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[Son of Cervantes]

I'm a longtime Musou fan (and have platinum'd/1000'd almost every Musou game I've played) and this is one of the few in the series I hadn't played. I was always a bit iffy about this particular spin-off for a few reasons: it's not by Omega Force, it's by Koei Canada (and I don't think they did anything other than this). It's NA physical release for 360 ended up getting canceled (never an encouraging sign). It seems to have been mostly forgotten by Musou fans.

Nevertheless, it got released in Japan under the title of Troy Musou, which makes it as official as any other spin-off, and Achilles was featured as one of the playable characters in Warriors Orochi 3, and he looked pretty cool though I didn't use him much. And other teams have successfully harnessed the Musou formula to make great games (Sengoku Basara being a great example).

So I've been playing for the past week. Beat the three basic challenges (not the more advanced epic versions) and the story mode. Still plenty of things left to do, but I've played enough to make a thread, ask for impressions, and give an opinion at least. This game isn't all that popular so I don't expect this thread to go anywhere though, heh.

The first thing I noticed is that, visually, the game is a rip-off of Brad Pitt's Troy movie. Achilles looks like a really buff version of Brad in the movie (he's even got the long blonde hair) and one of his finishers is a leaping stab identical to one Brad does in the movie which was prominently featured in the trailer. Big difference is he talks like Macho Man Randy Savage, which is damn funny. Agamemnon looks like Brian Cox, and has a similar costume/facial hair. The movie also seems to take cues from 300. Heavily saturated colors, crushed blacks, lots of blood spatter onscreen, etc. It looks really different from the typical Musou game.

Cut scenes are REALLY well-directed. What's more, even if the game borrows from Hollywood for its visuals, it's remarkably faithful to the Iliad. The character's names all use Greek pronunciation, to start with. The gods appear prominently, fucking with the participants of the war. Also, the characters' backgrounds are largely faithful to myth:

- Odysseus is presented as being inadvertently responsible for the Greek alliance, because he made all of Helen's potential suitors swear loyalty to whoever she was chosen to marry, to avoid strife. The tragic result being that when Helen was kidnapped, all the princes and kings who'd fought for her hand were honor-bound to help Menelaus get her back.

- Paris is presented as fighting with a bow and arrow (long-distance, showing he's not honorable like the other heroes of the Iliad). His background story is also accurate, as far as I can tell. He was prophesied to be the downfall of Troy so he was ordered to be executed as a newborn, but the king's servant couldn't bring himself to do it so he raised him as his own. As an adult, he was discovered and King Priam brought him back into the household as a prince, setting the stage for the coming events. Just as in mythology, he doesn't survive the Trojan War (though in the game he's killed by Odysseus).

- Ajax's madness and death is presented as I remember it from myths, with him impaling himself on a sword.

- Hector and Achilles' speeches before their final duel are pretty accurate (down to Hector asking him to swear to bring the body of the fallen back to the dead man's army for proper cremation, and Achilles refusing him and telling him he'll leave his body to the dogs). However, a few changes transpire: Achilles doesn't chase Hector around the city walls, and the scene where Priam begs Achilles to return Hector's body is deleted.

There are a few other changes in this vein, but the game is otherwise surprisingly faithful to the Iliad and surrounding myths.

Now, the negatives: only eight playable characters, some of which play very similarly ( Paris and Odysseus, Hector and Achilles and Patroclus). And even the supposedly speedier characters move sloooowly. For example, whenever you get knocked down, it takes like three or four seconds just to stand back up! So you have to look at your character struggling on his back while you want to get into the action again. Speaking of slow, all the characters fight slowly, and you have to wait for an animation to finish before you start a new attack. So the pace is much, much slower than any Musou game I've played before. This is especially egregious in regards to finishers.

In the game, when an enemy is stunned or fleeing, you can do a finisher on them. This is especially useful when you're farming for Kleos (currency in the game) since finishers give you a ten Kleos instead of one which you get by finishing an enemy any other way. But wach finisher takes a long time to do, making your choices for clearing enemy crowds somewhat limited: clear enemies quickly and get almost no money, or use finishers and take forever but get a lot of money.

And you'll need money in the game, as characters neither level up nor gain individual skills. Everything comes down to equipping them with items on an expandable item grid. The items themselves have to be unlocked by fulfilling optional objectives in the various missions. The missions themselves are unfortunately not very dynamic. Unlike other Musou games, where there are tons of little objectives and new ones pop up constantly or change if you fail a particular mission, the stages in this game are very straightforward.

Anyway, those are my impressions so far. Next I'm going to replay the game on a harder difficulty to see if I can unlock a few more items!

 

[Beren the Empty-Handed]

Also, the characters' backgrounds are largely faithful to myth:

- Odysseus is presented as being inadvertently responsible for the Greek alliance, because he made all of Helen's potential suitors swear loyalty to whoever she was chosen to marry, to avoid strife. The tragic result being that when Helen was kidnapped, all the princes and kings who'd fought for her hand were honor-bound to help Menelaus get her back.

Honor-bound maybe, but most of them had to be found first. Odysseus was dragged kicking and screaming to the Trojan War when pretending to be insane didn't work out as he'd hoped. And Achilles dressed as a girl to avoid going. Did those make it into the game? It'd be cool if they did, in my opinion.

 

[Son of Cervantes]

Nope, like I said, they even cut out Priam paying Achilles to get his son's body back.

They changed Penthesilea's reason for entering the war on Troy's side as well. Instead of a hunting accident, Hippolyte is killed by accident during a heated battle. This let Koei include another Penthesilea stage.

The game starts with the ships landing, like some sort of Greek D-Day invasion. There are other flashback scenes, but other than Paris', they're only those related to battles.

Even with these changes, I was impressed by how faithful they were! Especially coming from the mangled mythology of the God of War games.

 

[Son of Cervantes]

After playing this game on hard and expert now I understand why it was a flop. Musou games usually have a ridiculous amount of content, so that even if you're replaying the same stages, you feel like you are constantly making progress, unlocking new characters, weapons, etcetera.

All that Troy has are items to buy. Just a handful of characters that are all unlocked after a single playthrough and the stages have no element if variation or randomness to them.

A real disappointment how quickly this game has bored me when I usually spend at least hundred hours minimum on every Musou game.

 

[FrostuTheNinja]

Actually grabbed a copy recently and I'm having a really hard time understanding the point of those start up animations during movement. Bizzare...

 

[Son of Cervantes]

I gave up on it. It's not that fun to play, and there isn't even enough content to keep me hooked. Finished it on normal and I know I'll never touch it again.

The game moves too slowly, the animations you spoke of slow the pace of the battles (God help you if you get knocked down, it takes forever for your character to do the animation just to stand up again), and there just isn't enough to keep me interested.

 

[VexyWexy]

Got 1000gs in it. Loved every minute. Combat was the most satisfying of all the Warriors games. I'd love to see them do more games in this serious style instead of the super campiness of Dynasty/Samurai Warriors.

 

[Son of Cervantes]

Vexy, you're a better gamer than me. I couldn't take how slow it moved, and the paucity of content meant that I didn't feel motivated to keep replaying the same stages over and over.

 

[AlphaTwo00]

Well, count me surprised to see an LTTP thread to this thread, given that there was an OT at one point that everyone avoided like a plague (or The Plague... hahaha), and the original reveal thread which had everyone up in arms over the developer.

...oh wait, I did mentioned I worked on the game right? So when I did see this thread, I guess it's good to take trip back. I'm sure there's still technically NDAs that I cannot talk about, and there's a few things I can't talk about (just professional courtesy), but feel free to ask. I'll just make a few comments on a bunch of things.

It's by Koei Canada (and I don't think they did anything other than this).

The studio's launch title (after getting converted over from a straight CG team was Fatal Inertia (360/PS3). There was a secondary team (which I was on) that worked on Prey the Stars (DS), Orochi 2 (PSP), DW6 (PSP). The secondary team was merged together to complete Troy in 2012. Two weeks after the game was released on the PS3, around 70% of the staff was downsized, and the remaining team converted over to a mobile studio. It then closed in 2013.

It's NA physical release for 360 ended up getting canceled (never an encouraging sign).

It's funny about that, because for the longest time, the game was demoed and shown off primary for the 360. I think we were all sort of shocked when we found out. More surprising was that at the time, I had heavily pushed to inquire about a digital release in the absence of a physical release (at the time, MS just opened the the gate to Games on Demand only games with RE4), and the Digital only release came almost a year later.

Achilles was featured as one of the playable characters in Warriors Orochi 3, and he looked pretty cool though I didn't use him much.

That was definitely interesting, because at the time of that game, the team that had worked on Troy had all but disappeared. It was super fun (at least for me) to see how they recontextualized all the move sets to actually fit a "proper" musou game. More hilarious: they managed to stitch together the jump/fall animation cycle that doesn't actually exist in Troy.

Now, the negatives: only eight playable characters, some of which play very similarly ( Paris and Odysseus, Hector and Achilles and Patroclus). And even the supposedly speedier characters move sloooowly. For example, whenever you get knocked down, it takes like three or four seconds just to stand back up! So you have to look at your character struggling on his back while you want to get into the action again.

Patroclus and Achillies are practically clones as far as move sets goes, along with Hector and Aeneas (variations in attack timings). Paris and Odysseus aren't exactly clones, but because of their projectile style type of attack, a lot of the timing and balanced were made similar. The slowness that you refer to is really a much more conscious decision by the team early on to present a "gritty, realistic" version of fighting (if you remember, the joystiq interview with the lead which was quoted as "dynasty warrior games for people who hate dynasty warriors"). The description from some of the decisions I remember hearing was that the primary complaint from the North American staff was that the traditional Musou game felt too much like dancing, and that Troy should feel like each attack and movement should be weighty and purposeful. Personally, when I started on the project, most of it was set in stone. Personally, I found many of the same issues you listed (here and below), and was especially livid about the entire lack of jumping (and more importantly what it really meant for traversal and movement. It almost became a joke amongst everyone in the office how much I was pushing for jumping.

Speaking of slow, all the characters fight slowly, and you have to wait for an animation to finish before you start a new attack. So the pace is much, much slower than any Musou game I've played before. This is especially egregious in regards to finishers.

The game moves too slowly, the animations you spoke of slow the pace of the battles (God help you if you get knocked down, it takes forever for your character to do the animation just to stand up again), and there just isn't enough to keep me interested.

Actually grabbed a copy recently and I'm having a really hard time understanding the point of those start up animations during movement. Bizzare...

Believe it or not, they were much much slower (and you can see this with some of the first early E3 demoes). By the time I started, I inherited some of the animation timing task, and IIRC, they're at least sped up 30-40%from what they were originally at. I would have pushed for way higher, but there was always the consideration for the type of style (gritty, realistic) that the leads were asking for.

The missions themselves are unfortunately not very dynamic. Unlike other Musou games, where there are tons of little objectives and new ones pop up constantly or change if you fail a particular mission, the stages in this game are very straightforward.

I believe that this was another conscious streamline decision when they were considering making a "musou for the west". There's a few stages that veers the closest (2nd stage - Perimeter), but none capture (haha, pun intended) the same feel of the base possession style of play that you find in all other musou games.

After playing this game on hard and expert now I understand why it was a flop. Musou games usually have a ridiculous amount of content, so that even if you're replaying the same stages, you feel like you are constantly making progress, unlocking new characters, weapons, etcetera.

Content is definitely an issue, which leads to additional bad reviews (the game fails in many ways both as a game, AND as a musou game), but I don't think that's why it's a flop. It was basically sent to die because it was unmarketed and an unknown. And if people didn't know it exist, then no one would buy it. Fundamentally, the game tried to be too many things to too many people, and failing on all fronts because of opposing ideas: I'm firmly in the belief that a musou for the west can work (think the likes of Dead Rising), I also think that a gritty game can work; but mixing them together? The studio closing should tell you plenty of why it hasn't worked.

 

[Camp Lo]

I loved that game. My brother and I had this game preordered for months just off the hype from the movie Troy (couldn't believe it actually had that leaping death move for Achilles!)

Oh man, those were some good times.

 

[Son of Cervantes]

AlphaTwo, that's some really interesting info! Whoa, I can't believe the animations used to be even slower than they ended up being! Another thing that was weird was that building up Kleos meant using finishers which meant killing one grunt at a time instead of killing off giant swaths of foes like you do in a typical Musou game. At least with Penthesilea and Ajax, you could throw the downed foe at an enemy and score some bonus kills (why wasn't there a total KO meter in the game? That felt like a weird omission).

I don't want to sound entirely down on the game - the cinematics and story are really cool, as is the graphical style. I can even understand the limited number of characters.

These small changes could have really improved the game:

- KO counter, and maybe switch it so the Kleos you get per enemy goes up with your combo counter, encouraging you to kill large numbers of foes instead of going one by one with finishers.

- free play mode so you could play any stage with any character.

- Jump button, and make the characters move and attack just a little faster.

Of course, I get that they were going for a Western Musou game (the Troy and 300 influences are plain to see, lol), but it really seems the game was sent out to die. The only reason I know about it is because as a diehard Musou fan, I love the weird side games and Musou knockoffs (Kamen Rider Battride War, Sengoku Basara, etc.). Of course, this is an official Musou game in Japan.

I wonder how it did in Japan where the Musou name actually has some power? Did it sell at all? I know it got a Japanese 360 disc release at least.

 

[AlphaTwo00]

Another thing that was weird was that building up Kleos meant using finishers which meant killing one grunt at a time instead of killing off giant swaths of foes like you do in a typical Musou game. At least with Penthesilea and Ajax, you could throw the downed foe at an enemy and score some bonus kills (why wasn't there a total KO meter in the game? That felt like a weird omission).

Yup, many of that were conscious decisions decided much earlier before I joined (and was the initial sales pitch at E3s), the more realistic tone lead to both the pace of combat, and the method of execution. The inclusion of a lock on system was another one of those features that were created to "alleviate" "problems" that the design team wanted to fix (where people felt who they wanted to hit didn't connect). KO counter irked me the most personally (especially when I joined the team and found out), the reasoning, once again, fell to the idea that Musou games with all that UI element felt "too gamey".

Fun fact, if I remember correctly, weapon throwing wasn't part of the initial game (and really inspired after the intro video had the idea). That was included pretty quickly and served as a cornerstone for a few gameplay mechanics.

- free play mode so you could play any stage with any character.

I can't comment much on this, but I can ask you to consider this: has there been other musou games that has a free mode (or dream mode) where they allowed any characters to enter the QTE/locked attacked system like in the Troy boss fights? I can tell you that I had worked on the Griffin boss fight, and if you were to think about how a free mode would work, the only viable character that can complete that fight is Paris and Odysseus.

I wonder how it did in Japan where the Musou name actually has some power? Did it sell at all? I know it got a Japanese 360 disc release at least.

My understanding is that it entered both the Famitsu/Media Create sales chart fairly similar to other musou, but dropped pretty quickly.

 

[Son of Cervantes]

Yup, many of that were conscious decisions decided much earlier before I joined (and was the initial sales pitch at E3s), the more realistic tone lead to both the pace of combat, and the method of execution. The inclusion of a lock on system was another one of those features that were created to "alleviate" "problems" that the design team wanted to fix (where people felt who they wanted to hit didn't connect). KO counter irked me the most personally (especially when I joined the team and found out), the reasoning, once again, fell to the idea that Musou games with all that UI element felt "too gamey".

Fun fact, if I remember correctly, weapon throwing wasn't part of the initial game (and really inspired after the intro video had the idea). That was included pretty quickly and served as a cornerstone for a few gameplay mechanics.

I will admit one of the cool things in the game is tossing a spear at a fleeing enemy and having it impale him. Merciless!

It's weird they were trying to make a Musou games without Musou elements...why not include both types of characters? Big brawny guys like Achilles and Ajax, and then have Paris and Odysseus play like classic Musou characters, really fast and agile.

I can't comment much on this, but I can ask you to consider this: has there been other musou games that has a free mode (or dream mode) where they allowed any characters to enter the QTE/locked attacked system like in the Troy boss fights? I can tell you that I had worked on the Griffin boss fight, and if you were to think about how a free mode would work, the only viable character that can complete that fight is Paris and Odysseus.

While I can't think of a game that lets any character do any stage, the Gundam Musou games come very close (except for stages where space mobile suits can't function on Earth and vice versa). For the griffin fight, maybe there could be spears on the ground which other characters could pick up and toss? I dunno, not like there's much point in discussing it now. It's just that there's a real lack of stages and some sort of free mode (or even better, a Dream mode like a lot of Musou games have) would have added to it, without needing to make all-new stages.

My understanding is that it entered both the Famitsu/Media Create sales chart fairly similar to other musou, but dropped pretty quickly.

I doubt there'll be a follow-up...I guess it's like Bladestorm, a one-off. Too bad, because if they didn't shy away from more traditional Musou elements, I can think of another dozen or so characters they could've added for a sequel/expansion.