"Not At All What I Was Expecting"

Sudeki is an action RPG released with the hopes of filling a huge gap in the gaming library of the Xbox. This gap is, of course, the lack of an involving Japanese (or at least Japanese styled) RPG. However, rather than describing what makes a good Japanese RPG a good Japanese RPG and then weighing Sudeki under those standards, I am merely reviewing Sudeki as a game in and of itself. In the end, it only matters whether or not Sudeki was an enjoyable and entertaining game, and in my opinion it was boring, repetitive, and not at all what I was expecting.

Graphics: 8/10

I loved the graphical style of Sudeki. The environments all had a very solid feel, with a vibrant and almost cartoon-like look. The enemies were all nicely detailed and fun to see. The bosses were especially well done, each being more intimidating than the next. From a graphical standpoint, I found the spell effects to be decent but not anything amazing. For me, the biggest issue with the graphics was just the general fluidity of everything, but I will further delve into this matter under gameplay rather than here.

Sound: 4/10

First and foremost, the voice acting in this game is terrible. I believe that all dialogue in the game is voiced as well as written, but I found that the voices were so annoying and poorly done that I hit the “A” button whenever I could so that the text quickly displayed and the voices stopped. Therefore, I don't know if every word is actually voiced, but I'm guessing they are. Rather than being a positive factor in the game, having voices regardless of the talent on all dialogue was a negative factor. Elco, the “smart scientist” in the group, has one of the most out of place and annoying voices you will probably ever hear on a main character in any game. When I first started playing the game, I talked to a child that was standing around in the beginning village. The child was a girl, but the voice sounded so bad that I thought it couldn't be serious. I actually imagined the developers of the game joking around with one another laughing and saying “yeah man do that voice for the little kids, it's so funny” as they sat in a room changing their voices and reading all of the text for the game into a microphone (yes, I intentionally said the developers of the game recording voices rather than actual voice talent).

Two seemed to be the magic number as far as voices go for the main characters in the game. Whenever you opened up a treasure box, the character in the game that you used to open it would say one of two lines, which basically said “Wow, an item!” except more annoying. For example, Ailish, the “magic person” in the group would say “ooooh, prizes and surprises!” or else something about presents. Hearing the same lines each time you opened up a treasure box got annoying. I think a “just open the box and don't make any comments” would have been nice to hear sometimes as well. Also, whenever you cast a spell, the spell caster will randomly say one of two lines before it is completed. This wouldn't be so bad if it was something quick and powerful, but the game focuses on that character while casting a spell and hearing the rather lengthy lines over and over again gets frustrating.

To sum that up, the voice acting is embarrassing and annoying to listen to.

The music in the game is not very good. Only one song in the game even caught my attention, and that was the music that played when you were in and around one of the towns in the game, New Brightwater. Despite sounding like something you would hear in an elevator, it was pretty nice to listen to and it was a style that I hadn't ever heard in a video game before. It was also the only time that the music was noticeable without thinking to yourself “OK, I want to listen to the music for a second because I totally forgot that there might be some in the game.”

Sound effects were fine, but I didn't really pay much attention to them to be honest. If an explosion or sword clank can't be made passable in a game today, something's wrong. Nothing stood out to me, so there wasn't anything amazing but there wasn't anything horrible either I suppose.

Gameplay: (4/10)

This is where the greatest number of disappointments occurred with Sudeki. I was hoping for a game that let you run over a vast world to reach other towns and areas, killing monsters randomly scattered throughout the different regions of the world before reaching a new town that had some really cool stuff that I couldn't afford yet because I needed to go out and kill some more monsters, which would be wandering around outside the safety of a town. While Sudeki technically did this, it was not done in a way that is any fun. You travel from place to place along paths that are basically straight lines that lead you from one place to the next. While traveling along these paths, you will sometimes find a slightly larger open space. Once inside this slightly larger open space, strange gates magically appear out of the ground, preventing you from continuing your run from the one end of the path to the next. Then, monsters will magically appear out of thin air, forcing you to defeat them before the walls open up, allowing you to continue on your little travel. Think of these as “mini arenas” along your way from point A to point B. Because of this, you can never see a huge enemy in the distance and debate over trying to kill it even though it is too powerful for you because you will get crazy experience points and maybe a few good items or just running around it and waiting until you get stronger.

Also, you will find that you cannot stray very far from the linear path that is Sudeki. If you find a branch off of a path that will lead you elsewhere, a gate will typically be over the path, and upon approaching the gate you will find that it is locked. This is not a big deal, however, because towns and other paths leading to towns contain such little incentive for you to want to travel them that you might as well just follow Linear Path A to Town B so that you can get it over with.

Speaking of towns, there is absolutely nothing new to look forward to in a new town. Every town contains the 3 same exact basic things, and they are a general store, a blacksmith, and an inn. If you think it would be exciting finding a new blacksmith at a town, you are wrong. Despite the smith saying “I make the finest weapons and armors around”, there are no new weapons or armor to purchase. As a matter of fact, there are no weapons or armor to purchase at all. The blacksmith merely places “runes” on the weapons or armor you already have. You can place 1-3 runes on each weapon, and 1-3 runes on the one suit of armor you will own. Runes make your weapon capable of incredible power by doing such things as adding 5 damage to your sword (when your character deals around 100 damage already) to receiving an incredible 1% of the damage dealt transferred right into your “mana” supply to cast spells (called Skill Points in Sudeki). Every single blacksmith is exactly the same, so don't worry about traveling to a far off town to get new, rare runes added to your stuff. As a matter of fact, there are only about 14 runes total that you can use, and none of them are any more exciting than those that I mentioned.

Combat in this game is interesting, but after maybe four hours into the game becomes repetitive and boring. Everything happens in real-time, and you control one character while the other characters in your party are controlled by the computer. Strangely, the character you are currently controlling deals twice the damage than it did when the computer was using it a second ago. If Tal, your swordsman “warrior” type deals 50 damage each hit when you are not controlling him, he would deal 100 damage when you were. When using your two ranged fighters, the view switches to first person and allows you to fight a la Halo except without the grenades and vehicles and fun. Also, enemies begin to have so many hit points that the damage you deal with a ranged character becomes almost pointless. When you deal 100 damage every 6 seconds and enemies start to have upwards of 3000 HP while constantly healing themselves, it becomes pretty annoying. Any of the semi-powerful ranged weapons have such a long reload time that you have to wait 5 seconds between shots, which is pretty boring. This means that even though you might do 125 damage with a more powerful weapon, you could have shot 5 shots with the 30 damage weapon in the same amount of time it took to fire 1 shot with the powerful weapon, meaning that the powerful weapon isn't any more powerful than the other weapons. Also, whenever a spell is cast, you have to sit through an animation that slows down the battles so much that you'll probably find yourself hitting “A” out of frustration even though you know it will not skip the spell casting ordeal. When in the middle of a battle, I don't want to sit around for 10 seconds watching my magician heal for the 100th time. I actually found myself dreading fights sometimes because they lasted so long and were so unexciting that I just wanted to skip around them. Unfortunately, the “mini arenas” scattered throughout the game are unavoidable and nearly always stop you. This is especially frustrating when you have to go up a path after winning a fight and finding that path to be a dead end and having to go back to the same spot and go through the same exact tedious fight.

The blocking is another annoying feature in the game. When you squeeze the right trigger, a magical shield raises around you and you take absolutely no damage from anything. Rather than being realistic and making you use a shield or other type of blocking device, a magical barrier just arises and you can sit there all day if you want taking zero damage. This is even more frustrating when enemies you face can do this as well.

Weapons in the game are so underpowered that they are virtually meaningless. Tal's weapons range in “power” (the damage stat, displayed as a single number) basically from 10-20, and every power point is one damage point. Tal's attributes allow him to increase his power by 10 every level, so by the time you invest 5 points in the power attribute, the damage on weapons is almost negligible considering that the sword having 20 power pales in comparison to the power stat's damage bonus. This makes weapons really boring. Also, there are only about 7 weapons for each character total in the entire game, but that doesn't matter because one doesn't feel any different from the next. Some weapons poison or slow enemies, but many of the enemies resist this effect so even that doesn't add very much excitement.

Weapons are the only aspect that you can equip on your character. While there is also an “armor” category, the armor you wear is selected for you, is upgraded twice for each character at certain checkpoints, and offers no stat bonuses or anything like that. You can't buy helmets, shields, or any other accessories. My favorite part about an RPG finding and buying and saving up for all the armor and weapons and such, and this game has none of this.

The fluidity of the game as a whole is what makes it so boring. You never feel like doing anything because you have little incentive to do anything. You are never rewarded with any cool new items, you don't want to get anywhere new because there is nothing more powerful awaiting you, and you don't care about any of the people because they all feel like robots. One of the downfalls of all the voice acting (aside from the fact that it's annoying) is that it usually takes 3-4 seconds to load the dialogue with another character after pushing the “A” button to talk to them. This means that you walk up to somebody, push “A”, and then everyone just stands there for a while. This feels awkward, and sometimes I've even thought that missed the button or something and I'd start tapping it a few more times. You can't explore anything because everything is linear, you don't want to explore anything because there aren't any real items, and you don't want to fight because it's tedious. You don't get gold for killing enemies, but that's okay because there's nothing you would want to buy anyways.

To top it all off, there are numerous typos, which furthermore reflect the quality of the game. For example, on some of the weapons the item description says:

“This is a strong and powerful weapon has a good chance of doing critical damage.”

At the end of rune scrolls, it says:

”Available now at a blacksmith's!”

I'm not sure, but maybe this was an attempt to imitate the various typos that occur in the Japanese RPG's that are actually made in Japan, originally made in Japanese?

Anyways, to sum it up, this game was very boring and a big disappointment. The things that make an RPG fun (New items, desire to level up, desire to get gold, ability to roam around) weren't there. The story in the game wasn't all that great, but I don't really like watching long cut-scenes anyways and I usually skip them in the Japanese RPG's, so it doesn't really matter to me.

Final Score: 5/10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/26/04