7 Blades is a game which, unfortunately, has many highs and lows.The game is visually stunning, with great 3d backgrounds rendered in real time, and the potential for many, many monsters on the screen simultaneously. This can lead to some great battles with your unwieldy swings smashing up boxes and scenary around you. There is a large chunk of FMV that takes up a large portion of the game. While this is rendered in a very high quality, it is slightly annoying having your playing time cut down even further because you have to watch a cut-scene every few minutes.
The audio is equally as good, with all the voices still in their original japanese, subtitled in english. Personally, I think this adds to the atmosphere of the game, but some people may have problems keeping up with some of the subtitles. The only other problem with the subtitles is that they are sometimes slightly incorrect, but you can still figure out the correct meaning easily.
The story itself is pretty good, but rather linear, and while there are basically 2 games melded together ( ala. Resident Evil with 2 characters ), the game still fails to pose much of a challenge, and each character's game can be completed in about 2 hours.
The "boss" enemies are visually impressive, and all the opposition have many varied attacks which they can unleash on you. While your opponents have many attacks to unleash, the players attacks are about average for this style of game, but they still feel rather limited, and you regularly find yourself repeating the same move over and over.
Finally, the last dissapointment of this game, is the appaling camera angles. This is noticable more with the sword-fighting character, rather than the gunfighter, but there are times when you are about to strike your enemy, and you find that the entire camera is filled with your characters neck, or perhaps his head... This can be very annoying, and left me swearing at my TV screen many times during the game.
Overall, 7 Blades is a game that is probably worth renting out if you are into this kind of game, but I personally would refrain from buying it. If you have to buy a japenese samurai game, but Onimusha instead...
