Date Released: 11 March 2003
Date Played: 27 January 2022
Introduction:
Sol Divide is one of the most painfully terrible games I've ever played and I'm absolutely shocked that it has received as many ports as it has. It was developed by Psikyo for arcades back in 1997 before being ported to several home consoles. It's a departure from their normal types of games and tries to blend a horizontal shmup with an RPG while throwing in some fighting game elements into the mix I have played this game three different times on three different consoles, and each time I play it I feel like it only gets worse. I Originally played this game on the PS2 in 2006 where I felt like it was just a boring arcade game. Then, I played it again on the Nintendo Switch in 2018 where it was a boring arcade game with so much input delay that it was practically impossible. Now, I've decided to try to redeem Sol Divide by playing what is considered to be the absolute best port of the game, the Playstation 1 version.
You may have noticed that this version was released in 2003. Two whole years after the PS2 was released and almost halfway through the cycle leading up to the following console generation. This is such a bizarre choice for releasing their game that I had all of these theories brewing in my head trying to rationalize a reason why they would have done this. The best thing I could come up with was that the publisher was contractually obligated to release it on a home console in the United States, but knew the game was so bad that they decided to bury it by putting it on the previous generation Playstation to save face and money. Sadly, we know this isn't the case, because they released the game on the PS2 just a few years later (and once again right as the PS3 was coming out). So, there as to be some other reason for doing this. Why would you release your game time and time again on a console that's one it's way out? You know the game isn't good and isn't going to sell well, why even bother? At least on the PS2 version it's bundled with the much better Dragon Blaze. I'm at a complete loss for what actually happened and the mystery of why this all came to be is, by far, the most interesting aspect of the game to me.
Despite all of the terrible choices centered around this miserable game, there are still people out there who consider the game underrated or as "hidden gem." Don't listen to what they have to say, because they're wrong. Sol Divide is an objectively bad game with almost no redeeming qualities. It's a broken mess, and is not only extremely boring while being maddeningly frustrating, it's also barely playable.
Story:
There is some nonsensical story about the armies of Satan invading some fantasy kingdom and you have to stop them. It's all very convoluted and hard to discern because there's very little information about it out there. Even the Wikipedia page for this game is mostly blank and only has basic information about it's release date and critical reception. Most of the information about the narrative has to be gleaned from the manual because there is practically no story given to you while you play the game.
You're greeted by a terrible CGI cutscene that shows the skeleton of a fallen warrior lying in the sand near some ruins. Then, you see a dragon fly by overhead... and that's it. There's no exposition, dialog, or anything else to let you know what's going on and this cutscene could honestly be from any sort of fantasy game. As you play the game, you're shown a map of a fantasy world in between the stages. Obviously, you're traveling to these places, but you aren't given any idea of what these locations are or what is happening there. Then, when you finish the game, you're greeted by one of the laziest things I've ever seen any developer do. The final cut-scene is completely in Japanese. Let me remind you that this is the U.S. release of a game; and the final cut-scene is all Japanese text with no audio or English translation. I'm not sure if the publisher just didn't care, didn't have the money, or didn't think anyone would ever make it this far because the game is so terrible, but it's an absolute slap in the face to have this cutscene play out after suffering through this game.
Gameplay:
The Playstation 1 version of the game is considered to be the best not only because of it's port of the Arcade version of the game, but also because of the included Normal mode which is supposed to be more like a story-based campaign.
In Arcade mode, you being by selecting from the usual 7 difficulty settings found in most Psikyo games. These range from the insultingly titled, "Monkey" for the easiest setting, up through "Child" and on to "Very Hard" for the highest difficulty. If you've ever played a Psikyo game, you'll be fully aware that the games pack quite a punch even on the "Monkey" setting and will not be a walk in the park. As for this game, I've never been able to 1 credit clear it on anything harder than the easiest setting in all my attempts with it. This isn't from a lack of skill but rather from the poorly implemented gameplay mechanics and god awful design. So, if you do make the misguided decision to play this game, don't let Psikyo's direct insult of playing on a difficulty designed for a monkey force you to play on a higher difficulty setting. You won't have more fun that way... you'll have way less. Believe me, I didn't even think that was possible until playing through the game on the practically impossible Normal difficulty.
You select from 1 of 3 characters to use in combat. Kashon, the hawkman (or bird person as I like to call him) who is the largest character and is evenly balanced, Vorg, the fighter who has stronger melee attacks but weak magic, and Tyora, the sexy wizard, who has strong magic but weak melee abilities. Personally, I always go with the wizard because she seems to be the best for cheesing the game, which is really the only way I've been able to make any progress with it. After that, you're dumped out into the first stage.
The gimmick of Sol Divide is that it's more melee focused instead of being based around shooting like most shmups. Each character has the ability to shoot bullets, do melee attacks at close range, and cast an overly large and complex series of magic spells that are essential to make any progress. In addition to this, you're given only one life but have a health bar to make up for it. You also have a mana meter for casting spells that is refilled by damaging enemies with your shot or melee attacks. As you kill enemies, they drop power upgrades, additional spells, and health and mana recovery items. It's actually pretty sound idea that seems like it would be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the game is executed so poorly that almost none of its systems actually works.
Here is how the game actually plays. Each of the stages is broken up into several smaller encounters with enemies that range from bats, eyeballs, wizards, skeleton warriors, mushroom monsters, and all other manner of fantasy creatures. These happen more like an arena battle where you move on after you clear everything rather than the game continually scrolling as you would expect in a shmup. These arenas are broken up by mid-bosses and final bosses just like you will expect and they mostly play out exactly the same way as the other encounters. Your ranged shot is pretty much useless and is only good for taking out the smallest and weakest of enemies. Usually, these just sit in one place at the beginning of each encounter and let you blast them away and really only serve to waste more of your time. After that, a handful of other enemies will appear and start bobbing and weaving around the screen as they bum-rush you one at a time. They get right up in your face and you have to use your melee attack to dispatch them before the next one rushes in. This seems fine, except that even your melee attack is rather weak and will take several complete combos just to take down an enemy. To help with this, each character has a dedicated special move that they can do during their combo to help take down the enemies faster but pulling it off is easier said than done. If you are able to do it, it will make they incredibly tanky enemies much easier to deal with because using your normal combo attack seems to take forever. This makes each combat encounter much longer than it needs to be and this can be especially true for the boss fights. It's annoying, but not a deal breaker. The real issue in clearing the arenas lies in the enemy behavior. They are all much faster than you are and will dash in and hit you before you're able to move out of the way. If you decide to go on the offensive, and move forward to kill them before they have a chance to come to you, they will often bob, weave, and dart out of your attack range so you end up chasing them all over the screen trying to land a hit on them. The hit detection is very poor and it often feels like a lot of your hits just aren't making contact when they should be. To make matters worse, your character is immobile when they are in the middle of a combo. So, you'll be in the middle of attacking an enemy, just for it to dodge away and you'll be stuck swinging at empty air. It's usually at this time that the other enemies on the screen decide to shoot you when there's nothing you can do about it. This leads me to my other point, which is that your character is huge and takes up about a quarter of the vertical portion of the screen. Enemies will send out a barrage of bullets and attacks that there's no way to avoid and you'll take damage constantly. If that weren't enough, you basically have no invulnerability time after getting hit and you'll have enemies stun lock you constantly as you're getting hit from all sides only to watch your health bar rapidly get drained. It's rage inducing, and the combat never feels like it's working the way it's supposed to do.
You know how in martial arts movies the hero will be surrounded by bad guys and they will all attack him one at a time and he seems super powered and untouchable? Well, this game is the opposite of that. The bad guys all attack you one at a time, but it's them that are super powered and untouchable. It won't be long until you're trying to deal with several enemies all at once as they move all around the screen while avoiding your attacks and popping off cheap shots at you.
To help with this, you're given magic spells to use. As you kill enemies, they will drop magic scrolls that you can collect. These are added to your spell book shown under your life bar. Several of these spells are permanent and you can use them whenever you have the mana, while some are single use items. Every character can have up to 9 of them at any given time and they can be cycled through by pressing the X button. Personally, I feel like 9 spells is WAY too many to try to deal with. All enemies and bosses have spell weaknesses, defenses, and invulnerabilities and it's up to you to learn which one works best in most situations. But, with 9 spells, it can be a challenge to figure out what works... especially after you blow a single use spell on a boss that has an invulnerability to it. The permanent spells are the main ones you'll be using and they range from a flame thrower, to lighting that strikes the whole screen, and finally the most useful skill in the entire game, the freeze attack. This spell freezes all of the enemies on the screen and actually gives you a chance to attack something without it dodging and moving all around and will also prevent the other enemies on the screen from sucker punching you while you're trying to focus on one specific guy. Since you're mana refills by attacking, most of the game just consists of you freezing everyone on screen, attacking something until your mana is full enough to cast another freeze spell, and rinse and repeat. You basically have to chain freeze the entire game to cheese your way through it. The other spells like meteor and death may only appear one time in the game and are single use and can be very devastating. You typically have to save them for a boss as many of their attack patterns are practically un-dodgeable and you need to kill them as quickly as you can before losing all your health. Luckily, the freeze trick works on most of the bosses as well.
If you don't want to suffer alone, there's 2-player simultaneous cooperative play. Good luck finding someone to see it through with you to the end.
In addition to the Arcade mode, this port also has a Normal mode which serves as a story based RPG. While it is a nice feature, it is executed as lazily and poorly as everything else in the game. What you're supposed to do is make your way through 16 floors of a dungeon. Each floor is broken up into little combat arenas just like the main game where you'll have to kill enemies. Doing this will level up your character which does nothing more than give you more health. To increase your other stats, find healing items, spells, and everything else, you'll need to collect floating chests from fallen enemies. These chests have rarity levels like copper, silver, and gold. To utilize them, you'll have to constantly be returning to the menu to open them and have a chance at a precious upgrade. Sadly, most of the chests require a key to open; and these keys can only be found in other chests. You'll have to grind for these keys because you really need the items found inside the locked chests. As you progress, you'll be given the option of repeating the floor you just did before moving on. Sadly, you'll need to do this several times in order to level up and get the items you need to survive the next floor. Grind, grind, grind.
Occasionally, you'll have a spell drop from one of the chests and you can finally cast something. This time around, the spells all have limited uses and you'll really need to horde them for use on the later floors. It's a real misstep by the designers, because the magic is the most fun part of the game and removing it as a main attack feature in this mode turns the game into a really boring hack and slash game. Albeit one where neither the hacking and/or slacking are any fun.
But, just like the Arcade mode, there are some other insanely stupid design choices here as well. Firstly, you don't even seem to get that much stronger when you manage to get items to increase your attack power and defense. Maybe each one is like a 2% increase to your stats. So, you need to grind a lot to make any difference. Also, many of the floors of the dungeon are just copied and pasted from previous floors. You'll fight the exact same enemies, mid-bosses, and final bosses in a row with only pallet swaps to differentiate them. But, the most grievous sin of the whole game is that when you die in this mode, it takes all of your upgrades and items that you've collected and sends you ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME. Yes, you are a higher level now, but all that does is slightly increase your health. You'll still need to redo all of the grinding you did before to upgrade your attacks and defense and collect all the keys and healing items you'll need. If you're far enough along, the game may not take all of your attack and defense upgrades, but just like 80% of the them. But, even then, it can erase hours of progress. It's, all highly boring and grindy, and the fact that the game makes you redo it again and again is just so painful.
Presentation:
Sol Divide has prerendered 3D graphics similar to Donkey Kong Country on the SNES. Only, in this case instead of being charming and impressive they are chunky, ugly, and muddled with an art style that is very lackluster. Everything in this game is a murky mess and you can barely make out any features of the characters as they fly over uninspired and repetitive backgrounds that are mostly stone structures. The boss design is all over the place but seems to focus on various dragons, lizards, mummies and statues. I guess it's supposed to be like a pseudo-Egyptian theme, but it's all so haphazard and poorly thrown together that it's difficult to even tell what the theme is going for. Maybe if the developers had actually taken the time to tell me what's going on, I would be able to piece it together. The stages are all so similar with their muted color scheme and repetitive environments, that I can't even really tell them apart other than some are above ground and some are below. Not only that, you're given a really boring and sparse orchestral score to accompany your time with the game. I've never personally been much of a fan of the Psikyo shmup soundtracks, and this one is no exception. There are no memorable points in the music and nothing I could find to grab onto. I know that this is a game from 1997, but it looked bad even for that time period and really doesn't hold up well now. Everything about the aesthetic choices in this game are ugly and off-putting. When compared to Psikyo's other games, they don't even look like they're made by the same company.
Conclusion:
I've given this game 3 tries to prove itself over the course of 16 years and it has never been able to give me a single moment of enjoyment. It's not in the "so bad it's good category" and it's not even in the mediocre one either. It's just completely terrible across the board. I want to commend Psikyo on trying something new and a little out of their comfort zone, but they just failed so spectacularly in every conceivable way that I would be remiss to give them even the slightest acknowledgement of any worthwhile effort put into this game. It's an ugly and clunky mess that is barely playable. The game wants you to ignore the shooting aspect of a shoot 'em up and asks you to get right up in the enemy's face and melee attack them while the other enemies get to pretend like they're in a real shmup and blast you with unavoidable bullets from across the screen. Psikyo wants you to play the game by their very specific and not fun at all rules, while they ignore those rules themselves and proceed to make the whole experience feel unfair. The only way around this, is to basically cheese the game by freezing all of the enemies constantly which totally defeats the whole point of playing a shmup.
I don't recommend this game to anyone and would advise everyone to steer clear. I'm angry with myself for having purchased this game 3 separate times just trying to eek out a little enjoyment from something I feel should be good... but just isn't.
Final Status: Beaten (at least 9 times over 3 console generations... and 1 credit cleared on Monkey)
Final Score: 2/10 (about as bad as you can get)
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