Kwaidan ～Azuma manor story～

short and sweet, the only thing i can complain its finding the numbers for the safe and the move/turn speed its a bit too slow

(TLDR: Weird interface, but a very good fixed camera adventure) Mostly created by a single developer (Gudou Taguchi), Kwaidan: Azuma Manor Story is impressive for a number of reasons. The retro look is impressive - recalling PS1, or pre-PS1 Japanese games (think the YS series). The professionally designed cutscenes are impressive, and the efforts towards a complex combat system are impressive (though the outcome is not exactly fluid). The bestiary is impressive, and the game narrative is well developed, full of character and detail about the setting, with a nice twist at the end - very impressive! But most impressive of all is- -the utterly insane player interface and hud choices. Reader, this sh♥t is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s. The hud covers the screen with two pillars (okay, fine if you're doing 4:3) and then covers MORE with a permanently displayed inventory and health bar. Why? WHY? And then, in order to interact with the world (look, use, etc), one has to use the right stick or mouse to move a cursor around the screen and literally click on the objects. And the player character won't oblige you in the slightest - if you happen to click on something that's just outside of t…

Terrible, especially for the asking price. This game is a whole bunch of Jank, which you can forgive to some extend because of it's old school getup, obviously. While most of it is "manageable" and I basically tolerated it because of the unique concept, the final boss is such a damn jankfest, combined with every bad design choice ever made in gaming history, that it finally put that last nail in the coffin for this game. It's not charming jank, it's just horrible design nonsense with the same three enemies spammed everywhere, mixing it up only rarely with two, iirc, other ones. (One of them being the big stone tablet you see in the store page. The control scheme is terrible enough, but some attacks you take hits from even if you block which is like "why"? It feels terrible, do not be fooled by the supposed old school charm of this game.

I'll start off with the things I do not like about this game, so you'll know what to look out for if you're interested in trying it. First of all, enemies respawn way too frequently, and their animation for doing so is so quick that they can spawn on top of you and hit you immediately. Second thing is that some areas, especially the last area of the game, has way too many enemies at once, making you need to counteract each one almost perfectly within the span of seconds. Last thing is the rarity of health items toward the end, I was left limping around being able to survive only one hit, which meant I had to restart multiple times and avoid enemies perfectly to even get any progress. It really made me not want to play that end section at all, it wasn't fun to die so often and have to time everything perfectly. Also what's up with the two proficiency achievements? From what I've heard you have to finish the entire game without saving once and never getting hit. Yeah it sure lives up to the name of full proficiency, but what was the thought process behind making it that difficult? Now that those things are out of the way I'll actually talk about what I do like. Kwaidan obviously tak…

Pretty boring gameplay and story wouldnt recommend this game to anyone.

It's a shame this game hasn't gotten more attention. A solid take on survival horror that has a unique retro presentation. I originally played it when it came out and still remember it till today.