As I mentioned to peccaui the other day over tea and cupcakes, it seems that I?ve become the de facto reviewer of weird/crappy action games around these parts. While he and his cohort MeeRonn are more often than not infatuated with a game like "Genki Genki Supaa Panic Button!" which that involves stacking caramel muffins to the moon and then trying to stop the assorted rats, weevils and other rodents from taking a hold and sending your butterscotch Babylon down to the ground, I find myself more firmly grounded in reality, with my gaming tastes centering around things that more require hitting buttons over and over again until the zombie falls over and prizes pop out.

A hail of lightning super move. Never saw THAT before.

So this is where you find me, then, working over the newest of the straight from Japan action titles for your enjoyment. Blood Will Tell, called Dororo in Japan after Osamu Tezuka's old and not too popular manga series, is the story of the wandering warrior Hyakkimaru and his thieving sidekick, the eponymous and ambiguously gendered Dororo. Hyakkimaru is not like other boys, though, he was born under a rather poor sign and his father ended up making a pact with a team of demons who subsequently stole all his body parts. Hyakkimaru was quickly shipped down river by Dad-the-asshole.

It's fortunate that he's so lucky. Hyakkimaru pulls a Moses with the help of an old doctor named Jyukai. Jyukai, good guy that he is, sets, in true Italian carpenter style, to the task of cobbling together a body for Hyakkimaru to wear. Like Pinocchio, Hyakkimaru's quest is to go out there and become a real boy. Unlike Pinocchio, Hyakkimaru's quest involves less "telling the truth" and more "slaughtering demons with his wicked sword-arms".

Sounds good to me!

Jyukai, always the industrious inventor, has supplied Hyakkimaru with more than just an assembly of wooden appendages. In addition to his ability to sweep off his forearms and fight with the blades hidden inside, Hyakkimaru has a concealed machine gun in his arm and a rather powerful cannon somewhere around his right knee. Score one for Japanese ingenuity!

Armed to the gills, we join Hyakkimaru at the start of his journey. It's laid out for us that every time we kill one of the major fiends in the game; Hyakkimaru regains a little bit of his humanity and often cool powers to boot! In one of the only creative aspects of the game, the world is seen through Hyakkimaru's black and white psychic vision until he recovers his left eye at the end of the Prologue.

The game falters when it becomes clear that you'll almost never be impressed by what your body parts grant you. The game blows its wad early and after the second chapter, there really aren't any parts worth shouting about until the last hour or two of the game. Most of them just increase your attack or other, more Byzantine, stats like metabolism and regeneration. What started as, 'Sweet! I get to do 47 more of these!' turned into 'Aw man, do I have to do 28 MORE of these?'

I had high hopes for Blood Will Tell, being led astray by the always chipper previews of various review publications, both web and print-based. It's easy to be upbeat when the alternative is a cutoff of your supply of preview material, especially from a big time name like Sega. This game is the poster child for not taking previews at face value.

So this is what I'll impart to you about Blood Will Tell: I wish I didn't buy it.

Blood Will Tell is just another example of the stunning mediocrity that action games are falling into right now. Since Devil May Cry came out, everyone wants to be the next one. Or maybe, since Devil May Cry, action games and their ilk are now put under greater scrutiny.

Kick, punch, it's all in the mind.

The key to any good action game is simplism and variety. These things are not mutually exclusive. Devil May Cry had two major weapons, around ten enemies, and a grand total of five bosses (most repeated three times). Conversely, Blood Will Tell has 48 bosses, 30 enemies and probably well over 50 swords to pick up.

Which was the better game?

It was Devil May Cry, because each of its two weapons had more combo strings than all of the Blood Will Tell weapons combined. Because there's only ONE chain and it's usually easier to just hit square seven times than it is to try and mix in the triangles button. Hyakkimaru DOES have the ability to sheath his sword arms and fight with a more traditional blade? that doesn't gain experience like the sword arms do. Nipped that idea right in the bud! Hyakkimaru also has the curious ability to "slice" his enemies, a sort of charge-up attack that moves into a King of Fighters-style button combination session reminiscent of Geese Howard's Deadly Rave. For you less cultured video game enthusiasts, think of it as a brief round of Parappa the Rapper. You're given a certain amount of time to finish an enemy while pounding out patterns of square, circle and X. The meaningless rewards for your labor are life, bullets or, if you're especially good, a new sword. This new sword, unfortunately, functions exactly the same as all your other swords except it does more damage, maybe.

Devil May Cry was better because each of its small cadre of enemies had six or seven or ten or twelve extremely varied and extremely smart attacks. In this game you can consider yourself blessed if an enemy has more than two. More often than not an enemy will have a swipe attack and a rolling attack. All of these can be countered by, say it with me, running in and mashing Square.

And the bosses! Blood Will Tell eschews originality and goes with a more Mega Man-esque style of rehash. There is not a single boss in Blood Will Tell that does not have a near carbon copy somewhere else. Sometimes there are two or three and you find yourself wondering if demons don't give birth to litters of these things or something. Once again, Devil May Cry wins out. It may've had significantly less bosses than Blood Will Tell, but each new encounter was a new environment to fight them in, and every time the boss had something new to bring to the table. All the Blood Will Tell boss battles take part in circular or semi-circular or oval environments and often the best strategy involves running up to the boss and, like usual, jamming on square until you get knocked away for miniscule damage, and then repeating. Aside from the last boss, who is the only boss that requires more than the run in and mash strategy, I spent a grand total of two lives fighting the other bosses in the game. Do you want to know how weak that is?

It's pretty freaking weak.

The game's one saving grace is its story. While bogged down in many stupid clich