Few games in my household have gone from "Let's try this demo" to "I must own this today" as quickly as the sequel to Tecmo's Deception. Kagero: Deception II is, simply put, a wonderful romp through a nicely realized world of torture and politics. Kagero uses anticipation, long term planning and the hunter/prey relationship to create a suspenseful and rewarding fantasy adventure trap-based action simulation (Tecmo doesn't know how to classify this game and neither do I.)
The story - told in the typically obtuse Japanese fashion - follows your role as Millenia, a young girl brainwashed and molded into the secret weapon of an ancient race of uppity blue-skinned muckrakers. These immortal smurfs, called Timenoids, regularly take off for vacation and leave you in charge of defending the castle. It seems that the local humans are always breaking in for some reason of another... either they're looking for powerful relics or the cure for a son's illness. Whatever brings them to your door doesn't matter. Your job is to kill them.
Millenia kills things not with guns or tanks, but with cleverly triggered booby traps. Before the pathetic humans enter your estate, you get to run around and set hidden traps in all the rooms. When a human walks within range of one of your toys, you hit the switch and spring the surprise. Traps range from the expected bear traps and crossbow darts to the more nefarious poison gases and launching floor sections.
There are many types of humans who enjoy stepping into trouble, and each type acts and reacts differently... a very nice touch that keeps things exciting. The brawny fighter types will charge right after you (allowing you to anticipate their moves and set traps right in their way), the aged wizards tend to hang back and pelt you with magic (forcing you to sting them with arrows or corner them and then drop rocks on their heads)... and the senior citizens, children and assorted untrained commonfolk just wander around until they start bleeding. Then they run and hide.
Between levels, Millenia faces her greatest challenge of all: enduring the horribly repetitive and entirely unecessary cutscenes. While they may slowly advance the plot, they also project grueling screenshots of throbbing villagers, bouncing like nauseous Tekken fighters. The dialogue doesn't come with voice actors, so you have to read aloud their various insipid reasons for entering your castle of death.
Kagero also opens with one of the most pyschologically gruesome full-motion videos I have ever seen in a video game.
The intense fun comes from setting of chains of traps. Trap combos get you big points and big laughs. Watching a well-crafted trap series come together is a real pleasure. ...Big stinky Gunter walks into the room and is immediately thrown into the opposing wall by a launching floor pad. Before he gets to his feet, you drop a huge spiked rock on him. Then, when he finally stands up (with a noticeable limp), you finish him off with a volley of arrows. (Although you are limited to three traps at a time, if you're quick you can replace a spent trap with a new one and smack your victim around some more.)
I'm reluctant to toe the line and call Kagero "sadistic" or label it as another "be the bad guy" game. On the latter, the barely-there plot heavily blurs any lines of good and evil. For the former, it's not much more sadistic than any other game involving killing. Dead is dead, be it by bullets or falling rocks. It's just that in Kagero, the death is premeditated.
