to do so i opened it early both times before even getting the instructions and the other one is incredibly obtuse it's not even difficult it's just man if you can't read the japanese characters here you better prepare for a long and patient game of match the pictures until you painstakingly get the combo to say with a piece of paper told you there's a couple of other clues that also look like they're related to this combo lock yet they don't seem to give any information that's really helpful here everything you need seems to be on this one so part of me kind of feels like this puzzle was maybe originally more complex in the japanese version and all that got lost in translation or maybe i'm just flat out missing something i don't know but dude like when i had to do this against sakia i did not even bother doing this all over again i just played back my game footage from the first run and just made it match what i had before and yeah the solution's even the same for both characters i don't know why they make you do this twice having the two characters easily serves the story a lot more than it does the gameplay so why don't we see if that's at least any good i'm gonna go over the whole thing real quick so uh here's a timestamp if you care about the spoilers but honestly it's not really like an amazing story or anything like a lot of these games usually have so i'm not really going to urge you to skip it this time but you know gotta have it there for the people that don't want to see it but yeah so at some point during utsuki's past she had an accident with her sister kudeha fell off a cliff which mortally injured her and utsuki got the blame for it she was only able to survive the fall because their father domen attempted to perform the kuan ritual according to legend entering a chest nine times with a silkworm will cure the disease or i guess in this case heal kureha we then hear reports from other people that disease has been spreading around here and people are vanishing whenever they hear the twin song at night when i hear that song i fear i'll be killed or worse as we progress through the game we'll learn that the ritual is a lot more nefarious thanutsky initially thought actually requiring nine human sacrifices to supposedly resurrect somebody the kureha is technically a walking corpse until the ritual is people completed the disease if they don't merge with other creatures they will all die as such a zombified kureha begins roaming the manor searching for more and more victims she can sacrifice and merge with it even turns out the newtsky's father invited the exorcists here to begin with just to be fodder for this ritual it's got something to do with the twin mulberry trees being reincarnated as this pair of evil twins long ago spikes were driven into these trees to seal away the twins but doman he knew he could use the twins to revive his daughter so he removed the spikes letting all hell break loose in the manor after utsuki falls victim to the curse and sakia fails to save her we then unlock a third character abe no seimei based on the real historical figure of the same name apparently his status as a mystical figure made him a very common character in a lot of japanese folklore this incarnation of him takes the form of a female onmyoji who arrives to put a stop to doman's evil plans doman's also based on the historical figure and there's actually a little bit of lore between these two and they're often depicted as rivals and stories and the game hints at that as well though they don't really explore it a whole lot here honestly this whole final chapter seems like a really big cheap deus ex machina move you know the two characters find themselves in dire straits but instead of persevering and fighting their way through and surviving the night they just cut to the cool anime hero to save the day instead same's got a long spear with really good melee range and she's got the most powerful summons in the entire game this phase isn't even an hour long either you just annihilate the [ __ ] out of some demons with your overpowered abilities and then it's a one-on-one final showdown with dolman which considering how freaking decked out we are with the most powerful spell cards we can get i it's it's really not very difficult now fully diseased from the curse utsuki drags doman's body to a wicker chest to complete the kuan ritual sami then goes over to destroy the chest arguing that we don't know what sort of thing is going to come out of it but sakia stops her she hasn't been outside the manor her father tricked her and we can't we can't let her die this ritual was never meant for human beings it was never even meant to bring life back from the dead the actual purpose of the kuan ritual was to rebirth silkworms which explains why previous people who attempted the ritual all became bizarre insect monsters instead of being healed of their disease so instead of kureha coming back to life utsuki and kureha are instead reborn as a child i don't know if it's supposed to be both of them together or also the victims of the sacrifice but there's a kid now sakia decides to take in the kind of utsuki kind of kireha kind of all the dead people child and they live happily ever after it's an okay plot the curse is kind of interesting and there's also some cool callbacks you can notice on a second playthrough but overall it's a pretty par for the core story about a japanese curse nothing the fatal frame series hasn't done better so it's okay i was happy to see that you do get to unlock some fun bonuses for beating the game such as starting the game with a maximum ammo for everything oh my god it's god mode getting overpowered as hell is always a really fun reward for surviving through the game but it's oh my god it feels so unearned here dude like you only get it for clearing normal and that was easy as hell to do they should have at least maybe beat hard mode to get it i was actually gonna try that harder difficulty just to see if it was actually any harder or not but why would we do that when we unlocked a fourth even harder difficulty i'm just gonna jump straight to that like how hard did this game possibly get okay well yeah it is a bit harder but you can still heal for free so most enemies still aren't much a threat at all as long as you mash out of those grabs you really only have to worry about direct hits you will get a lot less supplies in this mode you'll have a lot less spell cards to use than before but it's still not that hard because saving resources is still incredibly easy to do most enemies are so simple to evade even the harder ones and if you do want to take them out well the one-on-one encounters are still easy to stun lock and cheese with a healing move i found myself just running past most of the enemies this time and i never really realized until now just how bad they are at chasing you in this game anytime i needed an item from a room i'd literally just push past them all mashing the x button and it would usually work now the boss fights were the one thing i was worried about the one with the big monkey especially and yeah while they definitely are harder i still found them pretty manageable as long as you've saved up on items which is really easy to do you'll be totally good to spam your attacks and just heal whenever you see the blur and well that does it got through each campaign all over again on the so-called hardest difficulty i think it's safe to say that even crank the max kuwan doesn't even come close to offering the sort of survival challenge you'd really want to expect from these sorts of games silent hill 2's normal mode is harder than this you don't even get anything for beating it which also as we believe you wouldn't get anything for beating hard either no silly costumes for kuan sadly i hate to see it but what can you do and here i was hoping we'd get to run around as a skeleton or something you know fromsoft loves her skeletons there is also a nine hit mode where you can only get hit nine times throughout the entire game and beating that unlocks a one hit mode which is just ridiculous so i'm not even gonna bother if beating insanity mode didn't get me anything i couldn't imagine this would be any different and that just about covers everything okay well there is one last thing i do want to talk about and that is sukoroku so it's this mini-game is hidden in two halves you can find the board game pieces hidden in this room here during uski's story and you'll just find the board itself in plain sight during sakuras getting both of these unlocks sugaroku from the title screen it's a really cute little board game where you roll these two dice and then use each roll to decide which pieces you get to move forward and the first person with all their pieces to the other side wins don't let that one player in the back of the box lie to you you can actually plug in a second controller and play this with a friend it is kind of mostly luck but there's a little bit of strategy involved it's a really cool little bonus kind of like when you get a billiards game with yakuza and i think the presentation here like the rest of the game's menus and everything it is absolutely fantastic it is just really cozy and lovely also really thankful this is just a bonus and not like something the game forces you to play for hours just to beat the game like a certain other from soft game made me do yeah uh kuan's not a very good game but it is a pretty interesting game there's a lot of really cool things going for it like i love the atmosphere i love the map design and i particularly love the whole idea of like those spell cards being in place of like uh traditional survival horror weapons but oh man there's just so much of this game just completely falls flat like it almost feels like they were trying to recreate a lot of aspects from other popular survival horror games of the time like like silent hill and resident evil and stuff but it almost feels like they didn't quite understand why those ideas worked but with that said i do think kuwan can be a valuable experience for that reason if you are a really big fan of horror games like fatal frame and silent hill and resident evil and all that and you'd like to understand a little better why the things in those games work kuwan's an interesting experience because you run into all those usual little things but versions of them that don't quite connect so if you'd like to make a horror game someday at least somewhat in the style kuan's a shitty but comfortable experience that does a really good job of demonstrating how these things can be executed better and i think that's just as important understanding game design than just seeing things done well sometimes you gotta see things done not so well before you really understand why it worked in the first place if you're in the mood for a really good horror game then you can do better especially on ps2 man like this is the console that has all the good silent hill and fatal frame games you can do much better than kuan it's also not like economic beyond which talked a really meaningful story behind all of its problems kuwan stories just like okay though it's not nearly as frustrating or patience testing as echo night beyond so i guess it is more of a harmless venture for the curious and experienced whether you're into old school survival horror or you just want to explore the cool old weird catalogs from your favorite developers but regardless nobody should ever have to pay a thousand dollars to do that nobody should have to pay a thousand dollars for a video game at all you really should just be able to buy this on the digital storefront for five or ten bucks or something but unfortunately like many of these old horror games there's currently no legal way to play it at least not a realistic one the software only legally exists on rare aging discs that aren't gonna work forever i really miss the ps3 days where you could just buy a crap ton of ps1 and ps2 games on the psn store for five or ten bucks each why on earth were not still slowly expanding the libraries of that on ps4 and five is like the most befuddling [ __ ] to me and while i'm not allowed to condone piracy i can tap that sign and say that piracy is a service issue it's a train you can't stop so you may as well build it a proper railway you know what i mean you got to get these things up on a digital storefront already but i don't think that's ever going to happen and it really makes me kind of pissed off that i have to say that about half of these old horror games but you know i'm also not gonna pretend that people aren't just gonna resort to their one only obvious option giving me two thousand dollars no i'm joking looks way too cool on the shelf look at that spine look at that spine but no yeah it's all [ __ ] but like i don't know at least go on is not that worth playing but yeah that's a done deal that is every horror game i wanted to tackle when i first started this channel but don't worry that doesn't mean i'm done doing halloween videos i think i'm interested in a lot of other horror games along the way i mean i've already made videos about a lot of them but i also get a ton of comments always telling me about all sorts of weird and cool horror games so i don't think i'm ever going to be short on material i almost want to talk about ill bleed next year just because i rarely get a chance to talk about dreamcast stuff but i don't know i also really want to talk about the ecstatica duology just because who the hell talks about this these days they're both really weird and interesting and hilarious but regardless of what i go with i hope you guys will look forward to watching more halloween videos as the years go by so uh yeah thank you so much for watching i hope you guys all have a fantastic halloween and take care of yourselves welcome to the evil end slate i'm evil my turret and i'm here to be evil and [ __ ] i swear to god buddy you're gonna regret sticking around for this one i tell you your ears are gonna be ringing and rattling by the end of this one buddy was it was that scary i sincerely apologize for that

Channel: Nitro Rad

Views: 425,109

Keywords: nitro rad, review

Id: XAWxMYu847E

Length: 35min 3sec (2103 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021