Erik's Favorite Things: Crimson Sea 2

If anybody ever accused the video game company Koei of anything, "not being willing to exploit anything for a long time" would not even be on a different piece of paper in the same room as the list.  Known for the Dynasty Warriors series and it's derivatives, the company figured out a formula and have not been shy in following it.

Now, I love the Samurai Warriors series more than the Dynasty Warriors series, but that might be my love for Japanese history (plus, female ninja Nene from the Samurai series will be in my next eleven fascinating female characters).  However, there is one tiny series of games made with the same formula that I love even more.  Keep in mind that this is despite the fact that, of the two games released, I've only played one.

It's that good.



I never played the first Crimson Sea.  It was strictly an Xbox exclusive, and I only owned a Playstation 2.  Looking at Metacritic, the game has a score of 78.  That's pretty good...though I remain suspicious since a lot of the high scores are from places I never heard of.  Will I ever play it?  Probably not.  I own the sequel, and it's only three points lower.  The sources are a bit more reliable, however.

When I picked up this game, I had little experience with distinctively "Japanese" games.  I played a lot of RPGs, and a lot of games from Japan, but this was one of the first then-"next-gen" games I played where I was marveling at the fact a character had blue hair and it wasn't because of a limited color scheme..  I was so naive then.

Now, if I see a game came out of Japan and it doesn't have weird hair, teenagers saving the world because adults are terrible at that sort of thing, or some kind of robot, I assume it is lying about its country of origin.


The story is pretty basic: in the future, aliens are killing everybody, they need to be stopped, only an elite soldier (or two) can defeat them.  The menacing alien race, in this instance, is called "The Menace."  Not great, but I've heard worse.  Apparently they came out of "nowhere" and started invading planets with humans on them.  Their primary way to breed appears to be injecting a "plug" into other creatures that transforms them into "Menace" as well.

Now, there's some other terms that get thrown around like "Vipa wave," "overdrive," "anti-wave," "neo-psionics," and other terms that normally make my eyes glaze over, but in this game they work because they're used in place of basic phrases and while a little effort is used to explain them ("the anti-wave cancels out the Vipa wave"), the game is willing to just throw up its arms, abandon the story, and let you just kill monsters for a while.

Besides, how can I hate a game that lets me use the word "archeomusiologist?"  That word is great.

There are two characters you can play as.  The male character, Sho, has a connection to the "Menace" in that they both use Vipa-whatever, and he was the playable character in the last game.  The new character, Feanay, is the wilder of the "anti-wave" and possibly the universe's last hope to wipe out the "Menace" once and for all.  Sho tends to be more heavy weapons and big attacks, whereas Feanay can either wield twin energy swords, fire homing rounds, or shoot lightning from a pistol.

Let me repeat that:  twin energy swords, homing rounds, and a lightning pistol.

Feanay is one of my favorite video game characters of all time.  Seriously, if I had to name a list of my top ten eleven video game characters, I'd have to omit her because it would have to be "top ten eleven characters who aren't Feanay."

In case anybody is wondering, the top eleven female characters list I made before is also, in my head, amended with "who aren't Feanay" at the end of it.

There are other memorable characters, including some soldiers Sho knew before, a princess/leader woman who has a particular chemistry with Sho, and your boss, Live-D.

Live-D is the one on the right.  You can guess what the "D" stands for.

The game takes you to multiple worlds, gives you numerous missions on each to solve, and has some pretty huge boss fights (for the PS2 days before God of War ruined everything) to entertain you with.  I will freely admit, in a world where so many games seem to reward combos I can never learn, spinning Feanay's twin swords around and getting two "hits" per swing while wading into a flood of enemies gave me some of the highest combos I ever reached (it's been a while, but I think I got close or over 300 hits at one point...I could be off, though).

The storyline is much, much more "epic" than any of the "Warriors" series, in my opinion.  Sure, uniting a kingdom is important, but unless I know the history of each battle, all I know is "now we fight guys in a field" and "now we fight people near water."  In Crimson Sea 2 you have space stations, mine systems, fire planets, liquid planets...each environment looks distinctively unique and gives you a better since of how spread out the war you're fighting is, something that was missing in particular from Samurai Warriors since, for all I knew, those locations were just down the road from each other.

Even when my PS2 eventually breaks, I'll probably still hold onto my copy of the game.  There were no moments I got too frustrated, and many, many moments where i was just having unbridled glee wading through waves of foes.  I could tell that my skill was increasing as the difficulty level did what most games by Koei do, which is to start you on a proverbial bunny slope before they shove you off a cliff with a wave and "good luck!"

It's a game that I recommend everyone try to hunt down and play, as it's definitely one of my absolute favorites of all time.