Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Old-school"

Of all the years I spent gaming, there have been many firsts: playing an action game for the first time, playing a platformer for the first time, chasing a floating ghost in bondage gear down the basement of a mobile home for the first time but, after all this time of being a gamer, I have never got around to playing an import from Japan. With a small ounce of regret, I have played my first Japanese import game with The Rapid Angels.

The story of Rapid Angels is...uhm...uh...er...I have no idea, the whole thing is in Japanese - both in voiceovers and text, which is a shame considering the amount of time devoted to dialogue is considerate, whether through cutscenes or in-game dialogue choices that are, once more, in Japanese. So really, the story has to be tossed aside due to translation issues (meaning absolutely zero translation). Regardless of story, Rapid Angels manages to be a halfway-decent arcadey platformer for various reasons.

First and foremost, there are three characters to choose from, all able to move quickly through the levels by dashing and attacking through enemies, which is clearly the main focus since trying to stop and strike enemies becomes cumbersome and will more than likely result in you getting hit once or twice before being able to land a single hit yourself, making the entire experience more like a hopscotch-over-the-enemies game than a platformer with actual combat in it, bosses aside. In fact, one could say that Rapid Angels is just a bunch of running leading to the next boss battle, all of which are fairly easy to beat at worst, making the entire thing a cakewalk. Sure, the player only gets one life before a game over, but a game over in Rapid Angels merely means that you respawn where you died and your score counter gets reset to 0, meaning that, if you are not concerned at all with how you would score, the game is probably the easiest thing since Lego Star Wars.

Really, there isn't much to say about Rapid Angels, it's just a platformer. Really, nothing interesting at all. In fact, this game would have been so much better if I actually understood the story instead of mashing on circle to blast through dialogue.

Overall, given that this game really is as generic as it could get, it's not really worth the purchase. Just go play Mario or something, I don't know.