"A solid addition to the GBA's action RPG lineup."

Story: 6/10

You play the role of the sole offspring of the legendary Craftmaster of Iron, who sealed away an ancient and powerful enemy 3 years ago. Choosing male or female will give you slightly different character interaction, but overall the story is the same. In typical adventure RPG fashion, you are plucky and earnest youth with a heart of gold who eventually ends up inexplicably defeating expert warriors with more years of combat experience under their belts than you've even been alive for, and ultimately defeating the ultimate evil that not even your father could finish off.

I would love to give higher marks here, but the story was such a let-down. In the beginning when your character is mostly ignorant of things going on around him, I imagined the other characters having much more interesting reasons behind their actions. Well, I didn't exactly make up stories for them, but I was certainly expecting something much different from what I got. Here I was, thinking I would be pleasantly surprised by what was apparently a surprisingly sophisticated level of political intrigue in a handheld game marketed towards children, but in the end it turned out to be nothing but the same old generic adventure RPG plot with a good opening. The bait-and-switch is a technique most foul and unsportsmanlike.

The characters are good, though. If you pick the male character, one of the older male leads playfully makes a pass at you, making for a rather humorous scene. One of the characters is in constant gender confusion, being assigned a different sex every time they meet. If you so choose, the opportunities for homoerotic tension are nearly endless. Additionally, there are a vast number of possible story paths. Every evening, you have a chance to go out on walk with one of a few major NPC's you've met so far. Sometimes, talking with a particular NPC will open up a mini-quest where you're take them shopping or something the next morning, but actually end up fighting a small boss battle. The ending may not change, but by golly you can take a different path to get there every time.

Graphics: 10/10

Outside of battle, the graphics are nothing to write home about. Pretty standard tile-based affair that doesn't do anything wrong, but doesn't do anything particularly right either. But the battle sprites are just fantastic. They're huge. I mean, just friggn' enormous. Not only that, but each of the over 100 weapons has its own equally enormous unique sprite. Attacks, both by you and your enemy, are fluid and detailed. Even better than Tales of Phantasia, which came out months later in Japan.

Gameplay: 3/10

This is gonna be a long section.

Much of the gameplay of Swordcraft Story, as one would expect from the title, revolves around the crafting of swords and other weapons. This is done by melting down various materials found in the dungeons into their constituent elements, and then forging these raw materials into powerful blades. The neat feature is that anything, anything can be melted down for materials. Band-aids, canteens, animal fur, all of it can happily go into the furnace and emerge as a chunk of workable raw material in one of four flavors: Yellow, Blue, Red, and Green. There's a secret fifth element, Mystic Stone, which is much harder to find than the other four materials, and is used in secret crafting recipes that produce much more powerful, elemental versions of your weapons.

Sounds cool, right? Well, not really. In a normal RPG, one would simply pick up money after each battle and use it to buy better and better weapons as the game progressed. All the crafting system of Swordcraft Story does is add four or five more steps in there. Pick up materials after each battle or by smashing barrels and crates found in the dungeon, then melt the materials, then get a recipe from your guildmaster, and then forge it into your weapon of choice. Forge it twice, actually, if you're going for the Mystic Stone version of the weapon, also doubling the requisite material-gathering. But just wait until you end up with 999 Yellow material sitting there, doing nothing in your inventory, while your stock of Green dwindles down to nothing. Now you can't even just fight a few battles to get more money, you have to smash barrel after barrel after barrel finding nothing half the time and Yellow materials the other half. The stores actually sell crafting materials, but the downside is that they're ludicrously expensive. All the money you get from each dungeon run is enough to buy enough of one material to forge maybe one weapon.

But the worst part about Swordcraft Story's crafting system is the sheer amount of wasted potential. I heard "turn anything into crafting materials!" and I thought I was actually going to have to choose between keeping something in its original, useful form or melting it down to feed my forge. Unfortunately, all the crafting materials you'll ever need can be obtained from all the junk items you find lying around which serve no other purpose than to be turned into crafting materials. Not only that, but the crafting recipes are all predetermined. It may just be the Diablo talking, but when I hear "crafting," I think "custom." But Swordcraft Story's crafting is exactly like buying items in a regular RPG, only with 5 different kinds of money, and 5 different steps you have to go through, and it only ends up being a hassle.

Battles are fun, though. They play out a lot like the Tales series's Linear Motion Battle system. You have a side view of the battlefield, and your character moves left and right to engage with or retreat from the enemy. Each different weapon type has its own particular kind of attack: Spears have huge range and can hit more than one enemy, Swords have thrusts and quick 3-hit combos, drills have a charge-up move, et cetera. You can equip up to three of these weapons at a time, switching between them at will with the L button. Battles are bit faster, though, and feel more like a fighting game than the Tales system.

You also have a Guardian Beast with you in battle, and their job is to assist you with offensive and defensive magics. You can equip up to 4 different spells for your Guardian to use in battle, and as the Guardian levels up it can learn new spells or gain more charges of an existing spell. In battle, you scroll through your spells with the R button and cast your selected spell with the B button, after which the B button automatically reverts back to guarding. But with such a melee-combat-heavy battle system, frankly I would have much more preferred a tech system like the Tales or Star Ocean series has. By God this game desperately needed some attacking techs. Or even just Tales of Phantasia's B + directional button spellcasting system. Summon Night's system forces you to waste a lot of time scrolling through your 4 spells, and having to give up guarding even for a few seconds is a complete pain. At least it didn't have all of that idiotic back-and-forth running that plagued Tales of Phantasia.

Difficulty: 1/10

There is none. Because of the incredibly broken nature of your Guardian's spells, you will never ever ever have any trouble ever as long as you play your cards right. Dungeons enemies never gave me any trouble at all, and the only thing that was remotely difficult was breaking boss weapons to get the recipies. And even that was more time-consuming annoying than difficult.

Take the Astral Guard spell, for example, It gives temporarily raises your defense and lets you ignore the stun animation of getting hit. Cast it once at the beginning of any boss fight, and laugh as you walk through their attacks, not only taking reduced damage, but literally shrugging every attack right off of your shoulders without even flinching. Tanked up like that, all you have to do is just mash the attack button for a quick and easy victory. And if you want to break their weapon in order to obtain the secret crafting recipe for it? Just cast the Weapon Shield ability. It temporarily makes your weapon immune to durability loss while you take apart the boss's weapon. With enough charges of Weapon Shield, you could even just guard your way to victory while the boss chips away at his own durability, vainly ruining his weapon on your unbreakable shield. Any health lost over the course of either strategy is easily taken care of with either the convenient Heal spell, which usually replenishes over 3/4 of your health in one go, or by the abundant curing potions littered about the dungeons. To give you an idea, it only took me 12 hours to finish the game, and even that was with some pretty significant dilly-dallying.

Finish the game, and you unlock an extra 50 floors in the dungeon with substantially harder enemies. Not really "harder" per se, but rather they all have more health and deal more damage. The strategy to beat them doesn't change, except now it just takes longer. Doesn't really add any additional difficulty, but it does make for some pretty nice replay value.

Fun Factor: 8/10

Other than the fact that enemies have a habit of super gang-raping you if you encounter several of the same type at a time (as is the case with almost any side-scrolling action RPG), battles were still overall quite fun. At least I thought they were.

Overall: 7/10

Not necessarily an average, but the math is close. A fun game if you like action RPG's, but a bit of a let-down when it gives the impression of being deeper than it really is.

The Good

Fun to play, hot graphics.

The Bad

Lackluster story and gameplay.

The Ugly

Everything has so much potential and ends up being such a disappointment.

It's a pretty fun game, though, so pick up a copy and give it a try if you like action games or are interested in the crafting system.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/31/06