Shadow Rising

What happens when a side scrolling hack and slash game meets a JRPG? Shadow Rising, that's what. In shadow rising you play as a spiky haired young man with magical powers and a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Your friend/girlfriend has been kidnapped and you must do whatever it takes to get her back, all while acting like a complete ass to Everyone you meet.

As far as graphics go, this game is pretty damned...pretty, but the dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. The animations and backgrounds are impressive for a flash game, and really make the game feel polished. You can tell the artist behind the game put a lot of time into the project, however, the same cannot be said of the voice acting and actual dialogue. The main character comes across as one of the most annoying people I've ever heard speak, and its as much the thick British accent as it is the fact that he's written as a cross between Seto Kaiba, and Neku from the world ends with you. The characters also make quite a few grammatical errors, and the voices don't seem the fit the characters at all.

As for the combat, its as slack and hashy as a hack and slash could be. You hit enemies, move to them, hit them again, rinse, repeat until they are all dead. I'm not over simplifying it, that pretty much IS combat. The bosses are even more ridiculous, because while the game has a fast paced combat system, the bosses move quite slowly and predictably, their only strength is that they can take a metric ton of damage without so much as blinking, so boss fights are of the Triple Slash->Double Slash->Jump to avoid attack->Triple Slash and so on until the thing dies. Even if you had never leveled up at all, it'd be one hell of an easy game, even with the neigh useless specials.

As for the actual leveling system, there is very little in the way of options. For your skill bonus, you can put one point each level into either a nearly useless special skill, or a nearly useless passive skill. The specials aren't capable of doing nearly as much damage as your slash spam, and they consume MP while spamming slash does not. The passives are no better, giving you buffs like "+2%armor", when armor could be gained much more easily by using attribute points. As a matter of fact, as the base armor level, 2% armor is only equivalent to 1 point in armor.

Overall, it's a really well polished game,  and it's still absolutely horrible. You know what they say...