Chaos Legion

Summoning help costs you power. That single rule is the whole argument of Capcom's 2003 action game: Sieg Wahrheit carries a sword and a soul-bound army, and the moment his Legion pours out of him in a column of light, his own strikes go weak. Keep them out too long and you are a man flailing at a mob while your ghosts do the work. Recall them and you get your bite back, but you fight alone. Everything interesting here comes out of that trade.

The Legions themselves are the collection hook. Guilt is a straightforward melee pack, Blast throws ranged fire, Thunder is fast and fragile, Arrogance lumbers in as a wall of armour that soaks damage while you flank. You take two into a stage and swap between them, and each one levels separately on the experience you bank, so investment matters. Neglect a Legion and it stays useless; feed one and it starts clearing rooms without you. It is closer to squad management than to a combo system, which is unusual for a game that otherwise looks like a Devil May Cry contemporary.

The structure is where it shows its age. Stages are corridors and arenas, gates seal, waves spawn, you clear them, the gate opens. Repeat. Enemy variety is thin and the camera does not always keep up with a screen full of summons and skeletons. Anyone expecting the precision of Capcom's other stylish-action output will find the swordplay simple by comparison, closer to a crowd-control tool than a craft.

The story is drawn from Tow Ubukata's light novels and carries the melodrama to match: Sieg hunting his former friend Victor across a ruined continent, Arcia chasing both of them with a pistol and a grudge, cutscenes staged with real conviction and dialogue that sometimes trips over its own solemnity. The presentation is dark, gothic, heavy on choral music, and it commits fully. That tone does a lot of work in holding together levels that would otherwise feel like a numbers grind.

What holds up is the arithmetic of the summon meter, a genuinely thoughtful idea that most of the genre never bothered with. What does not hold up is the twenty-hour repetition it is asked to carry. Go in for the Legions, treat the stages as a place to test builds rather than a campaign to be savoured, and it becomes a much better game than its reputation as Capcom's forgotten mid-tier action title suggests. The ghosts are the point; Sieg is only their reluctant battery.