"B & B Is NO D & D"

For the longest time, PC owners in the U.S. have been afforded the luxury of playing some of the best and deepest RPGs around. This is partly due to the larger memory available on computers, which made for more realistic and detailed gaming adventures. Console owners had to pretty much make do with scaled down, but generally well-done ports of computer RPGs, or games in which preset parties of big-headed sprites wandered about, getting into random battles and leveling up. Of course, console RPGs often get saddled with variations on the same main enemy: some sort of ''evil force out to destroy all'' that always seems to have 3 ''final'' forms before giving up the ghost for good. And don't forget having to save the same luckless princess time and time again.

Over the past few years, there have been a few notable console to PC translations like Final Fantasy 7 and 8, which gave PC owners who've never played a console RPG before a small taste of what they'd been missing. You'd figure that the next big console to RPG port would be another forward leap of sorts, but T&E Soft's Blaze and Blade: Eternal Quest is a bottomless pit of agony on a CD-ROM. It's a good idea, but also one never fully realized, which means it should have cooked more before being set on shelves to buy.

B&B is an attempt to combine a console style RPG with a PC game, and the results are a bit awkward at best. Considering the original game was a Japanese PS game that never reached these shores, you have to wonder what the intent was with this game other than to capitalize on the success of the FF games. In fact, it tries too hard to emulate a number of games, but falls flat in nearly every aspect. I really liked the AD&D inspired character creation screen, but the characters can only be modified in terms of costume color, class, and protective elements (magic). A bit more in the way of personalization (skin color, scales, fur, etc.) would have been nice here.

Once you create your party members, you can select up to four, and start your adventure. Which brings us to Problem #2: the party has NO formation choices in the single-player game! They just follow each other, single-file, like kids on a class trip or a miniature parade. It's sort of amusing at first, watching your party members jump all over tables and items as they follow you about, but out on the field screen it's just annoying.

Also annoying are B&B's battle scenes. Instead of giving players the choice of a turn-based fighting engine, B&B has you fight in real-time against hordes of constantly reappearing monsters. If you stand in one spot for about three or so seconds after vanquishing the current monsters onscreen, more just show up to beat on your single-file walking party! Even though the party members attack automatically, the formation is clumsy and it's hard to tell if you're hitting, or getting hit at times. Magic use is also awkward- you can choose between automatic or manual spell casting, but you have to pause the action and select a different character to cast spells, if the player controlled character can't.

Also, using anything but a control pad is asking for sheer frustration- the game is nearly unplayable with the mouse and keyboard. Even though the game supports up to four players and allows each freedom of movement, I can't imagine three other people who'd want to crowd around a tiny monitor to play a so-so console game. The manual says that you can save your characters and games to disk and play them on another machine, but this seems like a gimmick to get Playstation owners to purchase this title. In fact, releasing this as a PS game would have been a far, far better idea.

The environments are pretty wide open and varied, but the game looks simultaneously smooth and blurry under 3D acceleration, and too ugly without it, even if you run it at the highest resolution possible. The character art is really nice, but the in-game creations are strictly for fans of big-headed style anime RPGs like Wild Arms or Legend of Legaia. Also, everything seems a bit too pastel-colored for my tastes in the overworld, and a bit too dark in the dungeons. There aren't any true lighting effects (despite some powerful spells), giving the game has an odd, flat look at times. The music ranges from really nice to bland deluxe, and the dialogue is pretty much what you'd expect from a game like this: constant repetition from NPCs after one or two original sentences, and only a handful of interesting characters.

The story is pretty simple stuff too, and that's the main problem I had with B&B. Had there been a good, engaging storyline, I'd have been able to overlook just about any of the game's other flaws. But it's pretty much the same old save the world plot with 3D accelerated graphics. This is too bad, because T&E Soft (along with Game Freak) made one of my favorite Super Famicom action/RPGs, Bushi Seiruden. Blaze and Blade isn't even close, and I could think of a dozen other quality RPGs that should have been released here. But taken as an inexpensive novelty item, rather than a ''serious'' game in the genre, you may have a bit of fun with it, if you're willing to overlook some major flaws.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/03, Updated 01/02/03