Anyone here heard or seen much of this? It's PS3 exclusive and I happened upon a whack of info about it on Wednesday which floated my boat so much, I ended up pre-ordering the Asian version from Hong Kong that night. There's no word of a US or Euro launch but the Asian release is entirely in English.
It's essentially a hardcore hack'n'slash with no saves in the levels themselves and some utterly insane traps and bosses. Looks like a mashup of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and King's Field ( it's by FROM Software so that's no great surprise ). The clincher for me is the online stuff. Every bit of the online functionality is so utterly different from the norm that I couldn't resist it's lure.
Some of the main elements:
1: if you die you leave a glowing pool of blood behind. You can add notes about how you died to the pool of blood, which then appear in other peoples games. A player in an other game will be able to see this pool of blood, read your note ( and apparently sometimes watch a video of how you died, although I haven't seen this bit ). If someone found this note helpful then you'll receive a little health boost. If they didn't then your note will begin to fade away rapidly. Obviously lots of blood-pools means something really bad up ahead.
2: dying means that you become a phantom who has to somehow get your body back. One means of doing this is to be be summoned by another player into their game ( you can summon up to 2 phantoms ) to help get them past a boss etc. Successfully doing this will get you your body back.
3: One particular artefact allows you to appear in someone else's game as a "black phantom" at which point you can attack them acting as a kind of boss character. There's a risk attached to this as losing makes getting your body back harder than it would have been ( if I'm reading all of this right ). This ticks all sorts of boxes in my L4D/Anti-coop gaming list.
4: Simply being connected to PSN allows you to catch glimpses of other online players as ghosts in your world. You might momentarily see a wispy figure walking through a wall. This would have been another player discovering a secret door, for example. These visions are transitory, lasting only a few seconds from what I can see... but they look f**king eerie.
It just looks packed with atmosphere, lovely hack'n'slash gameplay and outrageous bosses and traps. Add in some genuinely imaginative online elements and almost universal praise from those with the Jap version and I just can't resist. I can't remember the last time I was this excited by a game and I certainly can't remember the last time I imported an Asian version.
10 minute vid at the linky below. Actual gameplay starts 2 minutes in - but the interesting stuff is about 5 minutes in, where you can see another player's "ghost" and some of the glowing pools of blood ( although this guy seems to be ignoring them, sadly. There's an interesting one right in the path of an arrow trap :)
http://www.gamersyde.com/stream_9989_en.html
/tries to forget about it til the beginning of March.
/faints at the length of this post