It is unfortunate that a lot of games released in Japan these days are not brought over to the United States for gamers who are unable to speak or understand Japanese to enjoy. Most companies these days are more into mass market titles that will sell, sell, sell. Thankfully, a select few publishers are doing the opposite of this and exposing some of the lesser publicized Japanese releases to the US market. One of these is Atlus, and their latest is a quirky 3D platformer from Bandai by the name of Tail Concerto.
To its advantage, Tail Concerto centers around one of the most unique plots for a platformer I have seen in a long time. In a world that exists only high up in the air (a ground planet doesn’t seem to be mentioned), the residents make their way from place to place using airships. However, these residents are no normal people. Actually, they aren’t even real people - they are cats and dogs. For the most part, dogs are more rampant than cats and the cats have been seemingly pushed off into seclusion away from normal society. Our main character is a canine police officer named Waffle, who, on his first day off in months, receives a call from headquarters that the Black Cats Gang are on the loose again. Sighing, Waffle heads off on his trusty mech suit and checks out what is going on.
When the developers were creating Tail Concerto for the PlayStation, it is obvious that they were not attempting to go up against the likes of Spyro the Dragon 2 or Crash Bandicoot 3 in terms of visual quality. While Tail Concerto’s graphics get the job done, they are nothing that special, just plain and average. Fortunately, the characters that Atlus have created are so unique that they make up for the lack of flair in the graphics.
Speaking of the characters, this is primarily where Tail Concerto shines. Atlus has done a great job of translating the dialogue of the Japanese Tail Concerto as well as hiring some semi-decent actors to record the voices for the main people through the game (like Waffle and the Black Cats Gang). None of the game is all that serious and it’s hard not to crack a smile when you hear the leader of the Black Cats Gang try to angry. Although, the princess’ voice was one I was a bit disappointed with since she gave absolutely no expression in the words she was speaking. When she was supposed to be in distress or explaining something fanatically she sounded all together too calm.
To combat the evil Black Cat Gang menace, Waffle wanders around in his mech suit that can perform a variety of abilities. For example, by swinging the arms it is possible to pick up the cats and warp them back to headquarters. Other abilities of the mech suit are shooting out bubbles to capture the cats, and eventually be able to attach a jet pack to the back in order to fly around the area.
There are no especially difficult sections in Tail Concerto. By collecting whistles scattered about the world you can revive your mech suit when dying against a boss or otherwise, and this makes it almost too easy to never reach a true 'game over' screen. After clinching on to the general pattern of a boss or enemy it only takes a try or less to figure out how to beat the obstacle at hand. The only other problems I had with Tail Concerto were that, despite Atlus having a good translation track record, a few grammatical errors were still intact (i.e. ‘I don’t know what you’re! talking about!) and the frame rate can skip around for no apparent reason at times.
The world that has been set up by Bandai for Tail Concerto is one that could easily be continued on in a sequel (a prequel could even be done due to events in the past that are mentioned periodically through the game). Hopefully Tail Concerto will do well enough to justify a sequel by Bandai for either the current PlayStation or PlayStation 2 (*crossing fingers*).
-- Patrick Klepek
