Blade Chimera Review – Taking Demons down In Old Osaka Town

It is the near future and thirty years ago a man named Shin was trapped in Cryostasis. Sometime shortly afterwards, demons suddenly appeared and waged a war on humanity. Now Shin, having been found and freed from cryostasis and with no memory of his past, fights to reclaim Osaka for humanity, and perhaps find the answer to his missing past. A chance encounter when fighting a rare and powerful Titanic Demon sets him on a path to uncover not only his past, but the truth of the demon war and the government he now fights for.

Team Ladybug is a relatively young studio, with only seven games – including Blade Chimera – to their name. Only four of them have been officially released in the west, but they already have a reputation for making very solid, visually stunning Metroidvanias with mechanics that favor switching between two different fighting styles regularly with environmental interaction. Blade Chimera is no different, while the tutorial starts you off with only a single weapon (a gun, you are capable of equipping two at a time, ranged or melee), in addition to your third, fixed weapon, constant companion, and a generally all around useful tool/entity called Lux.

Lux isn't just a useful mechanical gimmick, she's just as much a driver of the plot as Shin is.
Lux isn’t just a useful mechanical gimmick, she’s just as much a driver of the plot as Shin is.

After being suddenly attacked by the Dark Dragon, one of five Titanic Demons, Shin drives it off once by using cars in an abandoned parking deck for cover against it’s laser breath, but it attacks again in a spot without any cover. It seems like Shin is going to be eliminated by the dragon’s blast when a voice calls out to him offering help. This is Lux, a floating sword who creates a temporal echo of a car to block the dragon’s breath and allow Shin to deal the finishing blow on the gigantic creature. Killing the dragon reveals a small girl, who thanks Shin, then fades into ashes. Lux then reveas herself to be a demon who can take the form of a sword or a woman and has attached herself to Shin as her new vessel. After defeating the Dark Dragon and reporting back to headquarters while disguising Lux, Shin gets assigned to take down Phoenix, another of the Titanic Demons, by the incredibly sus Lord Baal, head of the “Holy Union” organization and de facto head of the country. What follows is a story about betrayal, regret, loss, shifting loyalties, revenge, and hope. On the whole, both the main plot and all the sidequests are very satisfying, though there are a few small loose ends that don’t quite get tied up, especially one regarding a woman and her missing dog that you cannot reunite, even though you do spend some time playing as the dog in a cute jailbreak section. 

 

Lux is capable of doing many things: attacking, creating a shield, restoring and vanishing objects via time distortions, stabbing into a wall to act as a platform, holding down buttons to open hatches, granting a double jump to Shin, among various other techniques. All of these cost some amount of MP to do, and while MP does naturally restore over time, it does so incredibly slowly. That’s where the style switching mentioned earlier comes in. Attacking with any non-Lux weapon, melee or ranged, builds a combo meter. The more hits you rack up in the combo, the more MP is restored at the combo’s end. On the flip side, attacking or defending with Lux also builds a meter, and the more hits blocked and/or dealt by Lux without breaking the combo will restore more health to Shin when you call Lux back. Of course, Lux can only do one thing at a time, so when she’s holding down a button, for example, Shin is on his own without Lux until you call her back.

Unlike other games in the genre, most movement upgrades are related to a skill tree, instead of items found around the map, but it works for Blade Chimera
Unlike other games in the genre, most movement upgrades are related to a skill tree, instead of items found around the map, but it works for Blade Chimera

Not that Shin is helpless on his own. In addition to the two weapons and accessories he can equip, Shin can jump, fire guns at any angle, use melee weapons in eight different angles including straight down, swim, mantle ledges, perform a dodge roll (upgradable to an air dodge later) and after some unlocking, dive kick and slide along the ground. Like a lot of Metroidvania-style games, most of the movement options in Blade Chimera are tied to level up system and skill tree instead of simply being found tucked away in a corner of the map or after defeating a boss (though there’s plenty of that as far as weapons and equipment goes). Though, with the way the XP curve is set up you want to push forward to explore deeper into the game anyway because that’s the only way to get enough XP to get the skill points to unlock the new movement upgrades, and the full skill tree doesn’t unlock until about halfway through the game anyway. One very early skill to unlock, the warp ability, is quite notable because it allows you to warp to almost anywhere in the map at any time, which makes backtracking and exploring new areas so much less of a headache. In my playthrough this saved a lot of time when I was finishing out the last few corners of the map, and it is also required to access one very specific bonus area of the map. With every skill you unlock, Shin regains a memory you can view in the game’s appropriately titled memory menu. These reveal details about Shin’s life from before he was frozen and since being defrosted, and go a long way into filling in the gaps of what’s really going on.

Blade Chimera does an excellent job of providing new and interesting challenges in the course of exploring. The Phoenix Garden introduces platforms you must rewind time on to raise back to their original position, which both require timing to use properly and which can get in your way when trying to use Lux, as well as strong UV lights, which can kill or damage Lux. If she dies, it’s game over. You have to leave Lux behind to navigate them safely. Another segment involves a flooded underground laboratory where you can’t use most of your guns up and you need to conserve your air. There is also a pitch black segment that requires using Lux as a light source to navigate. Each new area has a new environmental wrinkle, in addition to the new enemy types you have to deal with. Blade Chimera is good at keeping things fresh.

This is the form where the boss stops pulling punches, for the record.
This is the form where the boss stops pulling punches, for the record.

Blade Chimera is also really good at rewarding exploration. As mentioned before, there are tons of hidden secrets scattered around the map. One of the first secrets involves the puzzle doors, which only open when Shin has collected enough of the 56 puzzle pieces scattered around the map and as a reward from defeating certain monsters and finishing certain sidequests. Each of these includes some of the best weapons in the game, including guns and weapons that saw me through the endgame.

Speaking of bosses, the boss variety in Blade Chimera is great. Each of them has a very distinct feel and attack pattern, such that despite many of them being multi-phase fights with a monstrous form and a humanoid form, each of the bosses does something complete different with each form that none of them get stale. Blade Chimera stayed fresh for me from start to finish, even when I went around and completely filled out the map and almost filled out the Demon Encyclopedia. I hope Team Ladybug keeps at it with more Metroidvanias, especially more original properties. Do not get me wrong, they were amazing with Tohou Luna Knights and Wonder Labyrinth, but I loved seeing what they came up with unmoored from an existing property and want to see what they’re going to come up with next.

Tim played Blade Chimera on Nintendo Switch with a review code

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