May 16, 2005 - It's hard to wrap our heads around this one. Fifth Phantom Saga comes from our lovable friends at Sega and it's one of the more unusual titles in the PS3 line-up. Try first-person shooting with a floating buddy.
Sega surprised us at E3 with this unexpected game at the PlayStation 3 conference, in more ways than one. For one, it's a game that combines guns and ghosts. As you walk around with an assault rifle in a standard FPS system of corridor, the player summoned an armored Phantom (maybe something like the Stands of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), who floats around in the corner of your screen, carrying out various commands. Sometimes he breaks down walls. Sometimes he grabs up boxes (which seem to magnetically attach to his crotch). Sometimes he smashes everything in his path. In the meantime, you are right there behind him, giving him directions but saving your ammo while he does most of the dirty work for you.
As said earlier, we're not entirely sure where this game is going. You are commanding your Phantom -- the first-person character waves the hand not carrying a gun to direct the spirit -- but there wasn't a lot of action on the part of the player in the demo sequence. In what looked to be a puzzle sequence where a symbol on the wall was matched up with the shadow of an emblem that the Phantom seemed to commanding, it was the non-playable character playing the game (unless, of course, you have more control over the Phantom than we're assuming.) Even in gunfights, we only saw the player unload once. On the other hand, the Phantom was able to do some interesting things, such as shift blocks around and smash stuff and ... well, maybe not "interesting", but when a giant, floating, hellmouthed beast is smashing stuff in an FPS, it strikes you as something that you want to know more about.
Visually, this was one of the more simple PS3 demos, while also being one of the few that was clearly and undeniably running gameplay and not perhaps concept rendering. The game is clearly a very, very early project -- we wish Sega had been able to work out a better physics set for the creature's movement of boxes (the stuff he picks up just floats into the middle of his body, clipping through the polygons), but there was a good amount of stuff that smashed and moved around with a basic physics set. The corridors were simple square rooms dressed up with mighty textures, something similar to one of the many Unreal 3 engine demos we've seen over the years. Similarly, the character Phantom and first-person arm showed the advanced modeling and normal mapping that is fast becoming the standard for next-gen visuals. Some shiny water effects and moving lights rounded out the visual demonstration.
This has got to be just the start of Fifth Phantom Saga, and we're intrigued to find out what Sega is able to concoct. The strange creature at the center of the game is the key to this being more than just another FPS, while the game world of this FPS will need to be opened up in order to compete with the next-gen FPSes that this game is aiming to run with. We'll summon up some more info on Sega's Fifth Phantom Saga in the near future.
