This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on January 19th, 2019. It has been edited slightly for formatting.
We’ve flown into the third week of the amazing future year of
2019. Despite future kids telling Marty McFly that these types of things are
babies’ toys, even four years ago, I’m still going to be reviewing weird and
obscure PlayStation games, even if we have to use our hands to play them. This
is PlayStation Basement, happening every Saturday in this future world, and
even in the future, as it was in the past, I’ll be using a nine-point scale
where 9-7 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad.
This week, we’ll be taking a look through the veil into
Heaven’s Gate. This game is not about the cult that existed from 1974 to
1997. There is scant information about Heaven’s Gate online beyond the
basics. As I have the Japanese version and have extremely limited knowledge of
the language, I could not tell you what the story is or who these characters
are. There is something clearly about a battle between devils and angels. What
I can tell you for sure, is that this is a fighting game developed by Racdym
(later known as Racjin) and published by Atlus. Originally Heaven’s Gate was
released to Japanese arcades in 1996. It later came to the PlayStation in Japan
in December of the same year, and then a year later, October 1997, the game was
released to European PlayStation owners as Yusha: Heaven’s Gate.
The cover art is not particularly good. The original Japanese
art is way too dark, and I’m not sure what is even going on. There’s the main
character Jin, a combination of the classic Ryu/Akira look combined with the
wardrobe of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star standing in a
near-silhouette of another character. Jin is emitting a light from his hand.
There’s also some fire around them. The European artwork is a heavily cropped
and zoomed in version of the characters superimposed on a bright orange
background full of Japanese characters with a black X across everything. It’s
just a mess, especially with the characters still so dark and, now, blurry.
I’ll take the more dramatic Japanese cover, as dark as it is, over this neon
mess.
The thing that I do like about the neon mess of the European
cover is that it looks a lot more like the game. Heaven’s Gate is full of
bright, saturated Technicolor-esque hues. From huge fields of endless flowers
to the bright sun over an ancient land of pyramids to a bustling city, the
backgrounds are intensely colored and designed. It’s such a wild array of
sights. The characters match that with a lineup that includes fighting game
stock characters alongside angelic apemen, humanoid plants, and winged demons.
Characters and backgrounds are both a bit jagged and have some odd animations,
but there’s nothing too off. Whatever world, Heaven or Hell or someplace else,
that Heaven’s Gate takes place in is surely a weird place.
The sound design is also pretty weird and overall pretty good in
Heaven’s Gate. The sound effects resemble Bloody Roar a bit with the same
kinds of higher-pitched collision sounds and chimes for certain moves. There’s
a lot of basic voicework in this game that helps bring the characters to life.
The music is also pretty cool with a wide variety of styles: energetic rock
tunes, Chinese folk music, funk, ambient pop tracks, and eerie drumming. Even
with all of the differences, it all works together.
In terms of gameplay, Heaven’s Gate is a fairly standard 3D
fighter. You have arcade mode, training mode, survival mode, and time attack.
The actual fighting has similarities to Tekken and Virtua Fighter, but I
think it most resembles a cleaned up Dual Heroes mixed with Bloody Roar and
Soul Blade. The game has three buttons: kick, punch, and guard; you don’t
have the complexity of a game like Street Fighter with varying degrees of
attacks. This simplicity, along with overall simple inputs, makes the game a
little easier to play. And Heaven’s Gate is a fun game. Along with your
standard fighting stuff, the game has walls and ceilings that characters can
collide with, potentially breaking through the former and hanging off the
latter in certain circumstances.
Most of the characters in Heaven’s Gate have some kind of
supernatural lineage, most being devil or angel, though there is also Sasa, the
plant, and the insectile Dybyd. The characters all have a special bar to fill
up by making or taking attacks. The bar allows a character to transform once it
is filled. The bar then begins to drain, but this new, shining form, allows
some special maneuvers, particularly super attacks. It helps add something to
the game, as a powered up character has some real power at their disposal. A
big part of the game is knowing when to use the special bar.
Now, Heaven’s Gate is not without its faults. The main issue
is the lack of in-game story for any of the characters. There are no opening or
ending cutscenes, and the scene that plays before the title screen just shows
the characters fighting in a montage of shots. I like these odd characters, and
I would like to know more about them and their strange world. When I finally
defeated the final boss, Geezer, as Sasa, I was so glad to beat him but felt
that it was so abrupt to be greeted by credits after the demon fell to his
knees. A smaller criticism I have is the cheap feel of the menus and pause
screen and the lack of a movelist while in anything other than the training
mode.
I like Heaven’s Gate, but it certainly could have a bit more
polish and care. It’s a fun game with a strange setting that reminds me of the
tabletop RPG Rifts or some kind of VHS nightmare film from the other side of
the sci-fi shelf where you might also find Lucio Fulci’s 1983 fantasy trip
Conquest. If you like fighting games a lot as I do, you might really like
this game. You might also think it’s just weird or generic or even both.
Heaven’s Gate has some of both worlds, and that’s alright with me. It’s only
through the combination that it makes it what it is.
Heaven’s Gate receives a Good (7).
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