Namco's new hack-and-slash action game Knight's Contractwas on display at the Tokyo Game Show this week, and I had the opportunity to sit down with producer Ryo Mito to find out a bit more about what to expect when thegame launches this spring.
You play as the invincible warrior Heinrich, who has entered into a contract with a resurrected witch named Gretchen to protect her from harm. If you're going to sign up a protector, you might as well sign up someone who can't be killed and wields an oversized scythe, right?
Heinrich and Gretchen are on a mission to stop the evil Dr. Faust, who is up to all sorts of evliness in medieval Germany. He'd better look out, because Heinrich and Gretchen appear to be a formidable fighting team. The player directly controls Heinrich, who mainly uses combo-based melee attacks to slay his victims. In that regard, Knight's Contract is fairly standard in its gameplay. The twist is that he also has the ability to call upon Gretchen's magic skills by holding down the right trigger (although I saw the game running on Xbox 360, it will also be available for PS3). When Heinrich finds his smashing and slashing isn't enough to get the job done, he can engage Gretchen's witchy ways and cast spells.
But traveling with a witch has a downside. Because Heinrich has signed a sarcred contract to protect Gretchen, he can't let her fall in battle. If she does, it's game-over. If that sounds like Knights Contract is essentially one big escort mission, well, it sort of is. But Mito assured me that the game is designed to leverage the tension of protecting Gretchen while preserving the feeling of power that should come with controlling an invincible warrior.
I haven't had the chance to play Knight's Contract yet, so we'll have to wait a bit to find out how the game balances that dynamic. One thing's for sure, though. If the rest of the bosses in Knights Contract are anything like the two-headed flaming horse/chariot hybrid hell-creature I saw in the demo, then I dedinitely want to see more.
