After nearly two years of Japanese exclusivity, Malicious has finally arrived on both the EU and US PSN Stores for $10. It's the second console game from Alvion, whose only previous major work was the Japan-only PS2 obscurity Chain Dive (though they contributed to Siren: New Translation's development).
The game's structure is obviously inspired by Megaman. You can play the initial stages in any order, and defeating the boss of each one awards you a new weapon or ability that it had used in the fight. Some bosses are especially weak to certain weapons or abilities, so there is an optimal stage order to be found through trial and error. Unlike in Megaman, the stages are designed merely as arenas to accommodate the bosses--you'll see them as soon as you enter. Also, the difficulty level of each stage depends on how many stages you cleared before it. Bosses will be much more aggressive on higher difficulties and sometimes have new attacks.
The game system is set up in a way that will make it confusing and frustrating to anyone impatient or lazy enough to not bother reading the game's extensive tutorials. What Malicious doesn't spell out for you is that the normal enemies exist only as a resource for you to power up enough to able to damage the bosses. Without powering up, you will do almost no damage to them. Enemies don't respawn, so if you run out of enemies to harvest aura from and you don't have enough left to kill the boss, it's game over (this has happened to me more than once already!).
The flow of the game is meant to go like this:
1. Kill a few enemies to obtain small amount of aura.
2. Get a ton of enemies clustered together and use aura to wipe all them out at once with a chain attack, multiple times if needed.
3. Release your aura to power up (to Level 3 if possible), then fight the boss until aura drains to zero.
4. Repeat until boss is killed.
You can also use aura to heal, but this is a waste and will negatively affect your ranking. Just get better so you don't need to heal.
Kinda sounds like Cave, huh? I would say it's definitely an STG scorer's action game. And it's only about as long as a modern shmup. Thankfully there's a full-fledged ranking system and leaderboards to back it up. Of course, Malicious isn't without its problems. The framerate gets horrifically stuttery in certain stages, or whenever there's tons of stuff going on. Unfortunately, this can sometimes make it hard to read bosses' attacks. The camera, while perfectly functional, is very unintuitive and difficult to use. (It's set to always auto-target the closest enemy. Hold R1 and drag the right stick to pinpoint it on one, or double-tap it to lock onto the boss.) It's also a bit easier than I would have liked...bosses put up a great fight, but you can take way too many hits before dying, and there's no limit on how many times you can dodge like Bayonetta in a row. And there's really no way to tell how much health you have left! It's still a solid challenge though, and you've got limited continues.
Despite these problems, I give Malicious a hearty recommendation. It's so far beyond the standards set for a $10 made-for-download game it's not funny. Alvion is working on a port for the Vita with new content, and I'll definitely be checking that out as well whenever I get that system.
