Hindsight is 20-20 - Heavenly Sword

Several months ago, the PS3s two biggest exclusives were coming out: Lair and Heavenly Sword. Both had a lot of anticipation riding on them, and both were pretty much panned, and Sony may have lost some face for being too protective of Lair despite its shortcomings. Lair's next on my list of plays. Nowadays, thanks to winning the new format wars and several other really good titles, I think the PS3 has pretty much proven itself. Back then, Heavenly Sword was called repetitive for forcing a repetitive formula of get in a room, fight a bunch of guys, leave the room. It was also called short.
I fucking enjoyed the shit out of this game. I just read the IGN review, and they're full of shit. Heavenly Sword does a really good job of mixing up the combat from sequence to sequence with hella fun segments from the saddest, disturbed girl I've ever seen. The puzzles are simple, but due to supreme use of the SIXAXIS, actually pretty fun. The cannon is really fun. Sniping gets really fun.
Combat is also pretty fun. Really hard to master though, but, unfortunately, not that important to master. Button-mashing can get you far. IGN pointed out repeatedly tapping triangle can trigger many unexpected, helpful counters which are one of the most enjoyable parts of the game to me. Nothing more satisfying than a perfectly timed button push that sends the enemy to the floor.
Voice-acting and Motion Capture are amazing. The acting in this game is better than most movies, much better than Half-Life 2. The writing is a little lame in parts, but overall effective. Although IGN said the story was ho-hum, fuck them. Heavenly Sword is really good at what most video games suck at: Character development. Kai, in particular, grows into a functioning human being by the end of the story, and Bohan remains an evil, but clever fucker throughout.
I beat it in a day.
Is that a problem...? Well...there were definitely parts of the story that could have been fleshed out more. More about Kai's tribe, Whiptail, the other bosses, the Raven, all of these things could have made this longer than 10 hours without stretching the plot too thin. On the flipside, it wasn't too long. Uncharted was too long. I feel like Assassin's Creed had a good length in comparison. However, it does make buying the game fishy. Although I would jump at the chance to replay this game on Hell mode, I also was supposed to be doing research today, so I'm done with this game for now, but it's definitely a game I hope to pick up again in the future.
Heavenly Sword got panned because of the time it came out in, and 'cause IGN are dicks, and 'cause the demo they released sucked. In my opinion, it's way worth owning.

-Bohan: blah blah blah that chick's gonna kill me, she's evil, and she wants to "sink her teeth in my sacred genitals"

The Man'S testicles (g)ot Bit though...