Review: Corpse Party – Blood Drive

When developers move to new hardware, a sad reality is that bumps are expected along the way. For many sports, WWE, or annualized games, the bar of quality is lower and features are removed in the first year of a new system in order to just get the product out the door. Somehow Corpse Party: Blood Drive manages to be the worst example of this I’ve ever seen and it doesn’t even have the excuse of being early in the Vita’s life cycle or having John Cena on the cover.

For the sake of spoilers, only images from the first two chapters are shown.

To be blunt, playing the prior two localized titles in the Corpse Party series is mandatory in order to understand and enjoy Blood Drive’s plot. After the events of Blood Covered… Repeated Fear and the quite thrilling cliffhanger in Book of Shadows, this third entry in the franchise aims to wrap up the mythos of the curse school in a bombastic way (until the episodic Corpse Party 2 gets involved). The surviving students of Kisaragi Academy have found themselves whisked away to a seemingly different reality where their friends who died in the cursed school never existed. At the same time, they’re all going through some psychological or physical torment while mysterious deaths are occurring all throughout Japan. Our crybaby heroine, Ayumi Shinozaki, is goaded into returning to the cursed school by an outside party, a la Jurassic Park II. Unfortunately for Blood Drive though, the game lacks the alluring charm possessed by Jeff Goldblum and is instead filled to the brim with a bunch of overdone anime tropes.

Being a fan of the franchise, I’m very used to the lewd fanservice, rambling self-loathing, and juxtaposed comedy antics that take place within the universe. However, Blood Drive adds in a magical element akin to what you would see in a fantasy manga. There are several new omniscient characters introduced who have special powers and steal the spotlight from your quite ordinary high schoolers. The stakes are higher too as instead of just being a tale about kids concerned with their own survival against undead odds, the literal fate of the entire world is now at risk as Armageddon is literally occurring through the school’s curse. Escalation through a franchise is normal, but when the first game had you running for your life from ghosts to looking at where we are now with fights between a religious illuminati, mahou shoujos, and tentacle monsters; this narrative development is fairly offputting for someone who just wanted a good vengeful spirit story.

Told in a very visual novel-like style, you’d also expect the writing to at least be decent but compared to the others, Blood Drive takes a dip. A few plot threads and holes are brought up that are just left hanging, characters will refer to currently transpiring events that they would not have any knowledge of, and there is little that is actually scary in the writing except for regular vivid descriptions of gore and demonic symbols. It does have some humorous moments that got a chuckle, enough intrigue to keep you engaged, and a few unexpected events (one of which is really cool and is only seen in Japanese media), but it’s definitely the weakest in the series storywise, even moreso than the unlocalized comedy game.

It could be forgiven if Blood Drive were just a subjective mess on a narrative level, but the middling plot is actually the only thing that kept me going through some of the worst presentation and mechanics I’ve experienced in a game all year. While the first localized PSP game used a 2D style akin to something produced in RPGMaker and the second was more of a visual novel with room-escape elements, this chapter features Super-Deformed 3D sprites in a non-rotatable 3D environment on Unity’s game engine. This new graphical style immediately reveals the game’s main problem, a very low framerate. As soon as you turn on your flashlight in game, the framerate drops in half and stutters along whenever the player forces the camera to move. This all seems to be at the fault of the development’s lack of talent or poor toolset versus the Vita itself as the handheld definitively has other games that look and run better on it. Whatever is making the system struggle affects lag as well for several infamous objects in the game. Throughout the game for instance, you’ll be regularly walking past a dirty bucket outside the first classroom you started in. Every time you get in proximity of this bucket, a flies buzzing sound effect will cause the system to freeze for a second. A later example of a one-hit-kill deathtrap you have to pass by multiple times achieves its difficulty by slowing down the responsiveness of your Vita. Imagine if you were traveling through Sen’s Fortress in Dark Souls and every swing of the axe traps lagged the entire game for a moment.

The second flaw that makes itself apparent is very unacceptable load times, with as many as five seconds of waiting just to open up the menu, followed by another five to look at something as simple as your inventory, followed yet again by another ten seconds to exit those two menus and go back to the game. It’s actually quicker to pause the game by pressing Square and seeing the Message Log than it is go to the Menu. When you die, you’re forced to the main menu instead of resuming where you left off, which results in even more loading and unnecessary button presses.

While the illustrations and text size has certainly been increased thanks to the new platform, the audio quality hasn’t been improved and even sounds a little compressed. Like the last two, the game uses binaural audio so when you wear headphones, you can hear sound effect accurately around you. Unfortunately, there’s no option to turn the game back to a mono setting if you’re playing it on a Playstation TV and some of the voice clips are quieter than normal regardless of setup. The music follows the same industrial style as the rest of the games, but there’s no escalation of composition in the main exploration BGM like there was in the first PSP game I fell in love with. None of the music stands out to me now except for the Title Screen music (from going back to it so much) and the End-Of-Chapter-Plot-Twist song.

On top of all of this, the game regularly crashes. Throughout my playthrough, the game forced itself to quit four times between playing it both on the PS TV, and the Vita. One of these annoying crashes occurred just when I was scrolling too fast in the menu.

The 3D chibi aesthetic can be polarizing in itself as characters can be too cute looking despite the subject material, the models have limited animation and are dragged around during dialogue like early 2000s JRPGs and the added camera work doesn’t really add much that couldn’t have been done with sprites or ends up making scenes more confusing with odd angle decisions. The models are capable of different facial animations, but regularly, the expressions don’t change or match what’s occurring with the action and 2D profile images. The older games left a lot of the physical descriptions to imagination with visceral or disturbing illustrations from time to time, but Blood Drive actually has less of these CG images than past titles since they substitute all of the action in with amateur cinematography. This is compounded by the aforementioned loading problems which ruins every attempt at a jumpscare because of a noticeable delay when sound effects or new assets are shown.

Along with a disappointing story, and a broken mess of an engine, Blood Drive’s has bad game design. I have a feeling the developers (for the second time now) are trying to replicate the tense feel of exploring the Spencer Mansion in the first Resident Evil, in which you had a lot of retreading and had to learn the layout in order to survive single-unit encounters that will become routine but still risky. Blood Drive does contain a sense of tension as you slowly make your way around the school, but more from fear of random crashes or having to see another loading screen versus the dangers present within. Traps that are placed around the school will reduce your health, but the loss is minimal and you recover fully after saving your game so the threat feels negligible. Since chapters can be ridiculously short (if you know exactly what to do), there’s little need for the resources you find in each section and thus no longterm tension for managing them.

You have the returning Darkening mechanic, in which constantly looking at bizarre sites or being attacked by enemies eventually makes your character go insane, but this suffers as well. There’s no meter this time to gauge your sanity and instead the screen just starts getting covered in static. This conflicts with the necessity to search for key items around the school as many of them aren’t explicitly marked or hinted at. Since you need to basically pixel hunt and retread locations over and over, your thoroughness is punished the more you explore. Since I wasn’t following a walkthrough for a majority of the game, I spent 30 minutes looking for a key item at one point and it turns out it was in an old unmarked drawer I’ve already checked on earlier. Turns out the item was added to that drawer because a small event occurred but there was no plot reasoning for it, I didn’t get a narrative clue to check that area again, and I didn’t even know what I was explicitly looking for in general. Meanwhile, my character’s mental state (and my screen visibility) was being punished for rechecking old areas.

You only run into two types of enemies throughout the entire game who chase you until you hide from them in cabinets or leave the hallways they’re patrolling. These enemies follow the RPGMaker logic found in games like The Witch’s House or Ao Oni in which regardless of how much distance you gained in one area, it doesn’t have any bearing on how far back they are when you’re in a new one. They will just be immediately behind you a fixed two seconds later. To be brief about the hiding spaces, they aren’t well designed either. Enemies have inconsistencies in their range of finding you, get their pathing stuck, and sometimes don’t leave properly while you’re unseen. Amnesia this is not.

There are a few special “boss” like encounters where you have to escape from special foes but these are poorly designed. Without going into spoiler specifics, one has a two minute startup time between failures and has you trying to find the right room to exit among 10 or so different choices. Another has you trying to scale down a weird artifact that’s attempting to absorb you and because of this, the controls and camera freaks out. All of them are only memorable because of the number of times you had to reload from a Game Over versus actually being frightening.

I could spend pages discussing additional specific problems including the lackluster Extra Chapters, less and more boring “Wrong Endings” than old games, an obtuse puzzle that stumped both Japanese and English players, as well as a universe where double-A batteries power smartphones; but a fine closing example of this poor, broken mess comes from an early patch in the Japanese version that is pre-loaded into the English build. Per player request, an option was added in for unlimited flashlight/cellphone battery power. But they’ve even managed to fail fixing that issue as it’s not an option in the main menu. You have to activate it in-game with the Select Button and it will turn itself off on a regular basis, as if there was some conflict in the game’s scripting that toggled flashlight durability so that it wouldn’t be drained during cutscenes and they forgot that the two factors would conflict.

Corpse Party: Blood Drive is a disappointment on every possible level and it’s a tragedy because I really was looking forward to it. If brought to a platform like the PC in the future with updated assets and smoother gameplay, they could solve many of the technical problems or make them tolerable. But this would only elevate the game from its god awful status to barely mediocre, its only saving grace is my interest in the fates of the cast from the old games. In any case, this is one party that not worth the $40 ($50 if physical) door fee when you can get better storytelling, gameplay, and scares from cheaper thrills down the block. I rarely say this since it’s damnation for many games, but if you’re invested in Corpse Party’s plot, you’ll be better off watching someone else on the internet play through it for you.