"Good, but not enough to keep you playing"

When I first got Summoner, I played it for awhile than stopped. Eventually, I started back up and completed the game, but after you complete this game, there really is no reason to give it a second go. But than again most RPG's are like that, and summoner is no different.

STORY:
Your a farmer, born with the mark of a summoner. When you were little, your village was under attack, and you summon a beast, instead of this summon helping you, it ended up destroying the whole village, you toss this ring down the well, and turned your back against summoning, years later, you must complete the prophecy and the stage is set.

GRAPHICS:
The graphics of this game are simply amazing, even with an 8mb video card. The world is detailed, and your characters appearence change when you equip new items, from armor to weapons, to accessories.

GAMEPLAY:
The game somewhat fails in this area, the chain system is put together very sloppy, and the camera angle is somewhat terrible. There is too much text in this game as well. They should've had voice overs, which they do in some cutscense, but most of this game your stuck reading. This is probably the game with the most text in it, your pretty much reading a novel. The way you fight battles was a good move, on the overworld map, when your traveling to another city, what happens is that the screen freezes and loads a battle sequence. Here you can fight tons of monsters, and earn experience. If they didn't have this aspect, the game would crumble.

ENTERTAINMENT:
Summoning your first few monsters is dumb. You get a big glowing purple guy for your first summon. Which is weak. But don't worry, at first summoning seems stupid, but you get stronger summons, and cooler looking monsters as the game progresses. Summoning is a good aspect to this game, but starts out very slow. You'll most likely beat this game once, and never play it again.

OVERALL:
When you break it down, summoner is really just another RPG, nothing really special about. They did bring some new ideas to the table, but most of them failed and were worthless. I would reccommend a rent, but since this game is for the P.C, and hardly any places hold P.C games for rent (there's not one in my area), your pretty much stuck buying this game. I managed to get this game for $10 used at E.B. It was well worth the bang for my buck.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10 | Originally Posted: 08/13/02, Updated 11/11/02

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