Divine Sealing (Genesis) review "There’s nothing divine about Divine Sealing; it offers little more than a small hentai album wrapped in five brief levels of shallow, unfinished vertical shooter. At the very least, the quality of its artwork is respectable – but this is a clear testament to the fact that this game’s only intended allure was its animated nudity. Dorks who are actually into that stuff should simply stick to the Internet to satisfy their passions – even they don’t deserve to suffer Divine Sealing’s boring shooter ..."

There’s nothing divine about Divine Sealing; it offers little more than a small hentai album wrapped in five brief levels of shallow, unfinished vertical shooter. At the very least, the quality of its artwork is respectable – but this is a clear testament to the fact that this game’s only intended allure was its animated nudity. Dorks who are actually into that stuff should simply stick to the Internet to satisfy their passions – even they don’t deserve to suffer Divine Sealing’s boring shooter engine.

Before you even get far enough into the game to realize what genre Divine Sealing belongs to, a half-naked woman appears on the screen for no real reason at all. Japanese text floods the bottom, possibly to give some sense of meaning to the woman’s presence and the subsequent shooter action, but you can rest easy, since you’re likely not missing anything crucial if, like me, you can’t read Japanese. Scroll through enough text and the woman will finally disappear from the screen, leaving a generic-looking planet in her place – presumably where the game proper actually starts.

As it starts, an unimpressive-looking, blue ship is superimposed over a badly drawn background; it’s a garbled mess of colors that almost vaguely looks like…nothing in particular – certainly not any sort of planetary surface. The ugly blue ship’s maiden voyage is remarkably easy and dull; none of the uninteresting creatures that initially fall victim to its twin cannons really fight back.

The onslaught begins with an intimidating wave of…bees. Bees. The rest of the enemies are nondescript blobs; some are even as simple as mere circles or tetras. Whatever the case, none of the first level’s enemies even shoot at you; they simply set a collision course for your ship, which is a futile affair since anything that steps into your line of fire almost automatically disintegrates. The robotic boss of the first level is the first enemy in the entire game to actually shoot at you: clusters of flashing, light blue bullets move ever so slowly toward your position, but their slowness makes them easy to dodge. Despite its comparatively superior combative capacity, the boss still presents no challenge, since it doesn’t actually do anything besides arbitrarily move about the screen. Shoot it just a few times and it’s gone.

The woman who appeared before returns, and this time her scant clothing is inexplicably whisked away as more Japanese text scrolls across the bottom of the screen. She even looks as if she’s in pain, but there’s no time to consider the moral implications of all this. You’ll quickly return to shooting bugs and other indistinguishable things in the ugly blue ship.

From level two and onwards, standard enemies will actually shoot at you, using the same, slow-moving bullets that level one’s boss employed so ineffectively. Level two’s structure is virtually identical to its predecessor’s, and the enemies maintain the simple, predictable patterns that made them so easily destroyed. In fact, save for the overbearing amount of purple that makes up level two’s background, it might as well be level one – its boss is even the same, hurling the same clusters of slow-moving bullets hopelessly in your direction. The only difference is that it teleports from one part of the screen to the next, rather than moving directly. In seconds the mechanical beast is destroyed, at which point another scantily clad woman appears on screen only to have her clothes painfully whisked away.

This process repeats another three times, until you finally reach the glorious ending in which nothing much really happens. The remaining three levels offer no innovations or twists to save the game’s mind numbing nature; the same predictable boss patterns are recycled, the screen becomes slightly more cluttered, and level four in particular employs an unfair, eye-stabbing background that’ll cost you many lives. The average human simply does not have the visual acuity to handle it and keep track of everything on the screen.

The reward for “battling” your way through these five bland stages – besides the cartoon nudity – is a spectacular ending in which the words “The End” flash across the screen. It only makes you wonder why you ever began playing, and why the company that made Divine Sealing ever began its development – both were meaningless endeavors.

Community review by radicaldreamer (February 18, 2005) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.