My first experience playing the PS3 was not with the acclaimed Resistance: Fall of Man. I had watched that intense game out of the corner of my eye while I was playing the more serene Okami. I had no real interest in playing Resistance, as I knew I would die in no fewer than two seconds and not really get to appreciate that game at all.

However, when I had the opportunity to play the PS3, I did not want to pass it up. I decided to play another game, Genji. It looked like something I might actually be able to play (an action game, not an FPS) and the boxed advertised a game about ancient Japan. It sounded interesting at least, so I began a game.

While I had expected a cutscene at the beginning of the game, I was unprepared for the horrible voice acting. The characters’ mouths moved and were poorly dubbed. As if the dubbing weren’t bad enough, the voice actors had accents from Australian to American to pseudo-Irish. I found it incredibly distracting from what would otherwise be a mediocre cutscene.

I do not hate cutscenes; in fact, I really enjoy them when used in moderation, which is the way I see them in many newer Final Fantasy games. One of the best aspects of the Final Fantasy cutscenes is that they rarely try to do voice acting with mouth movements. (This has changed in FFXII, but I have yet to form a real critical analysis due to the short amount of time I’ve played the game thus far.) Looking back to games such as FFVIII and FFX, the full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes were used mainly as showy pieces of drama – they did not burden them with dialogue. I really do not see the point in animating a FMV cutscene for one language only to have it poorly dubbed into another.

The cutscenes in Genji were poor not only because of dubbing but also because of their content and quality. As I implied before, a large amount of time was spent on a scene where two characters talked in what amounted to a poor substitute for a film scene.

Then there was the issue of the graphics. The whole game had a very red tone – much of the set, especially in the beginning with a fire, was very red. It was hard to look at it for any length of time. The graphic quality of the game was very high, but the characters and backgrounds didn’t blend well together. It looked like someone had done a poor job in Photoshop and forgotten to soften the outlines of the characters to look more natural. It seemed as if the quality of the PS3 detracted from the game rather than complimented it – the high quality console revealed all the flaws.

Aside from the tone and graphics, I really wanted to like this game. I had hoped to find a game I wanted to play on the PS3 that I could return to – something that rose to the challenge of developing for a new console. I understand that practically every game developer is having a terrible time working with the PS3, but this game just seemed to get worse the more I played.

I played first as a character who was a sword fighter. He moved with decent speed, but I found the controls to be somewhat counter-intuitive. I had a hard time going where I wanted to in the environment and understanding the fighting system. Later, I got to play another character, but he moved ridiculously sluggishly and swung around what amounted to a glorified stone column. While he was powerful, the stereotyped fighters – big = sluggish and smaller guy = more agile – has been done so many times it’s not even fun anymore.

I had held out hope for this game. I played it for nearly an hour, hoping that it would get better. Instead, I found graphics temporarily freezing up, cutscenes that revealed a plot I didn’t care about, and many of the same mistakes I’d seen in other games set in ancient Japan like Onimusha 4. I really hope the PS3 gets better soon and developers will make games I want to play.