"Waiter, there's a dating sim in my RPG."

The first thing I can tell you about Summon Night: Swordcraft Story is this: generally, guys will like it way more than girls.

The second thing I can tell you is that you should always pick the opposite of your gender for your character. If you're a guy, pick the girl character. If you're a girl, pick the male character.

This way, guys get to appreciate the blatant lesbian overtones and girls get to avoid it.

I won't lie and I say that wasn't one of the highlights of the game for me.

The world of Summon Night: Swordcraft Story is more or less governed by Craftlords. These are, more or less, elite blacksmiths. Your character's father (three years deceased) was a Craftlord, and of course, you want to follow in his footsteps, despite knowing very little about him.

Easier said than done, as there's a very extensive test to determine who becomes Craftlord - a huge tournament where you can only use the weapons you make yourself. This presents another problem for your character, who has never made a weapon in her life. (I'll be referring to the main character as female from now on, but keep mind you can choose to be male and the story will change very little.) However, you are an apprentice to Bron, who is a very accomplished Craftknight in his own right. With his help, you may just be able to make it through the tournament, but it'll be a tough start. Your first task is to venture into the "labyrinth" and collect some ore to create your first weapon.

The problem is that you're in a dungeon without a weapon. Luckily, you are essentially a blacksmith. And what does a blacksmith use to forge weapons? A hammer. A little work hammer.

That's not gonna be enough.

That's why you're going to need a Guardian Beast. They're perfectly legal for a tournament and give you an edge, so why not? After answering a series of questions, your GB is summoned, and surprise surprise, it happens to be the same GB your father had before you. If you're lucky enough to get the GB named Sugar, you'll also get to view a cutscene where you can cut the sexual tension with a knife... or, you could if you had some ore to forge a knife with. Off to the labyrinth.

The labyrinth is where a large amount of the game takes place. It's 50 floors deep during the main quest, and the main place you go to get ores to create weapons.

After obtaining your first ore, you'll forge a Novice Sword, which obviously isn't very good. It's still leagues ahead of your little mallet, so off to the first match.

From then, you work in a general circle of tasks: Find ore, create a weapon, use the weapon to get better ore, use the ore to get better weapons, etc, etc, etc.

While you're climbing the tournament's proverbial mountain, you'll meet several friends/love interests. This is where the game really excels, for Summon Night is, at its heart, a dating sim with RPG elements. You'll see the sexual tension between characters flare as they start as enemies, become acquaintances, become friends, become lovers.

Of course, no decent story can be about just a tournament. It's as you're doing what seem like normal Craftknight tasks that the real story unfolds - a story that seems at first to be a general corruption in the government story, but somehow avoids many of the cliches.

Throughout the game you know that there are people you can trust. Whereas other RPGs strive to test your sense of loyalty, a key plot element of Summon Night is friendship. It's not nearly as corny as it sounds, either. There's no friendship ranting or the power of love overcoming great odds - friendships are developed through talking and interaction, not supernatural feats.

Summon Night relies on subtlety to show off many of its points. Your character is trying to learn about her father, but you never really simply have his story explained to you. You have to find it out for yourself, while fulfilling your own dreams in the process.

It's really not as corny and cliche as it seems. Alright, it's fairly corny, but it's told in such a fluffy, cute, "warms your cockles" way that it's still enjoyable.

Gameplay in battles is very similar to the Tales of... series, however, I almost relate it more to a recent Castlevania game. It's more about sneaking in, defending or dodging attacks, hitting the enemy at the right time in their pattern, etc. The problem is that the gameplay is simply too easy. Because you can create powerful weapons very easily, most random encounter enemies can be killed in just a few hits. You've also got your GB, who you can assign four spells to and fire them off at your command during battle. If that didn't make things easy enough, you can have three weapons equipped at a time. In theory, this is because your weapon can break in combat, but it really only serves to let you swap to exactly the right weapon to exploit an enemy's weakness. It's a good thing the combat wasn't the draw of this game or I'd be disappointed here.

No, the core of the gameplay is weapon creation. There are four basic type of materials, and by collecting ores or other items, you can create these materials. Using those materials, forge a weapon using a technique you're taught by various characters throughout the game. There are tons of weapons and weapon types (sword, axe, lance, drill, and knuckles) and you can create more powerful, elemental versions of many weapons using special mystic ore. Weapon creation adds a very neat collection aspect to the game that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Sound is fairly average all around, and graphics are only mediocre - until you enter combat, that is. In combat, your character and your enemies take on a semi-cell shaded quality which is very attractive and fits the mood of the game nicely. The character profiles (seen when a character is talking) are also very well drawn, in an anime style that looks like it could almost rot your teeth.

For being a game that tried something new and succeeded, and because I'm a sucker for romance stories, Summon Night: Swordcraft Story gets an exceptional eight out of ten. And they lived happily ever after - the end.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/04/06