In Shadow of Memories, you play Eike, a young man with implausibly long legs who, over the course of the game, finds himself repeatedly getting murdered in a variety of increasingly convoluted ways.
#SHADOW OF MEMORIES PS2#
So I deliberately chose a game I knew absolutely nothing about as my first PS2 game, then sat down to play it and found myself utterly entranced by something quite unlike anything I’d ever played before.Ĭombining elements of traditional adventure games, visual novels and even open-world exploration, Shadow of Memories remains a highly noteworthy title in the PS2’s library, and well worth exploring even today. I’d wanted a PS2 for a while, but even back then, I felt like I didn’t want to pick up a game that I felt I already knew all about from reading about it in magazines. But this is not the way stories should be told.The first game I ever played on the PlayStation 2 was Konami’s Shadow of Memories, also known as Shadow of Destiny in the States. I ended up reading a book in order to stem the boredom.Īt least Konami have done a good job of converting it, with high resolutions and mouse support. It's not as though much happens in the cut-scenes either. Would you sit through a pompous, five-hour anime movie? No, you wouldn't. The main criticism SoM got from PS2 reviewers is that it's too short (despite the several endings, which depend on a couple of those dialogue options). You're supposed to just sit back and watch. There aren't more than a handful of dialogue options in the whole thing. The main character is straight out of a Japanese Mills and Boon novel, and the quality of the narrative isn't far off one either. There are as many as five objects to pick up during the course of the 'game', their use always obvious to the point of utter imbecility.
of course) and then going back to the present. The adventure element has you dying in a fire, travelling back in time from the limbo you end up in, seeing a boy starting the blaze so you can stop it (all this in cutscenes. The other 10 per cent has you walking round the streets of a quaint German village, sparking off cut-scenes by, say, clicking on a character or turning down an alleyway. Ninety per cent of the 'game' is made up of interminable cut-scenes and loading screens. The problem is you might as well not be there for all the input you have. You save yourself from one death, then do it all again only in a different place and time, as you move ever further along the game's timeline. The premise is not without its merits, beginning as it does with your character's death and his subsequent time travels as he attempts to thwart his own murders, one after the other. The way people have been talking about it you'd think none of them had ever read a novel. Never mind that there's barely the bones of a game to support it, that the characters are one-dimensional marionettes and the dialogue is functional at best. The reason? That it tells a complex, dramatic and slightly original story.
#SHADOW OF MEMORIES PC#
The PC version, which came out in the States a few months ago, has been getting the same sort of rave reviews. Shadow Of Memories received scores of eight or nine out of ten in almost every PS2 magazine when it was released a few years back.
IF any further proof were needed that storytelling in games is primitive, childish and in need of a revolution, this is it.