Silver

"A great Action/RPG game for the Dreamcast"

SILVER

Silver is indeed one of the most underestimated games I've ever played. Only very few people know the game and many of those who do know it tear it down with sarcasm.

Silver tells us the story of David, who's wife Jennifer is kidnapped by the evil Lord Fuge in the intro sequence. Lord Fuge is the son of the even more evil wizard Silver who plans to destroy the world. David has to stop Silver and his henchmen by finding eight mystical orbs, spread all around the world.
That's where your adventure begins. You take control David and it up to you to find the orbs, defeat Silver and save Jennifer.
Your adventure will bring you all over the world, as you make new friends who will help you on your quest. You'll visit many different places and will have to defeat many monsters, ranging from small imps (small and insignificant against your sword, as David concludes in the game), to giant dragons (BIG and very powerful, as I've concluded while trying to defeat them).

You play Silver like many RPG's, your 3D characters walk along pre-rendered backgrounds (most people, me included, compare the graphics to Final Fantasy VII), with many battles against numerous monsters. The battles are fortunately real-time, unlike many RPG's. I've already said that you'll meet up with several characters who you can recruit to your party, although you can't bring more than 3 people at the same time.
A very annoying thing however is that the game sometimes leaves you with very little clues on where you must go next. I really needed a walkthrough to play through the game without stressing out.

The thing that separates Silver from RPG's is that your characters will level-up, but only after you've defeated a boss, so you'll never be able to gain levels by playing random battles over and over again.
This has disappointed many RPG-loving Dreamcast owners, but I still think that this doesn't take away all the fun. The battles are still great and the magic attacks are very spectacular.

GRAPHICS 8/10 Very nice backgrounds and characters, but the camera views are very bad sometimes. Most of them seem to far away, but this gets better once you get further into the game.

SOUND 8/10 Good music, nice sound effects and voice acting. The voice acting isn't exactly great but it'll do.

GAMEPLAY 9/10 The battles are lots of fun and it's really spectacular to see three different characters fire magic attacks on all those monsters! If only you could level up with these random battles and the game would tell you where to go next on several occasions.

+ Great graphics
+ Good story, brought with voice acting
+ Battles are a lot of fun
- You can't level up with random battles
- Sometimes it's very hard to tell where you have to go

OVERALL 8/10 Silver is simply a great game. The graphics are good, and the story is interesting enough to keep you playing it for houres on end. All the cut-scenes are brought with voice acting and the music is also good. Just be sure that you have a walkthrough or you might spend hours trying to figure out where to go next.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/11/01, Updated 11/24/02