Hagane: The Impossible GameOverall: 7.4 Hagane: The Final Conflict (or simply Hagane) is a extremely challenging, fast-paced, side-scrolling game. The basic plot is that the evil Koma clan is trying to destroy the world, and someone has to come to its rescue. Apparently, you are a cyborg-ninja capable of doing acrobatics and using plenty of different weapons from your arsenal.
It had its US release in 1995, but was only available in Blockbuster stores, simultaneously turning this into a very obscure SNES game. Because it's so ridiculously challenging, not having a save feature is a huge let down for me.
Graphics: 6 The overall graphics aren't that amazing in my opinion, they could have worked it more, because the way it is you can easily compare it to a NES game. Nonetheless I still have to compliment the scenario, you can feel a growing change of atmosphere as the game progresses.
Sound: 5 The sounds in it feels like arcade standards, and by no means I'm saying this as if it's a bad thing, but there are no memorable soundtracks and they eventually get annoying and repetitive as the game progresses. The weapons, enemies, attack sounds and such have a noticeable similarity to old-school arcade games, such as CONTRA.
Addictiveness:?7 This diverges from person to person, you are more likely to enjoy this game if you have more affinity with side-scrolling fast paced games, which I don't. At first I found this game to be very entertaining and challenging, but as I kept doing the same thing over and over again I rather became bored and frustrated than eager for further progression. Each enemy presents a different attack pattern, and you have to learn how to avoid them or else you will die fast, at the end it almost felt like playing Guitar Hero, as I had to do the exact same moves in order to advance through stages.
Story: 8 The story is actually pretty solid, and provides you with a clear objective: Destroy the Kuma clan to claim your deceased faction members pride. There are the two main clans, both of them holds members with strength and spiritual power beyond any normal human being, each of them are split into several factions: the Fuma (protagonist clan) are based onto the Chinese Zodiac while the Kuma clan are split into different colors.
Depth: 8 Even if this game can be classified as short, any average player will have a hard time on getting through the stages, that's due to the game's difficult which will cause you to spend most of your time figuring out how to get effectively get through them. Though there are some slides that provides you with back-story, you will find most of the game information in its manual.
Difficulty: 10 Hardest SNES game I've had the boldness to play, before playing this I had a different perspective of what was HARD and EASY in the game industry, I might as well
replace the word hard in my vocabulary to Hagane from now on.
It feels unfair most of the times as you repeatedly die until you FINALLY get it done right. But hey, it doesn't matter, because you are going to die a ridiculous death right after that! As I stated before, this game feels more like a memorization kind of game than a fast-paced action one. If you believe you are good enough to beat this game, you might as well film yourself doing so, as I would consider it an amazing feat for anyone.
Graphics
6 Sound
5 Addictive
7 Depth
8 Story
8 Difficulty
10
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