[Review] El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron – Nintendo Switch

Story/Description

A hidden gem classic, a game of aesthetic piece! This game packed everything that makes action game FUN.”El Shaddai” comes to Nintendo Switch™ in Full HD!

An ever-changing endless visual experience
El Shaddai’s artistic setting aims to provide a canvas-like world that changes in an organic way as long as you progress your adventure. The world keeps changing constantly in the most creative and innovative ways, perhaps even nostalgic.

Easy to play, hard to master
You’ll only have four buttons: jump, attack, guard and weapon stealing. But this simple way of proceeding is deeper than one can expect. There is no need of manuals or walkthroughs to get into the game, but if anyone is ready to deepen into the mechanics, the game will offer a profound, precise and rewarding timing-based action experience. The motto of El Shaddai’s gameplay always was to be “easy but profound”. Many of the game’s mechanics such as the offense-defense systems were carefully created to provide the best possible game feel.

◆Additional elements
This time we have implemented full HD support, optimized loading and optimazation in general.
Also, as a bonus content, the post-ending novel “Lucifer’s Fall Chronicles of Ceta” and El Shaddai ASCENSION OF THE METATRON ArtBook are included.

Gameplay/Controls

The game was previously released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, had the pleasure of trying it out on PC which still have nice controls and all and now it’s coming to the Nintendo switch which I was truly hoping for it to happen and now it’s happening.

El Shaddai is a third-person action game featuring platform game elements, in which players control Enoch. Enoch wears holy armor that loses its pieces as the player takes damage, although it can be restored using hearts found by breaking objects.

I remembered playing the game on PlayStation 3 through a friend’s console which I enjoyed the game but didn’t play it for long now it’s getting released on PC via Steam but now seeing it on Nintendo switch made me what to play it again on a different platform, which I can relive the time I had playing the game.

From the beginning of the game, I wanted to learn more about the character named Enoch which I found out is a biblical character from the bible from Genesis, Chronicles, and Hebrews which I had a pleasure reading through the Bible verses.

Surprised to learn brief things about him made me more curious as to what he looks young and seeing that He gained favor from God made sense after reading chapters from the bible.

The Nintendo switch still have the functionality of you receiving damage from the enemy when Enoch will have no armor left, they are given a small amount of time to repeatedly push buttons L, R, X and A to revive and to repair the armor before they have to restart at the last checkpoint or by finding an item that can fix the armor piece by piece.

The game is brilliantly ported from previous platforms with something special along the way.

Like it or not, this is a great move for the publishers to port the game from previous consoles onto the PC with the game now on Nintendo Switch making it a great console platform to play the game, making the game feel right at home.

The controls are being played with the controllers of your choice either joycons or Nintendo Switch Pro Controller.
I can say the controls are quite good, feels better because I’m not used to playing games with the mouse and keyboard. But usual the controls are easy to learn but hard to master once you’re being cornered by enemies.

Throughout the game, Enoch and the majority of his enemies utilize three weapon types; Arch, Gale, and Veil, each with their own strengths and weaknesses in and outside of combat. The Arch is a swift close-range weapon that can perform quick combos and allows Enoch to descend slowly whilst jumping. The Gale is a long-range weapon that fires projectiles at enemies and allows Enoch to perform dashes over large gaps. Finally, the Veil is a slow but powerful weapon that can easily damage enemies and break certain objects that the other weapons can’t.

I like that the game auto saves at some point in time or you can manually save your data through Lucifel while exploring an area, you can even hear him close by, speaking on the cellphone.

I like that Enoch can retrieve these weapons by stealing them from enemies after they have taken enough damage or by taking them from icons found during platforming sections and boss battles. These weapons dull over time, requiring Enoch to purify them to restore their power or steal a new weapon from an enemy.

After a certain point in the game, Enoch will gain the assistance of the archangel Uriel and can activate ‘Over-burst’ mode, increasing the power of Enoch’s attacks and allowing him to perform a special attack combo.

To conclude this review, the game is a great way for those who played it previously on PlayStation 3 & Xbox 360 in which porting it on PC and now onto the Nintendo Switch is a great move from the publishers and developers.
The gameplay is that of platforming and action roguelike that makes a great combat system feels slick and fun to work with.
The controls are easy to work with and since the game is from the previously consoles, I had no problem with the performance of the game on PC thus you’ll need a certain program to be installed before launching the game.

Graphics

The game aesthetic is anime-styled, loosely drawing on sources such as Studio Ghibli.
If you previously played the game on either Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 then you’ll be familiar with how gorgeous and how smoothly the game is running on PC, but seeing it being HD remastered on Nintendo switch, looks great and well-polished for the console.
The game runs between 43-47FPS which, to me, runs beautifully well on PC. Now it’s being played faster on Nintendo Switch with higher FPS not sure which one to be exact.

Audio

If you’ve played the game on Xbox 360, then I can say the audio is still as good as before, showing that the developers and composer did an excellent job in bringing everything from the previous consoles into the PC platform where I got really excited into the playing the game again.