Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

If you like flying robot suits and blowing the crap out of things, Liberation Maiden is for you. It is a 3D shooter w/ open level design and an excuse plot so thin it's kind of baffling they bothered with one at all.

You see, when the president of New Japan is assassinated by an evil empire known as the Dominion--who, by the way, are now building Captain Planet-esque pollution factories all over the place--his daughter gets elected in his stead and she is tasked w/ flying a giant robot suit and bombing her own country back into some sort of picturesque stone age. This is all portrayed in wonderful and stylish anime w/ great voice action. You'd think w/ the kind of effort they put into telling the story they'd come up w/ one worth telling but, to be honest, it works completely. Liberation Maiden is all about big-time thrills and big time fun.

So, as mentioned, you play as the former president of New Japan's daughter who is now president herself. Her name is Shoko and she flies around in a great big white Gundam-like contraption and just generally blows the hell out of anything she can target. The controls are intuitive--movement is taken care of by the circle pad and aiming by the stylus. I was unsure of using the stylus to aim at first but it actually works quite well and feels natural after a few first rounds. Trailer's make this game look something like an on-rails shooter like Star Fox but each level is basically free roaming--though your progression through the game is strictly linear. You have some side missions like blowing up some factories or aircraft carriers but the meat of the game is destroying spikes which are what the Dominion uses to create pollution and oppression and whatever other evil things they do. Spikes come in lesser and greater varieties and you must destroy the fairly-passive lesser spikes in order to take down the shield surrounding the greater spike which serves as the boss for each level.

I wouldn't quite call Liberation Maiden a bullet hell game but it is sufficient to say there is a hell of a lot going on at once. I had to play through on the easy difficulty first to get the hang of it and after that was able to slowly build up the technique to work through the normal and hard difficulties. There is an interesting dynamic to Liberation Maiden's gameplay which is that your ships shields also serve as your weapons. If you wanna try and really paste an enemy w/ missiles and lasers, you do so at great risk of taking damage. Also, if you take a big hit, it destroys some of your shields and since the shields and weapons are one and the same, it also reduces your fire power which must then be built back up by building chains of rapidly defeated enemies. You only get one life--plus a few continues--in Liberation Maiden but this aspect really gives it a feel similar to classic arcade shoot-em-ups like Raiden where you lose all your weapons upgrades when you lose a life.

And it is the fast paced arcade-like gameplay that is truly Liberation Maiden's best aspect. Unfortunately, the campaign mode is rather short and there is not much to it beyond that. As you work through campaign mode on various difficulties, it unlocks stage attack mode which lets you play through one level at a time to compete for high scores but because there are no online leaderboards, you are basically only competing against yourself. This makes the whole game feel like something like a demo or "just a downloadable" and that's a shame since the production values are so great otherwise. Definitely fans of the genre need to check Liberation Maiden out but definitely expect to be just a little bit disappointed by lack of content.