Two strangers with seemingly separate paths are drawn to the mysterious village of Doolin where things are not what they seem. While one is looking to solve a murder, and the other is trying to find her past, both will be caught up together in the Netherworld where they hope to get the answers they seek.

I have a hard time calling Folklore a straight RPG as it has so many action/adventure characteristics that it has to be considered somewhere in between the two genres. There is experience and leveling but there is also a distinct amount of movement and tactical attacking that nicely balance each other out. In addition, the fights contain puzzle solving themes that take it beyond random button-mashing madness.

The game is played in two worlds; the real world, where you collect information and side objectives to further the story and the Netherworld, where you must fight your way past the Folk inhabitants. You must use the powers of captured Ids (spirits) to combat these enemies to gain more powerful Ids to fight with. Some Folk are like mini-puzzles as you attempt to find their weakness and exploit it to gain their powers. Others just take brutal beatings and still require a tug-of-war to release their spirits. Regardless, this mechanic is a valuable and rewarding aspect of the game.

I can't emphasize enough how fun these battles became; testing different captured Ids against enemies, finding weakness and literally pulling the spirits out of them with an upward "fishing" motion of the controller. In addition, each captured demon had a Karmic level associated with it which unlocked enhanced abilities such as reduced MP consumption or increased attack power. These could be accessed by defeating more of the same enemies, defeating a different enemy with that captured Id or using special dropped items. For the completionists, this will add a significant amount of gameplay even beyond attempting to capture every Id in the first place.

Controls themselves feel natural and intuitive, and camera motion followed suit save the transition to non-combat zones where the camera followed a fixed path; I wanted to rotate the angle around to get a better look at these areas to no avail. Helping the controls was the ability to map your captured Ids to individual face buttons; it gives you only four options at a time, but that causes you to strategize your attack scheme while being able to say "I want my X-button to be attack". Being able to re-map within a battle allowed a certain forgiveness and freedom of exploration within each battle as well.

Graphics are excellent as you swap between the dreary real world and the eye-popping Netherworld. Color schemes are perfectly chosen to represent the vividly lucid areas whether you are wandering the lush faery realm or the undersea city, your visual journey takes just as much importance as your quest for answers. The story progresses by a series of beautifully rendered cut-scenes with superb voice acting, or more commonly through comic book-esque panels that give a completely different feel to the narrative. The latter are slightly harder to get used to but ultimately prove an innovative way of completing the picture of the story.

Each character works their way through their own linear storyline. This is accomplished by completing individual chapters for Keats and Ellen, and theoretically you could complete seven chapters of Keats before even attempting Ellen. This seems slightly disjointed and I wouldn't recommend doing it, but maybe this was an attempt of the developer to break up the monotony of completing a level as Ellen and then immediately going back and doing the same level as Keats. Admittedly the gameplay between the two characters is similar but there are different variations of Ids available to each character such that battles have to be approached differently depending upon who you are controlling at the time. Add to this the strikingly linear design of each level and you do begin to feel a bit constrained within each area.

These flaws are more than adequately covered by a solid gameplay which is just plain fun to experience. In fact it was so fun that it was almost heartbreaking coming to the end of the game after about 20 hours, making me wish there were more. In concept and in form Folklore manages to bring fresh ideas to the table with interesting mechanics and just nail mostly everything. Moreover, the game could be considered a piece of art for the amount of beauty captured by its graphics and general presentation.

Nov 16, 2007 | 0 comments
Paul Bishop