Doshin The Giant
by RichKS
Doshin. Hmmm,
a very odd game indeed.
Since Doshin has been shown at E3,
you can safely assume that it'll be coming out in the US and
possibly even Europe. So people who previously thought that
it was "one of those weird things they have in Japan"
are starting to wonder what it's actually like. And the answer
is, well, it's not like anything you've ever played, and also
it's like a lot of other things you have played.
The recipe goes something like: take equal
parts SimCity, Black
& White and Populous, with a nice dash of
Nintendo. Stir, and compress onto an 8cm DVD and play for several
hours.
The premise is very straightforward and the
graphics are pretty but simplistic. For instance, the villagers
tend to turn into sprites when they get beyond a certain distance
away. But you only notice this if you look for it and there
are often about a hundred of them on screen at any given time,
so it's forgivable.
The game is set in a world populated by people
who breed and set up villages and stuff. You directly control
Doshin, a big yellow Tango-man of a giant who you move around
using the analogue stick. He's basically a nice, friendly giant
who helps people. Then if you press the R button, he becomes
Jashin, a naughty giant. Doshin can pick stuff up and move things
around; Jashin can hit things and make them break. Jashin also
moves quicker, jumps higher and is generally more maneuverable,
but villagers are afraid of him, and the very sight is enough
to send them running away like vicars at an Eminem concert.
You can also raise and lower the ground in
a Populous style. Villagers like to have flat ground
to build on, so they're often asking you to raise or lower a
given spot so that they can put a house there. Also there are
trees, which make the ground around them fertile. People only
build on fertile land, so what they really want is flat ground
near a tree. Needless to say, you therefore spend a lot of time
moving trees and creating flat areas to please the villagers.
The game is split up into days, each day takes
half an hour to play. Unlike Pikmin, there's no limit
on the number of days you can play for, so no real need to rush.
You start in the morning of every day and the game saves and
quits automatically at the end of every day. You can start and
continue straight away though, if you fancy a marathon session.
As the day moves on you can guess what time it is by where the
sun is and how long your shadow is. At the start of the day,
all the villagers are asleep and will get up after a minute
or 2.
As any girl will tell you, size matters and
you change size a lot in this game. You start off 'small' which
is about 10 meters tall. I guess that's small for a yellow giant.
As you do things which make the villagers happy, they throw
hearts at you. Whenever you collect 21 hearts, you get a bit
bigger. If you upset the villagers (by stepping on them or smashing
one of their buildings) they throw skulls at you. Each skull
overwrites a heart (and vice versa), but getting 21 of either
makes you get bigger.
As you get bigger, you move faster, can carry
bigger stuff, can pick up bigger buildings (houses when you're
a bit big, farms and factories when you're very big and monuments
when you're massive) and raise/lower the ground quicker. Also,
once you get over a certain size you can flatten out ground
to make it totally smooth rather than needing to raise and lower
individual bits. On the other hand, if you get too big, it's
hard to do anything without crushing people and buildings.
As far as I can tell the people also have a
memory of what you've done to them. If you're mostly nice to
the people in a given village, they'll throw hearts at you just
for being near them. If you scare them a lot and crush them
and their buildings, they'll hate you and you'll get skulls
whenever they see you. In all I get the impression that being
nasty all the time is probably easier (as long as you remember
to keep enough people alive!) because you'll get big quicker,
but playing nice seems somehow more rewarding.
When a village reaches a certain size, the
people will build a monument to the giant. It'll either be a
nice monument if they like you, or a nasty, spiky monument if
they hate and fear you. Ultimately, either one will count towards
the game's objective, which is to get the people to build 16
different monuments. At the start of the game there are 4 villages
in the world, and each contains a different tribe (Red, Yellow,
Blue and Green, in case you're wondering). By moving people
from town to town (and creating new towns) you conduct some
sort of weird eugenics experiment and create villages with mixed
tribes (like a Green/Blue village for instance). The monument
that the people create will depend on the racial mix of the
village. Also, the more different tribes in a given village,
the more complex the monument will be graphically. Monuments
can be destroyed, they still count towards victory.
As I said, there's no time limit, no enemies
and only the occasional natural disaster like a flood or whatever.
As a result, I think that a lot of people would find this dull
and some might even think of it as a toy rather than a game.
Once you complete it you get to play again on 4 different maps,
but the game and objectives are the same, just with different
scenery. For instance, one of the maps has hardly any land and
only red villagers at first. It's very relaxing either way.
This is one of those titles that's really good
at what it does, but if that it does isn't what you're after,
there's nothing here for you.
- RichKS
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