"Wystern's got a screwed up clock"

Who would have thought there'd actually be fun involved in crawling through dungeons? Not this reviewer, that's for sure...but Summon Night: Swordcraft Story actually manages to make it work (somewhat), with a fast-paced battle system and the ability to make your own weapons to help tie everything together.

In Summon Night: Swordcraft Story, you get to play as a boy/girl bent on following in your late father's footsteps as a Craftlord (a knight who builds weapons and protects the peace of Lyndbaum). In order to determine the next Craftlord, your home city of Wystern holds a local tournament for all aspiring Craftknights to enter. Between matches, you can travel underneath the town's large labyrinth and collect materials for building weapons, and you'll meet a handful of colorful characters along the way, both friend and foe, to spice things up. In fact, since there are two playable characters and four different Guardian Beasts to assist you, you'll get quite a bit of dialogue to sort through, which keeps things from getting boring. Well, okay...there are portions of the game where you'll have to sail away from Wystern and help someone deliver a weapons shipment or fight off some bad guys, but these portions of the game only seem to distract you from your main goal - winning the Craftknight tournament and battling anything that stands in your way.

If you've played any of Namco's Tales games, you'll feel right at home with the battle system. Instead of the standard menu-based battle system prevalent in many console RPGs, you'll fight your battles in a side-scrolling environment, allowing you to fight in real time. These are usually easy and fast-paced early on, taking no more than a minute to complete, and that allows you to move quickly through the dungeons. Some enemies are strong against certain weapons, so the game gives you an opportunity to hold three at once, and switch through them with the push of a button. You can also summon your Guardian Beast to cast magic to help, but you'll mostly wind up using your weapons and healing, as the elemental spells don't have very good range, and most do the same amount of damage regardless of the enemy's element.

Summon Night is definitely pleasing to the eye, with excellent character artwork and colorful animated backdrops. Even the battles are fun to look at, with added touches like lightning sparks and fireballs whenever an attack makes contact. The game's great graphics serve as a sharp contrast to the mediocre sound. Granted, the music itself is actually pretty good, but the blips and bleeps that accompany it were left behind my most other developers in the 8-bit era, and for good reason. Despite the minor flaws with the magic system and the disappointing sound, however, the game still is enjoyable enough for those with the patience to crawl through dungeons all day, thanks to the real-time battles and the light-hearted nature of the game's universe.

Pros: Decent battle system; great graphics; and a colorful cast of characters
Cons: music sound great, but sucks on a technical level; offensive magic isn't very effective
Recommendation?: If you actually get a chance, rent it, or buy it used.
Final Score:7.5 out of 10 (rounded down to 7 for GameFAQs only)

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/17/06