Note: this review doesn’t completely fall in with what I said in my last post, because I wrote it before I wrote that one. This post was written to be a video, and I had all the footage collected and shit, but then I cancelled the videos altogether (for now). I haven’t had time to play and review another ARPG though, between consuming a fuckload of editorials/reviews and playing awesome indie platformers.
On that note, I said in my last post that I haven’t found anyone doing heavy-duty analysis of individual games on a regular basis. Well, now I have. Errant Signal is an amazing blog with some excellent and lengthy videos, many of which analyze individual games. Unfortunately, it’s almost all games which I haven’t played, since like just about every other game’s journalist, he focuses on AAA games and indie games intermittently. As you may gather from my posts, I focus strangely on A/AA games and genre titles.
Anyway, here’s my review of Swordcraft Story.
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Had I played Summon Night: Swordcraft Story when I was thirteen or fourteen, I’m sure it would’ve been among my favorite games. Back then I played more Game Boy Advanced than any other console. I was really into shounen anime and JRPGs, and would’ve loved a game that I could beat in just over ten or eleven hours, instead of the longer Gamecube and PS2 RPGs that could never hold my attention through to the end.
Even though I’ve never played a Summon Night game before this one, Swordcraft Story gives me a faint sense of nostalgia. I wasn’t a gamer in the Super Nintendo era, but I played a hell of a lot of Game Boy Advanced, and even though the graphical qualities of both systems are similar, there’s a huge difference in the atmosphere of RPGs for those consoles. GBA games tend to be brighter, lighter, and somehow more innocent and easy. Whereas Super Nintendo games appealed to a generation of gamers who dedicated countless hours in front of the TV playing their favorite games, GBA games were more about carrying a game around that you could snap on, play for twenty minutes, snap off, and continue your day.
My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 