Posted April 05, 2010
(note this is just for the first game)
Most games I play I can easily shove in a "good" or "bad" corner but Blade of Destiny is a tough nut to crack. It took me 2 days to read up on the game before I could actually start playing it and having now completed it, 4 days later, I'm not sure whether I really enjoyed the trip or not.
Blade of Destiny is called, by many, a "hardcore RPG" meaning it's supposed to be very deep, complex, full of stats, etc. Okay, it HAS a ton of stats but sadly enough, many of them are vague and some don't even do anything! With over 50 skills and very limited skillpoints, it becomes a game of pure guesswork to determine what skills you should focus on. The manual is entirely unhelpful because it doesn't actually state which skills will be used the most. If they had trimmed the fat and had cut out all these skills which are only used one or twice in the entire game, it would have been a far more enjoyable experience instead of giving gamers a headache trying to figure out how to make the best party. In the end, it doesn't really matter that much because even if you lack a skill, there's usually ways around it but, of course, the manual doesn't tell you this either.
Basically, before you play this game, I'd recommend you read any helpful website to get an idea what the game is about, what skills to focus on, what items to focus on, etc. because otherwise, you're going to get buried beneath tons of useless loot. Most of the stuff sold in stores seems useless and with your inventory being so limited in space and carrying more than a few weapons seriously slowing you down in combat, you'll end up just ditching everything but rations and weapons. I know I did.
But once you get past all this crud, you're left with a raw diamond of a game. Combat is very satisfying and tactical and there's a LOT of it and there's a lot of little detail to the game like random events. You can sell and buy in different stores, there's actual seasons that affect where you can travel to, you can take a boat to cut corners off your travels, there's side quests and lots of caves & dungeons for you to loot and, generally, there's a lot to this game considering its age.
Still, even here I can't stop to criticize: the game is completely user-unfriendly for dozens of reasons. Besides how intransparent the skill system is, navigating cities is a nightmare as well, with vital NPCs being in unmarked houses so you end up knocking on every unmarked door just in case an important person lives there. If a city contains 50 houses, this easily takes 15 minutes for a city. Good thing you get the Hint Book with this game which has maps of all cities - USE IT! But that's not all: it's well possible to get stuck with no way of completing the game by doing normal things but picking the wrong things to say. And how about magic items which look identical to normal items and even have the same name! I had three swords in my inventory at one time and one was magical yet I had to use identification spells to discover which was. Or how about in dungeons: picking the wrong hallway once got me stuck with no way of getting out, AT ALL. In general, what people call "hardcore" is really a game being very unforgiving and expecting the player to figure out how everything works with barely any clue and a LOT of trail and error. If this game had had a 300 page manual that carefully explained what most items were for, the ingredients for alchemy (dear god, I spent an hour just to discover what I needed to have to make a potion. If you pick up a recipe, isn't it SUPPOSED to tell you what ingredients you need?) and so many other things like the real use of skills & spells for starters.
In the end this is a very rough diamond. For its age it's amazingly complex but it still saddens me to see so many crucial mistakes being made. This game would have been a tremendous classic if it didn't leave you hanging in the air so many times. Even the walkthroughs I find are full of lines like "I never discovered if skill A or spell B had any use" which is not encouraging. Heck, there's even evidence inside the game that the game was meant to be a lot more complex but my guess is that they removed a lot of functionality (or decided against adding it) because it would complicate the game too much which is ironic since leaving all the useless baggage behind does exactly that. Except for the fun combat, there's a lot of rough corners on this game. If you got the patience, it's still worth playing but be sure to use Google to track down every piece of advice you can find!
Most games I play I can easily shove in a "good" or "bad" corner but Blade of Destiny is a tough nut to crack. It took me 2 days to read up on the game before I could actually start playing it and having now completed it, 4 days later, I'm not sure whether I really enjoyed the trip or not.
Blade of Destiny is called, by many, a "hardcore RPG" meaning it's supposed to be very deep, complex, full of stats, etc. Okay, it HAS a ton of stats but sadly enough, many of them are vague and some don't even do anything! With over 50 skills and very limited skillpoints, it becomes a game of pure guesswork to determine what skills you should focus on. The manual is entirely unhelpful because it doesn't actually state which skills will be used the most. If they had trimmed the fat and had cut out all these skills which are only used one or twice in the entire game, it would have been a far more enjoyable experience instead of giving gamers a headache trying to figure out how to make the best party. In the end, it doesn't really matter that much because even if you lack a skill, there's usually ways around it but, of course, the manual doesn't tell you this either.
Basically, before you play this game, I'd recommend you read any helpful website to get an idea what the game is about, what skills to focus on, what items to focus on, etc. because otherwise, you're going to get buried beneath tons of useless loot. Most of the stuff sold in stores seems useless and with your inventory being so limited in space and carrying more than a few weapons seriously slowing you down in combat, you'll end up just ditching everything but rations and weapons. I know I did.
But once you get past all this crud, you're left with a raw diamond of a game. Combat is very satisfying and tactical and there's a LOT of it and there's a lot of little detail to the game like random events. You can sell and buy in different stores, there's actual seasons that affect where you can travel to, you can take a boat to cut corners off your travels, there's side quests and lots of caves & dungeons for you to loot and, generally, there's a lot to this game considering its age.
Still, even here I can't stop to criticize: the game is completely user-unfriendly for dozens of reasons. Besides how intransparent the skill system is, navigating cities is a nightmare as well, with vital NPCs being in unmarked houses so you end up knocking on every unmarked door just in case an important person lives there. If a city contains 50 houses, this easily takes 15 minutes for a city. Good thing you get the Hint Book with this game which has maps of all cities - USE IT! But that's not all: it's well possible to get stuck with no way of completing the game by doing normal things but picking the wrong things to say. And how about magic items which look identical to normal items and even have the same name! I had three swords in my inventory at one time and one was magical yet I had to use identification spells to discover which was. Or how about in dungeons: picking the wrong hallway once got me stuck with no way of getting out, AT ALL. In general, what people call "hardcore" is really a game being very unforgiving and expecting the player to figure out how everything works with barely any clue and a LOT of trail and error. If this game had had a 300 page manual that carefully explained what most items were for, the ingredients for alchemy (dear god, I spent an hour just to discover what I needed to have to make a potion. If you pick up a recipe, isn't it SUPPOSED to tell you what ingredients you need?) and so many other things like the real use of skills & spells for starters.
In the end this is a very rough diamond. For its age it's amazingly complex but it still saddens me to see so many crucial mistakes being made. This game would have been a tremendous classic if it didn't leave you hanging in the air so many times. Even the walkthroughs I find are full of lines like "I never discovered if skill A or spell B had any use" which is not encouraging. Heck, there's even evidence inside the game that the game was meant to be a lot more complex but my guess is that they removed a lot of functionality (or decided against adding it) because it would complicate the game too much which is ironic since leaving all the useless baggage behind does exactly that. Except for the fun combat, there's a lot of rough corners on this game. If you got the patience, it's still worth playing but be sure to use Google to track down every piece of advice you can find!
