For those of you who don’t know, this game is based upon the anime InuYasha. If you are a fan of the series, and don’t have some sort of burning hatred of fighting games, you will most likely enjoy this title. However, if you are just a general fighting game fan and have never heard of the series, you might not enjoy it as much.
The reason I say you may not enjoy it as much is that it has a lot fewer moves than your typical fighter. There are about three special moves per character, and they are all done by pressing the Square button while holding a certain direction (or, in some cases, just pressing the Square button by itself). There are other regular attacks that can be done by pressing buttons like Circle, R1, and L1, but since the special attacks are so easy to use, and are much more effective, it’s more likely that you will be playing by executing the same attack until the enemy is dead. In other fighting games, using the same attack over and over again would not work very well, but in this one it does, even on the hardest difficulty. The basic point is this: the controls are extremely easy to learn, but it doesn’t lead to a 
lot of variety in attacks.
The visuals aren’t very impressive, but the characters look just like they do in the anime. This being so, I don’t think that the not-so-spectacular graphics take away from the game as a whole. The graphics being so similar to the anime also adds a bit of fun to the game if you are, indeed, a fan of the series. If not, at least you can appreciate the fact that they didn’t try to turn the game into some faux-3D representation of anime.
The replay value, as you can tell from my score, is the best thing this game has going for it. The story part of this game is very short, and each time you collect a certain amount of crystals from the story mode, you unlock a character. You start off with two characters, and can unlock ten more. One of the characters is unlocked by beating all of the minigames in record time, but the rest are unlocked by collecting crystals. You must get a larger and larger number of crystals as you unlock more and more characters, and you will end up having to beat the game something like twenty times just to unlock them all.
In addition to all of the characters, you can also unlock different stages in the story mode that you can use in other modes. As if this weren’t enough to unlock, there is also a very large collection of pictures of characters and scenes from the game that you can unlock for viewing during story mode or other modes. All of these unlockables will definitely have you playing this game more often than you use those special attacks.
Overall, this is a fun game, and takes a very short time to play. It’s perfect for filling in those hour breaks between classes at college. It makes a whole lot more sense to those who have seen the anime. But even if you haven’t, it is still worth a try. I got this game for about 18 bucks at my local EB Games, and I’d say it was worth the price. I do say it’s short, but there are many reasons to keep playing, so at least rent it if you can’t afford the $17.99 for a used copy.
