Created by Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba recently became one of the best-selling manga following its debut in Weekly Shōnen Jump. There are a lot of reasons for that success, including the compelling plot, fantastic characters and gorgeous art style. A lot of the franchise's success also followed the start of the Demon Slayer anime in 2019. It's no surprise then that Demon Slayer has finally gotten its own fighting game, but CyberConnect2's Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Hinokami Chronicles ends up being a lackluster slog.
The Hinokami Chronicles is based on the first season of Demon Slayer and the 2020 Mugen Train film. Like the source material, Hinokami Chronicles follows a young man named Tanjiro Kamado after a demon turns his sister and slaughters his family. He joins the Demon Slayer Corps and seeks to get revenge on the person that destroyed his life: Muzan Kibutsuji, the original demon. Along the way, he meets up with a number of interesting and compelling characters, including Giyū Tomioka, Zenitsu Agatsuma and Inosuke Hashibira.
Hinokami Chronicles recreates all of the main plot beats from Demon Slayer Season 1 and Mugen Train, but in an odd way. The game frequently cuts out and rearranges parts of the story to serve its purposes. Normally, this would be fine, but there's a lot removed from the main plot that feels necessary, whether for explanatory purposes or to more completely establish just what's going on. In some cases, those scenes are available as Memory Fragments, a sort of collectible obtained by playing the game. However, pulling out key scenes like this really causes a plot that was recognizable and cohesive in two other mediums to feel disjointed and confusing.
The real problem with Hinokami Chronicles, though, is the gameplay. Those who played CyberConnect2's Naruto Shippuden adaptations won't be particularly surprised by the combat. Fighting consists of two characters dodging around an arena while trying to land blows. At its best, the combat feels really fast paced, but mostly it's just wildly boring. The movesets for each fighter are also shockingly shallow, with most characters only able to perform a handful of attacks. To the game's credit, fighters definitely feel different. Still, the combat is too simple to really care about the ins and outs of Hinokami Chronicles.
Hinokami Chronicles also has difficulty and repetition problems that make it hard to love. Each chapter generally consists of several fights. The non-boss demons are wildly easy to defeat, and they end up just feeling like padding as opposed to any real threat. The padding problem then becomes even more apparent when, while fighting a major boss, the player has to defeat them several times with little to no variation in how the demon fights. Some of the bosses are also more content to just dodge or block the entire time, which leads to frustrating gameplay and a lot of boring, overly-padded encounters.
Even if the fighting was excellent, Hinokami Chronicles still has some other big problems. Outside of combat, players move Tanjiro through a series of linear maps where he can pick up collectibles on his way to the next cutscene. These maps, while large, are devoid of life or anything interesting. There's a lot of just walking between places, and too much of the game's short runtime is spent just activating cutscenes.
The padding problem in Hinokami Chronicles seems to result from a lack of content. While Demon Slayer is great, a lot of Season 1 is about Tanjiro learning about a world with which he was previously unfamiliar. There's a lot of set-up for what's to come, and that means Tanjiro spends a number of episodes meeting important figures and getting beaten by stronger opponents. This translates to Hinokami Chronicles struggling to find something for Tanjiro, and the player, to do. There are actually two chapters later in the game that are entirely devoid of combat, minus a couple of optional battles. One of them is basically just a big cutscene, while the other has two identical mini-games that appear nowhere else. Considering Hinokami Chronicles is $60, that lack of content just isn't acceptable.
This isn't to say everything in Hinokami Chronicles is awful. There are a few additional scenes and insights into characters that fans of the franchise are sure to enjoy. The game's cell-shaded art also looks great and really does capture the aesthetic of the franchise. However, that's just not enough to keep Hinokami Chronicles from falling flat on its Nichirin sword at pretty much every other turn.
Developed by CyberConnect2 and published by Sega, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: The Hinokami Chronicles releases Oct. 14 on Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. A review code was provided by the publisher.
0 Comments