Rise of the Kasai could have been a good game, but its good concept was executed terribly.
User Rating: 6.6 | Rise of the Kasai PS2
A few months ago, I saw this preview for Rise of the Kasai. It seemed to have all of the necessaries to be a good action-adventure. I wondered why Mark of the Kri was an unheard of game, but once I played Rise of the Kasai, it made perfect sense. Unfortunately, Rise of the Kasai was released right after another action-adventure from the same publisher, and the only mistakes that God of War made were not only left without fixing in Rise of the Kasai, but were also worsened. Gameplay: You'd think a polynesian beater featuring a huge-ass warrior and his hardcore sister would be a formula to success. It is, but Bottlerocket just didn't assemble it correctly. The controls, for starters, absolutely suck. All combos are initiated by hitting X, and you will probably only use the X-bashing combo because all of the other combos are too slow to activate and properly execute and will get you killed. Fighting the look-alike enemies is tedious, killing them yields no reward, and the only changes in pattern are with interactive objects that do very little and appear very rarely. You have a few weapons, but each of them is either weak or slow. Your partner wanders off, and it becomes impossible to find him or her at any time. Furthermore, you can't jump. What the hell, over. Graphics: Graphic concepts were good as well, and the movies were very exotic, but the ingame graphic design is just mediocre. The two main characters have little detail, and the rest of the characters, plus the enemies, look like they forgot to put on the final layer of texture. The camera is aweful, by the way. It doesn't move smoothly, and the right analog stick was used for a worthless targetting system instead of something useful, like actually controlling the camera. Sound: The sound is generic. Not bad, fitting enough, but nothing really special. Repetition kept this one down. Value: This game gets boring sickeningly fast. Even on the first level, I got too bored to keep going. Conclusion: Rent this game, mash your controller for a few hours, and never come near it again. Finest Moment: Err...this game didn't really have one. I suppose it's kinda cool to execute a combo properly and see some sequence, but that's drowned out by the fact that the enemy is usually either dead or blocking by the finishing blow and thus the move just looks like the character is spinning a weapon in the air at nothing. 
