Ayakashi Banquet - GrandmasterJ

 


    Ayakashi is the collective name for Yokai (the Japanese term for supernatural beings) that appear over bodies of water. There isn't any water in this map but there are plenty of Yokai with custom models to shoot with fancy new gun models.

SCMapDB page

Author: nekomata, GAMESABA

Date of final release: 2007

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Ayakashi Banquet

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | September 4, 2022 | 4037 characters

    The screenshot for this map is a giant skeleton guy and I was pretty excited to take down a big skeleton guy with dual machine guns. Unfortunately that is all this map is, fighting enemies with lots of health with cool weapon reskins.

    The map is very one note, the walls are stretched out hedges with large arenas separated by big ramps with torii looming over them. At spawn there are two pickup trucks holding a bunch of weapons and there are well structures in each of the three arenas that heal players and provide ammo. The arenas get bigger (to the point where they exceed the draw distance so players can't see the other end) but don't change from being boxes with stretched out hedge walls. The first arena is with the big skeleton guy, there are smaller skeleton guys that infinitely respawn so ignore those. The big guy has tons of health, something like 50000, it was a lot and with two players it took forever to kill him. The next arena had cute cats as houndeyes, they had a lot of health but it was much faster and more fun to kill them. The final arena had four stages, a bunch of cats with a super fast magenta cat, all magenta cats, and then a final boss in the form of an anime female assassin, then we fight her again but faster. She has about a hundred thousand health and it takes forever, as an assassin she is also the most deadly enemy the map has to offer. I'll also mention a teleporter opens up from spawn to the final arena, so that's a huge plus.

    After the anime girl dies we get to hang out at the shrine, along with friendly versions of all the enemies we fought. We get to see that the mapper loves Daikatana for some reason. There isn't much to see or interact with here. The map description says to use the stone lanterns in front of the shrine at the same time but nothing happened when we did that. The map never ended either, despite us playing a fixed version where the map supposedly does end.

    One thing I forgot to mention, the map has a lot of exposition and cut scenes (along with some really fun music). The start of the map had some credit slides for the author, Nekomata, and their collaborator, Gamesaba. All the text is in Japanese Romanji and I don't know Japanese so all of the deep story is lost on me. There was a lot of reading, my teammate put some of it into Google translate but wasn't able to suss out the greater story here. I guess it is a mystery.

    The map is ok, it would have been much better with a full server. As it was, with two people, the map was boring. Neither the big skeleton guy nor the cats really offered up a challenge, but fighting the cats was much more fun than anything else in the map. The insane health just drags the fight out and turns it into a slog. The final boss especially, since she was ranged we had to keep our distance as well and it ended up in an annoying sniping match. We managed to trap the final boss on nothing and nail her with everything we had. The map itself was boring and simple in a blocky way. It's interesting to see how much work went into cutscenes and credits and the overall production value contrasted with blocky arenas with flat and stretched out textures.

Pros:

  • Really cool custom models
  • the map had a cohesive theme and used cutscenes, dialogue, custom models, and music to sell it well
  • the health and ammo wells throughout the map were much appreciated
  • the teleporter to the final arena was super helpful
  • music of any kind is always appreciated in the maps I play

Cons:

  • The main gimmick, enemies with too much health, is boring. Maybe more people would be more fun
  • Either the map is broken or the description is wrong, but the lanterns do nothing and map doesn't end
  • the arenas are big uninteresting boxes
  • map has draw distance issues
  • the cutscenes and dialogue really do go on for too long

Score: 6 / 10

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