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Blood Will Tell is based on the manga Dororo by Tezuka Osamu, better known as the creator of Astro Boy. Source material that was likely compelling at the time it was originally published, but now that generations of Japanese authors and artists have been using for inspiration it's become a long string of clichés. In all these little vignettes, you'll often know exactly what's going to happen by the end of the first cut-scene. Most of these scenes use the game's underachiever engine, which doesn't give you much to look at. The slow pacing and the wooden English voice acting don't help matters either. Having these self-contained stories might work for a serialized manga, but in a game it only makes you feel that you're back at square one at the beginning of each chapter, and haven't made much progress at all, aside from a few new body parts. Some of these parts actually add to the gameplay, like a leg that grants Hyakkimaru a dash ability, but most simply raise stats, which feels like a complete waste of such an interesting premise.
If impatience forces you to skip a cut-scene you want to see later, there's a movie viewer to watch them at your leisure. This is nice for the too few and too short pre-rendered FMVs sprinkled throughout the game. Other extras include a Dororo mini-game and a gallery, though you'll need to complete the game before unlocking either of those. There are also optional Fiends to slay and special swords to collect, but in the end there isn't much point in seeking out either unless you're a diehard completist.
The Dororo manga was left unfinished with a number of body parts still unaccounted for, so I guess it's appropriate that the game based on it feels unfinished as well. The bosses are great and the story could have held it together if it had simply been told better, but the bland combat engine and frustrating camera just doesn't do the premise justice.
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