Tail Concerto is really, really, really addictive. A friend and I were playing it one night until the wee hours of the morning, wanting to get 'just a little farther.' The gameplay is much like
MegaMan Legends, although with a considerably larger amount of old-school 3D platforming. It's the old explore-the-areas-for-the-enemies schtick, with enough twists and turns to make it interesting. You're Waffle, a dog-people (don't ask why it's not 'dog-person') trying to stop the Black Cats Gang (cat-people, of course) from destroying Prairie, the land you both inhabit. You have a Police Robo with odd arms that can shoot bubbles, capture things, and jump around in platform gaming style. During the course of the adventure, you visit all the islands of Prairie and a few other locations, searching for the little kitties that you've got to capture while searching for the members of the Black Cats Gang. Although the controls take a bit of getting used to, with a camera that just doesn't seem tight enough to really be effective, you get over it because of the great gameplay. Even when you screw up for the 30th time, you forgive the game simply because it's so much fun. Never before has a game with such quirky little control issues made me ignore said quirky little control issues. It's that fun. As the story unfolds, you get more wrapped up in the whole Waffle-Alicia interest story, and the Black Cats Gang's real purpose, and all that good stuff that's required in Saturday morning cartoons... erm, I mean, anime games. Yeah. And you know the most surprising fact of all? This game is made by Bandai.
There's only one real problem with gameplay, but it's a doozy -- the game's short as hell. For a game where you can save, six hours (and this is taking my time, folks) is a really short timespan for a game. The fact that one of the coolest scenes in the game, the Jet-Robo, is basically a throw-away area and not developed into something more concrete, makes the game feel a little less complete. You won't care on your first play-through, though -- you'll be whooping and cheering as you zoom around. It's that good.
