A young woman named Ellen receives a mysterious letter in the mail from her mother who died many years earlier, telling her to go to a small village in Ireland called Doolin. Simultaneously, Keats, an editor for an occult magazine titled Unknown Realms, receives an odd phone call telling him to also go to Doolin for a possible story. What makes Doolin Village so unique is that it’s a place where both the living and the dead can interact with each other, setting the tone for a mystery that will be seen through the actions of both Ellen and Keats.
At the beginning of each level you have the option of playing as either Ellen or Keats, and no matter whom you choose, the path of gameplay remains the same. If you select Ellen, your guide through the city is a strange scarecrow; if you play as Keats, your guide is an invisible man wearing a trenchcoat and hat named Belgae. Most of the action in Doolin takes place in a zone known as the Netherworld that is split up into seven different realms you must journey through. During daylight you will explore the village, making conversations with the villagers as you gather clues and items, which is the only way you will be able to enter the doors of the Netherworld when darkness falls.
The characters are controlled from a third person view and move around via the left and right thumbsticks, in the tradition of most RPG’s. Your arsenal is comprised of acquiring the powers of the enemies you defeat called “Folks,” who are the creatures who roam the Netherworld. Once eliminating a Folk, you can then capture their id (basically their life force) and use whatever powers they had as your own. The collected powers can be accessed through the four face buttons of your controller (square, triangle, circle, x) and rearranged to fit your liking. At first you only have two powers available, but as you journey further you can pick and choose better powers by swapping between your four available slots. Being that there are so many types of enemies as you get deeper, you’ll have a lot of cool powers to choose from in your chest.
To capture the id of a Folk, you tilt the Sixaxis controller up until you’ve snagged it and then continue a fishing rod motion, shuffling until you’ve sucked it all in. The best comparison would be how the Ghostbusters used their Proton Packs to snap up the goulies in the movies. At first this feels like a nice touch, but after you’ve done it twenty times you may start to wish that their id would just automatically lock and absorb into you like the power orbs do in
Ninja Gaiden Sigma. But the bigger the enemy, the more the level of strategy must be used to capture their id. Some of them don’t make it easy, pulling back what you’ve tried to take, creating a Sixaxis tug-of-war. Ellen and Keats also have individual styles of attacks that they can use when surrounded by the enemy. Ellen will use the cloaks she wears as a weapon against her enemies, and Keats can use a power called Transcension, which is basically a smart-bomb attack that can only be unleashed when his gauge reaches its max.
The story is unfolded through both motion cut scenes, as well as images that scroll in a comic book panel style. These are nicely executed, both visually, as well as for immersing you in the storybook fantasy of this world. The environments are also very beautiful, especially once you enter the Netherworld and venture through the forest, dungeons, and underwater city. Even though there is plenty of ground to cover, you are limited to a small area with very little room for exploration. But to its credit this makes Folklore a better game, because you’re attention is focused on a specific area of action to keep things moving swifter.
The one element of gameplay that some may have issues with, is switching from Ellen to Keats, because with the exception of their power moves, both characters are having the exact same adventure and fighting the same foes that the prior character just beat. Sure this may increase the length of the game, but it would have been more interesting if they had separate quest, doing different things, and kept interacting at times during levels.
Even though Folklore is categorized as an RPG, it does have a hack-n-slash molding (not the God of War type, more like Ghost-N-Goblins); but there are times when there are a lot of enemies coming at you at once, something rarely seen in the average RPG. The Sixaxis’ motion feature gets a big workout in this game, and when you’re going up against bosses and shaking or flicking the controller frantically trying to bring them down, it is an adrenaline rush.
Folklore is not perfect, but it’s a game that even non-RPG fans can enjoy because of its pick up and play style and emphasis on action. Sure there are moments when you’ll be wondering around endlessly looking for that one item you need to finish a chapter, but that’s the nature of a quest game. After a lackluster period of rushed ports, it is refreshing to play a game like Folklore, which is a step in the right direction to add much needed variety to the PS3’s library.
The music captures and pulls you into this world, flowing seamlessly from the Doolin Village to the Netherworld. The voice acting is very well done, but there are moments when some of the lines are unintentionally funny. The forest level stands out because there are so many layers of sound intertwined that you’re drawn into the surroundings. This is one of those RPG’s that many fans will be trying to find a Japanese import of the soundtrack on eBay.
You can get a lot of mileage out of this game, simple because of the idea that you have the option of switching from ether Keats of Ellen at the beginning of a level. Also, within each level there are various hidden Folks that may not be found in a first play through, requiring you to re-visit realms so you can find them all. A dungeon editor is also available, allowing you to use tools to create your own quest. These created dungeons can then be uploaded for other players via the PlayStation Network, and you can also download dungeons created by other players as well to explore.
Folklore is going to win a lot of hearts, because even thought it’s not reinventing the genre, it does deliver a solid gaming adventure for the RPG crowd. It’s also so visually appealing that you want to continue going deeper into the world just to see what the next realm will look like. There are things that could have been handled differently, like going through the endless pages of text, but it’s understandable that they were trying to keep certain elements of the genre intact. There’s no question about it that there is probably going to be a Folklore 2 on the horizon, and being that its debut is such a treat, future possibilities in the Netherworld are endless.
