Myth of Demons

If you're a little baffled by the plot, don't worry -- it's not integral to the enjoyment of Otogi, thanks to the heavy focus on action. You'll spend most of your time in melee combat. Raikoh is armed with mythical swords and can use them in light and heavy attacks. When you don't feel like getting your hands dirty, you can also cast magic spells. Raikoh is quite the acrobat, being able to double jump and dash in the air and on the ground. While the combat engine isn't overly sophisticated, mixing and matching all of Raikoh's various moves is very entertaining to watch. Fighting in the air is particularly fun, as you can stay afloat for extremely long periods of time as long as you keep performing dashes or continuously light combo-attack.

Even though most of the combat is straight forward, occasionally you'll be faced with a slight twist on how you'll approach battles. For example, certain enemies are invulnerable unless they are in under direct moonlight. In this case, you'll have to carefully avoid contact until the clouds pass before attacking. For the most part, Raikoh is defenseless and must rely on his speed and agility to avoid attacks. His only defensive ability is batting back enemy spells. By pressing one of the attack buttons at the exact right time, Raikoh will reflect the spell right back to the caster.

RAIKOH SMASH!

Another really cool aspect of Otogi is its destroyable environments. Faced with a big wall that you can't jump over? Then go through it with a heavy swing from your sword. Instead of just being a gimmick, you're rewarded for using a weapon of mass destruction. Apparently, human spirits are trapped within inanimate objects such as walls, pillars, wells, etc., and smashing them apart frees them, giving you experience points and gold. The results of your destructive tendencies are saved to the Xbox hard disk, so that when you later decide to revisit an earlier stage (which you can do at any time), you can finish the job of a one-man wrecking crew.