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| | | "Fausseté Amour" is French for "False Love." This game, of course, is Japanese, by Naxat Soft no less (and Aim).
A sedately-paced platformer with unusual controls and female cheesecake characters. I'm not sure what exactly the story is about, of course, but as far as I can tell you have to put on your cute pink armor, gird your grapple chain spear thing, and walk (no running, that wouldn't be ladylike) around spearing goons, faeries, monsters, and evil dominatrix chicks who turn in to big ugly monsters.
Hitting the Jump button again in mid-jump shoots your spear chain diagonally upwards to grapple on to the bottom of platforms. From this swinging position you can flip yourself up with a nice spin attack by pressing the Attack button. It doesn't feel quite intuitive to me, but you sort of get used to it. I have similar feelings for the magic projectile attack: jump, then hold down and press fire to spin your spear chain around you and simultaneously fire off a burst of magical projectiles. These appear to come in three flavors, and you collect these from little floating faeries (hit the faerie, how fun) scattered throughout the levels. Since the game is slow placed and enemies usually wait for you to come to them, you can usually take someone out by standing back and using the projectile attack.
Still, Fausseté is no easy nut for the likes of me. It should be, I know, but I die time and again, for instance, on the part where you have to float on a raft over water while weird fish and beasts jump at you: if they hit you, you fall into the water and that's all she wrote (even if the water is five feet deep). Normally you can take one hit before dying: it knocks off your armor, leaving your girl running around in her underclothes. Ooh. And then of course when she dies those fall off too. You can usually get armor back fairly quickly from a faerie, and most levels appear to have a 1UP faerie in them as well. Still, that water part kept kicking my ass because I am dumb.
It's slow simple patterns, really, but they're cut pretty tight so you have to be patient. The large bosses are the same way: they show you their pattern early, then just repeat it over and over. Somehow that doesn't bother me--probably because I'm anxious to kill them and see if I get another submission shot of the boss when she transforms back to her girl form. Ahem.
I don't know if it's the tantalizing thought of scantily-clad anime chicks, the big bosses, the inventive levels (with big pits, walking on the bottom of a drained lake, through spike-ridden catacombs, etc), the demure pace, the freedom to grapple around at leisure, the weird mixed light jazz/rock/classical soundtrack, or the quality cutscenes, but I find this game growing on me. |
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| | | | Trying this again after a long absence, I find pretty much everything about it fairly off-putting. |
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