In Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled
Guide your hero from city to dungeon to city, picking up new characters, and assembling a three-person team of skilled fighters while locating cool new items, and slowly revealing a dreadful plot that must be foiled. Along the way, find a ship that can travel the sea, then find a ship that can travel the air. This should all be familiar to players of classic RPGs from the 80’s and early 90’s. This game’s main goal seems to be a modernization of the 8-bit RPG, taking the classic RPG formula, and adapting it for the DS audience in a way that remakes of the actual classic RPGs cannot ever do.
Pursuit
One of the aspects that they shouldn’t have drawn from the 8-bit RPG era was the plot. Navigating the story was one of the frustration points of this game, as very little of it made sense, and the character’s motivations to move forward were hard to understand, and relied on plot induced stupidity to function. For example: early in the game, our magicless main character gets trapped in a cave that can only be opened by people with magic. His magical sister turns out to be trapped with him, but despite his desire to return home, she forces him to remain in the cave and explore with her, setting off the chain of events that lead to the rest of the plot. Sisters can be demanding sometimes, to be sure, but that behavior is just mean and irresponsible.
It’s not just the story that’s hard to follow, however. The maps and levels themselves are difficult to grasp. Much more than once, I was left without a clear idea of where to go next. Early RPG games used this as a device to instill a sense of freedom in the game, to make the player feel like they are the ones deciding where to go next, when they really only have one option. That may have worked in Final Fantasy III, but that’s simply not an acceptable device anymore. The modern RPG audience is used to real decisions. Lacking any real decisions to make, we should at least be offered a quest log or something to help us know where we’re supposed to go next. Making the player guess where they’re supposed to go next is a waste of their time.
Not knowing where to go next is almost a trope of classic RPGs.
Panorama
The graphics are great–the designers and artists really took their time to make this game look like the best of the era. This is the place where their apparent goal is accomplished best. The backgrounds and foregrounds alike are interesting and slick, while the screen elements like the textboxes and fonts are all reminiscent of the early genre. The only place where the graphics fall down is in the world map. The map is ever-present on the top screen when not in battle, and it helps to a degree, but I found myself wishing multiple times that I could get a slightly better view. In simple areas it was fine, but when it got more complex, all I wanted to do was zoom in on the map. Even just allowing it to be seen full screen for a moment (it takes up about a quarter of the screen as it is) would have made a big difference.
Noise
One barely notices the sound track, which is always a good thing. Usually we notice the music in games mostly when it starts to annoy us, so if the music and sound effects are so appropriate and well tied-in that the player doesn’t even remember hearing them afterward, then it was done properly.
Reins
The controls are easy and intuitive. The only place they stand out is in battle, where actions are selected using a quick radial menu. In the radial menu, each category and possible command has its own little icon. This was another success, in my opinion. Not only was it very easy to remember a quick sequence of directions that needed to be pushed to get to the item or ability one wanted, but it also improved the look of the battles, by eliminating the half-screen battle menu in favor of placing the menu around each character. There is never a doubt as to which character is being issued commands, and using the stylus to issue those commands is simple, and visual.
With the exception of the world map, everything has a great visual style.
Another aspect of the battle control was the ability to move around the battlefield to reach different enemies, and to make area attacks more effective. However, while I love this idea, I saw very little point to its use in this title. This feature was an inconvenience for me more than anything else. The few times I was in a position where I could line up a cool attack, or get everyone involved in a great buff because of it, I did think it was cool, but most of the time, my interaction with this mechanic consisted of one of my characters being in the way of my other characters trying to attack, and most of the good it brought was through the enemies placing themselves in bad positions, rather than me being placed in good situations. It’s a mechanic I’d like to see more of, but in this game, it just didn’t quite come out right.
Some reviewers have commented that the player cannot run from battle, and have called this a drawback. I rarely run from battles in games like this, but when I needed to, I pushed a few buttons (starting with attempting to hold both shoulder buttons), and found that holding ‘B’ gets you out of the battle after allowing the monsters one more round of attacks. It’s not in the manual, but no one reads those anyway.
Encoding
I didn’t encounter anything in Black sigil that seemed to be a bug or oversight. I did run into a single glitch: While fighting some toad things in a cave, the game stopped accepting commands, and all I could do was watch my party get killed, then reset the system, and go back to my last save. This only happened once, and wasn’t repeatable.
I appreciated the addition of a quick-save feature. I know that the DS is equipped with that hinge-suspend, and that enough for most games, but in an epic RPG, a quick-save feature is important, so that the cartridge can be swapped without interrupting your game.
The characters and monsters can move throught the battlefield during fights.
Last Word
When it comes down to it, players who love the classic RPGs are going to really enjoy this game. The same audience who was interested in the re-release of Final Fantasies III and IV for the DS should be interested in Black Sigil. The neat little enhancements and extras really bring something solid to the genre. Unfortunately, those little enhancements are not enough for a more modern audience. Anyone who got into RPGs during or since the late 90’s might get a bit lost. Put your nostalgia goggles on, and enjoy.
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