Blood of Bahamut Bared on DS
Fight enormous monsters in Square Enix's new multiplayer DS action RPG.
If you haven't seen the debut trailer for Square Enix's Blood of Bahamut yet, it'd behoove you to do so immediately. Looks a great deal like Shadow of the Colossus, doesn't it? That's not exactly how the developers at Think & Feel Inc. (makers of FFXII: Revenant Wings) are describing it, of course, but the basic premise here appears to be "multiplayer wireless SOTC with enormous dual-screen 3D visuals," which it's hard to deny the charm of.
The Nintendo DS-exclusive Blood of Bahamut doesn't appear to be strictly based off Bahamut Lagoon, a Japan-only game released by Square in 1996, but there are a few links -- game director Motomu Toriyama worked on that Super NES title's storyline, and the basic world setting of people carving out living space on little patches of floating land is familiar. Here, though, the little patches are actually sleeping monsters, freakin' enormous ones at that, and when they all wake up one day and start fighting each other, the fate of all the people living on them isn't exactly rosy.
This initial unveiling of Blood of Bahamut shows a team of four players facing off against Gigant, a humanoid beast that was once home to about 100,000 before it, er, shrugged them off. "They've all fled now that he's awake," Toriyama explained to Famitsu magazine this week. "They have no chance of defeating him at all, and within that desperate situation, we have the main characters stepping up, the ones the players control." You choose your guy from a field of seven, each from various countries and each with a given class of skills, and while single-player is certainly possible, you'll probably prefer to round up some friends and fact Gigant and the rest in wireless co-op mode, working together to take down these creatures with style.
"The first two things we wanted was a direct control scheme a sense of dynamic-ness beyond anyone's expectations on the DS," producer Eisuke Yokoyama comments. "From there, the idea of having the target be impossibly huge monsters came naturally, and multiplayer co-op came along soon after. That was the core concept right there -- fighting huge monsters is fun, fighting together with your friends is fun, and everything should stay fun no matter how much you fight."
While there's no talk of Wi-Fi support yet, the strategic element of this mission-based action RPG (there's something like 130 missions to play here) is more than a bit enticing. Players are free to move all around the game's world during each battle, allowing one player to distract a monster's attention while the other three go around to its back. How it'll all come together, we'll have to wait a bit to see -- there's no release date or price announced yet.
