Corpse Party: Blood Drive

Written by Matt Mirkovich on 11/3/2015 for Vita  

Well, that was certainly an experience I’m not going to have again any time soon. I can always count on a Corpse Party game to be completely different than anything I’m playing right now, and for a variety of reasons. It’s got a compelling story to tell, with a universe full of interesting characters, it’s got some solid horror tropes, and the translation work is always incredibly good. So why was I not digging Corpse Party: Blood Drive as much as the original game?

I thought the first Corpse Party was genius when it released in 2011, I had some problems with its sequel, Book of Shadows, and while Blood Drive is a definite improvement over the original game, this time around I found some of the design decisions, and technical flaws caused by the switch to 3D, to hamper the overall experience quite a bit. Not enough to hold me back from seeing the conclusion of the Heavenly Host saga, but enough to leave me feeling like this series could have been totally a one and done game.

So for those who are following the Corpse Party series, and the Heavenly Host saga, Ayumi Shinozaki’s sister saved her life at the end of Book of Shadows, and it wasn’t a happy ending. In fact if there’s anything this series can tell you, it’s that messing with the dark arts is a zero-sum situation, so if you’ve got someone telling you can bring people back from the dead, just turn around and walk away. Ayumi unfortunately is still wracked with the guilt of losing everyone from their first trip to Heavenly Host, and hanging on to a sliver of hope that there might be some way to at least restore the existence of those who have died. Meanwhile, strange things are happening in town, with mysterious deaths and people acting out of sorts, something is definitely not right after Sachiko’s death.

This means once more the survivors of the first trip to Heavenly Host are going to have to cross over to the land of the dead. The biggest hang-up I have on the story is the character designs stick out like a sore thumb, especially Magari, who looks like a magical girl anime reject and wields a large scythe, she works for the Murtubas, a secret society dedicated to witchcraft and maintaining a specific world balance. She’s not the only new-comer, but she felt really out of place for me. Also if you’re here for the awful and grotesque endings, you might come away a little disappointed. While they are certainly descriptive and paint a disgusting picture, the switch to 3D visuals doesn’t really sell them as well as previous games did in 2D. Not only that but a lot of them that are simple text descriptions of what happened that end up feeling pretty samey. Granted it’s awful that my character’s head got chopped off, but it seems like the most common thing that happens in the game when you die, and you’re going to die a lot. That’s also not to speak poorly on the translation efforts this time around either, as you can tell that XSeed has someone really committed to preserving the experience as much as possible. Nothing is really off the table, which means things can get pretty gross, or just plain awful. Looking at you, death scene in chapter six.

As I stated before, this time around the game features 3D visuals, running in Unity. The switch to 3D has not done this game a lot of favors as there are now a bunch of technical issues that really hold this game back. Real-time lighting causes a drastic hit in performance, which means that the game actually performs better when you’re not using your flashlight, but with all the traps hidden out in the open, it really ramps up the difficulty if you try to play without it. There are also long loading screens everywhere you go, even entering the inventory menu, and it’s not just going into the inventory of the loading menu, it’s going in to each screen of the inventory menu. To cap it off, these load times are long, which really sucks the momentum out of the game. This seems pretty suspect for a game that isn’t terribly detailed, but just know that this game can perform pretty poorly in spots. Considering it’s the first time the game has been ported over to Unity I can expect to see some hiccups, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.

The audio work is as strong as ever. From the voice acting to the music, Corpse Party: Blood Drive continues to be a standard bearer for quality audio in a video game. They’ve also continued to pack in the bonus audio at the end of the game, so the character testimonies from the voice actors are all there, and you can even build your own custom dialog from the audio that has been recorded. It’s kind of a bummer that the audio is so good, but the visuals don’t seem to have received the same level of love.

Eschewing the visual novel style of gameplay that ruined Book of Shadows for me, I’m really happy that Blood Drive is a much more interactive title this time around. Although the level of terror I experienced in this game isn’t anywhere close to the original game. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve become familiar with the series at this point, or because this time around the game just did not feel as scary as previous games. Sure there are some spooky moments, but more often than not, some weird design decisions made portions of gameplay a bit tedious rather than terrifying. In chapter four there is a point where you enter a room, and a pretty important scene occurs, as it’s one of the items you’re collecting to advance the story. Well unbeknownst to me, there were two more items in the room, so after thinking I finished with that room, since the scene ended with me needing to leave the room, I come to find that after almost an hour of searching, and dodging the relentless phantoms, I had to go back in the room, and examine the same spot where I found the first item, and then the other item was back in a corner. So be thorough when playing this game. Although chapter four is really the longest of the bunch, the whole game will probably take a little more than ten hours to complete the main story, and then another two hours for the EX chapters, and then you can get to work on finding all of those bad endings, for all the trophy hunters out there.

Corpse Party: Blood Drive did right by me by going back to the exploratory gameplay that I loved in the first game. The overall shift in the story’s tone doesn’t feel as horrifying this time around, which as a result, nixed the sense of dread I was expecting out of this game. On the whole I didn’t have the same level of tension that other games in the past did. While there are some bright moments betwixt all the awful stuff that’s happening, it seemed like all the redemption and resolution that’s supposed to happen has pushed out all the things that made the first two games so scary. To be blunt this is definitely a story where no one wins, and while I was satisfied with the conclusion, I felt like there were a few loose threads that didn’t get handled. I still have no clue as to who Azusa is, or why the anatomical model was even a thing this time around. But the resolution left me feeling like we could now put the Heavenly Host saga to rest. I’m still eager to see where this series can go, and hopefully the folks at Team Gris can clean up some of the technical hiccups and return some of the fear that this game was lacking.