Among my personal Japan-only favourites is the PlayStation RPG Walk Over My Corpse (Ore no Shikabane wo Koeteyuke). It took sumi-e style graphics, turn-based combat, and a breeding system to make an infinitely replayable classic. Now, a decade-and-a-half after its release, the sequel was playable at this year’s TGS.
The demo for Walk Over My Corpse 2 starts by using the Vita’s camera to take a picture of you — creating an anime-style character based on your image. With this character and your pre-created family you were directed towards the game’s first dungeon.
The battle system is practically unchanged from the original. As you enter battle, three slots spin to show you your rewards should you win the battle. Then you begin your typical turn-based combat.
Each character you control has a class that affects how they attack in battle. A pikeman, for example, can stab both the enemy’s front row and back row, while a naginata wielder can strike the entire front row in one slash.
But the most interesting thing about Walk Over My Corpse 2 is the art style. While the enemies’ art design is still highly inspired by sumi-e like in the original game, the art presentation is now in the 2.5D art style of games like PaRappa the Rapper and Danganronpa — where the monsters are clearly flat 2D while everything else is rendered in 3D. Both ally and enemy spells share this difference in dimension as well. It makes for a great-looking game. In fact, the only downside I noticed was that the frame rate would chug a bit during the casting of large spells, though this seemed to come and go.
In the end, from what I saw, Walk Over My Corpse 2 is not only a sequel that is true to its roots, but a beautiful-looking game all on its own.
Walk Over My Corpse 2 is planned for a Japanese release sometime in Q3 2014 for the PlayStation Vita.
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