Get jumped by half a dozen enemies. This sort of thing was terribly exciting eight years ago, but it's kind of lost its edge since then. After a while, you hook up with two sidekicks. One is a young lady named Mikiko Ebihara. I'm not the most sensitive guy in the world, but even I winced when I heard that.
Game play is pretty traditional, but at times, frankly, irritating.
You're supposed to be able to direct your sidekicks, but these two don't exhibit artificial intelligence so much as artificial stupidity. Levels and puzzles aren't especially challenging. Layout appears designed to deliberately delay, forcing the player to repeatedly retrace his steps. Load times are appalling, particularly for a game that allows you to put over 800 megabytes of material on your hard drive, which theoretically should make things run faster. The sound is poor, but the company says it's coming out with a software patch soon to address that issue.