#hack-'n-slash

Blades of Time

Blades of Time is a rarity for B-games. This was an honest attempt by Gaijin to show how much they had grown since X-Blades, paying homage to that game with another action-adventure, treasure hunting romp, filled with slashes, shots, magic, and monster killing. Just taking a glance at the cover, though, shows that a lot had changed for them since 2007. Ayumi was back, but now with a realistic art style and, *gasp* HOT PANTS! This was a different age, where the team was still most certainly horny, but now in a more socially accepted yet boring way. Also, she was white and British now, and her personality was replaced with cocky idiot for mildly surprised board of wood. On a style level, Blades of Time was a huge step back, with even the music drained of personality, but it was a massive step above X-Blades in every way you could imagine. But, it was still a B-game, and that still brought problems. 

X-Blades

If you owned a Xbox 360 or PS3 in 2009, odds are good you have heard of X-Blades before. You probably don’t remember too much, though. It was one of those budget titles flooding the market that tended to disappear as soon as they appeared, maybe getting lucky enough to be remembered a decade later by a small handful of youtube producers obsessed with B-games. However, X-Blades has shown a surprising amount of staying power, with a fleshed out wikipedia page and the odd sight of it appearing in discussions among particularly nerdy sects of the internet. There seems to be three reasons for this: The game had an anime art style, the game was made in Russia, and the lead wore almost nothing but a few strings of cloth and a thong, leaving her butt bare for everyone to see on the cover and most ads in a “look at my butt” pose.

Never underestimate the memory of twenty somethings when it comes to horny anime art.