Soul Sacrifice Delta is a game that’s meant to fill in the void left by the absence of Monster Hunter in the PlayStation Vita’s library. Delta is an expanded version of the original game with extra story content, monsters and re-balancing of gameplay. This is effectively the definitive version of the game, making the original release redundant.
The game has a confusing opening and the tutorial feels rushed as a result. Luckily the game is fairly easy to pick up. What drags the game down in the beginning is the messy menus, and how it progresses. There are numerous menus that you’re not too sure on what they are for since it uses unfamiliar terms. Then there are all the customization options, so you’ll need to spend a bit of time playing around in order to feel more comfortable with everything. It takes around four hours before the game really opens up and you’re more comfortable with the flow of the game.
The story is told via text cutscenes with voice-overs as if you’re reading a book. This is is not ideal but probably decided upon for cost reasons. You’re a trapped prisoner by the sorcerer Magusar, and are facing certain death when a talking book appears before you. The book, named Librom, is a chronicle of a powerful sorcerer’s past exploits. Through the book’s magic, the player is able to experience those battles and gain enough power to challenge and defeat Magusar.
This is an action RPG, and attacks are effectively various abilities called Offerings, which are hotkeyed to three of the face buttons. You gain more abilities through completing quests and are able to power them up. Then you press the hotkey to execute the attack which can be a melee attack, a ranged shot, defensive abilities or a myriad of others. These are fully customizable and you’re able to map six of these at once. The fourth face button is used for dodging, and the left shoulder button is for locking on. It works well enough but is still fairly clunky.
As you’re only limited to six abilities in total, you have to pick and choose the ones you like. This is made harder because there are also elemental effects on abilities, and a monster might be weak against one. Luckily, there are sets that you can customize, save and swap, so you don’t have to constantly adjust if you have a go to all-rounder set of abilities you prefer to use.
You might find the lack of a default block button frustrating, especially if you have played other games of the genre. You miss is quite a bit against the faster enemies, which can be quite annoying. You need to specifically equip blocks, using up a precious slot. Although this introduces the clunkiness of swapping to handheld weapons as it requires a short animation, by which point the boss is out of their stun animation.
The main gimmick here is the Save or Sacrifice option. Whenever you defeat a monster, you can either Save them or Sacrifice them. Saving them will boost your HP and defense upon level up, while Sacrifice will increase your attack power. This is changed slightly once you get further into the game, along with third option of Fate, where it randomly decides whether Save or Sacrifice. It depends on your play-style on which one you want to level up more of. You have a maximum level cap of 100, but it’s your choice on how to spread those 100 levels among Save and Sacrifice.
The game is comprised of many smaller bite sized quests where you defeat monsters and is designed to be played in small chunks. In the story quests, you either fight solo or you’re joined by the story character. In the optional quests, you’re allowed to bring up to two NPCs, and their AI is much improved compared to the original. They are more powerful, useful and actually worthwhile to bring as they make the quests much easier.
As it is with games in this genre, bosses can have an enormous amount of HP and you’ll be wailing away at them for a while. It has the issue of your character easily dispatching the weaker enemies but then bosses take much longer and are much harder. While most major enemies do it, the human enemies are worse because they dodge and jump around too fast, so you can’t even hit them if you are primarily a melee user. These battles just serves to be very annoying and frustrating.
The game goes for a dark gritty realistic look, thus the graphics aren’t amazing since it doesn’t have stylized aesthetics to cover up its flaws. Instead it can look muddy at times but it is still serviceable. The game can still feel very rough, even this improved Delta version, it does not play as refined as other games in the genre like God Eater.
The game can spike in difficulty if you are playing solo as enemies have limited openings. They like to chain their powerful moves that pretty much destroy your health bars in a few hits. Their attacks cause you to flinch but yours don’t have the same effect to them. They move really fast, can aim much better than you and it’s generally fairly unfair. Perhaps the worst aspect is that enemies hit really hard. Yes, you can learn attack patterns but all it takes is an unlucky move and you’re dead.
Despite being called one of the easiest games to solo the story in the hunting genre, the later levels are brutal. When you’re fighting a monster with such a gigantic health pool solo, where one or two hits will easily kill you causing you lose the quest, it is infuriating and feels really unfair. You now have to whittle down the boss’s health from the very beginning yet again, presenting a really repetitive and dull process that punishes you too heavily for a simple mistake. For this reason, this puts off a lot of casual players who aren’t too into the genre, and why the game lacks a wide appeal.
The game ends up forcing you to grind levels fighting against the same enemies again and again if you don’t want to spend a long time fighting bosses, their health pools are just too big to be fun. While it makes story sense to force you to go solo in story quests, it really never should be the case in a gameplay sense as it stops you from progressing since you don’t have AI partners to draw the heat away from the boss. This means it drags out the extremely short story much longer than necessary.
Another annoying part, although some may love it, is how your Offerings have limited uses before breaking permanently if you’re not careful. You’ll definitely run out during a quest so you need to replenish it by... fighting weaker enemies and then sacrificing or saving them. Not too bad when you’re only fighting weak enemies, but extremely frustrating when you’re fighting a boss... solo... and sacrificing takes time that you cannot afford.
While the concepts in the story are intriguing and has a lot of potential, the storytelling via a text method makes it lacking. Now, a visual novel style is not bad, but the game uses such a small amount of text that it never conveys enough detail or emotional impact to make it pay off. The game includes the story of the original, as well as an expansion taking place afterwards. The expanded story content, compared to the original, feels very short, almost like a token effort. Nevertheless, the game still takes around 30 hours to complete.
Even finishing off the story, there are a ton of other things left to do. The amount of content in Delta is mind-boggling, there is so much to do. However, while it has the quantity, it doesn’t have the variety. At least it has a decent collection of different monsters; it’s just weird that it doesn’t use them all in the story quests, instead opting to repeating the same ones again and again while leaving unused ones as optional quests. There are literally hundreds of optional quests to do.
Overall, Soul Sacrifice Delta presents its own unique twist to the hunting genre. While the combat is simple to understand, given you take six different abilities to the battlefield, it’s the flexibility of the abilities, coupled with the buffs that you decide to specialize in, that allow it a lot of different play styles. The story is average and at several points is hampered by annoying solo quests that slow your progress. All in all, it is definitely a great and unique game in the Vita’s library.
----------------------------------------------
For other game reviews, have a look at this page.