Bullet Witch (Japanese: バレットウィッチ, Hepburn: Baretto Uicchi) is a third-person shooter developed by Cavia for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows.
Players control Alicia through linear levels, using her gun to fire multiple types of ammunition at humanoid and demonic enemies.
[2] Combat is primarily based around using Alicia's "gun rod" weapon and magic abilities against normal enemies and during scripted boss battles.
[6] Upgrades to health, guns and magic are unlocked with skill points earned based on a ranking, which takes in damage taken, enemies killed and the length of time it took to complete a level.
[5] In the wake of multiple natural disasters culminating in a demon invasion in 2007, Earth has become a wasteland, and by the year 2013 humanity is on the brink of extinction.
During her time there, she and the resistance are forced to flee from Omega—a powerful demon immune to magic and gunfire—and Maxwell asks for her aid in saving humanity.
While they work together, Maxwell gives Alicia a journal fragment revealing that an archeologist performed a ritual to revive a loved one after she died in a plane crash—his actions opened a portal allowing the demons to attack humanity.
Receiving the remaining journal entries from him, Alicia discovers that she herself is the archeologist's daughter and is only alive and able to wield magic due to his actions.
Newspaper articles during the credits show humanity defeating the demons and recovering from the natural disasters while Alicia continues wandering the world.
[11] While development for the PlayStation 3 was considered, the team had begun work on the Xbox 360, and decided to stay on a single platform to deliver the best possible experience.
One monster he described in detail was the humanoid Geist, which he needed to redesign several times; his first draft was refused due to being overly complex to render, with later versions being created with input from other staff members.
[14] The larger monsters dubbed Megas were designed around the concept of players jumping on them during battle, but due to hardware limitations this aspect of gameplay was cut.
[18] When creating Bullet Witch, the team were pleased with the shift to high-definition graphics, but this and the game's identity as a new intellectual property meant they were taking financial risks.
[11] The team wanted players to be able to navigate large areas with few or no loading screens, but these ambitions were originally muted by the console's limited power, and it was only during the later stages of development that they started resolving the issues.
Due to the console's limitations, some potential effects and touches such as breaking glass, bullet marks in surfaces like building walls, and having Alicia's feet adjust to the slope of terrain had to be left out to increase processing power for the large-scale environments.
[9] The music was supervised by Cavia staff member Nobuyoshi Sano, mixed by Delfi Sound's Toshihiro Hayano, and mastered by Masami Kanda of Memory-Tech Corporation.
Take wanted the soundtrack to stand out, but when Sano added together their two styles of music, he negatively compared the result to a song from Japanese variety show Nanikore Chin Hyakkei.
[14] The theme song "The Vanishing Sky" was composed by Yano and arranged by Sano, with lyrics and vocals performed in English by Asako Yoshihiro.
[35] Greg Mueller, writing for GameSpot, praised the destructible environments and spell casting while faulting most other aspects of the game—he concluded that "Bullet Witch shows promise, but it ultimately fails to deliver anything more than a [forgettable] ho-hum third-person shooter".
[6] IGN's Erik Brudvig was unimpressed by most aspects of the game and highly critical of the gameplay and lack of content, calling it "short and shallow".
[4] Lewis Cameron of Official Xbox Magazine found the gameplay dull and repetitive despite liking the variety of attack options, and faulted most other aspects including the graphics and localization.